Only a few weeks behind the freezing of the 3GPP Release 15 5G standards, the WiFi industry will approve its own next generation specifications, often pushed as an element of the broader 5G platform. On July 1, engineers at the IEEE standards body are expected to green-light the first draft of 802.11ax, which will underpin the next wave of WiFi networks, after two failed attempts. The 802.11ax specs will boost data rates and be particularly efficient in very dense environment, which means they are addressing some of the key issues – multi-gigabit speeds and extreme device density – that 5G is also tackling. But the IEEE standard has had a rockier road than Release 15 in many ways. Its first…