Now that the first wave of 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers and devices are making their way out the door, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have begun to look ahead to its successor: 802.11ax. And this time around, the wireless industry is turning its focus away from overall network capacity to actual connection speed to the device.

What I mean by that is that is that these huge gigabit-plus numbers we so often seen attributed to 802.11ac can be a bit misleading. They represent the overall capacity a Wi-Fi network can support — for instance, 1.3 Gbps in today’s most advanced routers — but only in the rarest of circumstances would any individual device actually be able to connect at such high rates.

As 802.11ac technologies improve they will be able to pack more high-speed connections into a single router and take advantage bigger swaths…