If you are looking for a small office router or to replace your old phone, then it may be the perfect time to familiarize yourself with Wi-Fi 6E—the new standard in wireless connections. Following the terminology, Wi-Fi 6E seems to be an improvement on Wi-Fi 6, but you’re probably wondering what the differences are between these two. Here’s what you need to know about Wi-Fi 6E and how it is different from Wi-Fi 6.
What is Wi-Fi 6E?
In early 2020, the FCC (US Federal Communications Commission) announced the availability of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed spectrum use. Since then, an additional efficient band with more capacity has been opened for operation. This has brought significant benefits, both for users and for the global economy.
Wi-Fi 6E is Wi-Fi 6 technology, but with an extended bandwidth of up to 6 GHz. Wi-Fi 6E has a much wider spectrum than Wi-Fi 6. 6 GHz is the new frequency band, between 5.925 GHz and 7.125 GHz. It allows up to 1,200 MHz of additional spectrum. Unlike existing spectrum-constrained bands, where channels operate simultaneously, the 6 GHz band is free from overlap and interference.
What is the difference between Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 6?
Wi-Fi 6E offers the same features and capabilities as Wi-Fi 6, including high performance, low latency, and fast data transfers. Overall, Wi-Fi 6E is identical to Wi-Fi 6. However, looking at the technical side, we discover one significant difference, namely the additional 6 GHz bandwidth.
Wi-Fi 6 brings improved performance in terms of network efficiency and capacity. Also, the 6 GHz band is only available for Wi-Fi 6 traffic, allowing the proposed performance to be targeted.
Why do we need Wi-Fi 6E?
The number of Wi-Fi devices has increased dramatically in recent years. Moreover, experts predict that there will be more than 100 billion internet connections worldwide by 2025. Also, highly demanding devices and applications, such as 8K videos and VR/AR games, will become ubiquitous, as they compete for strong signals.
The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands are widely available with lower input barriers. At present, they are too crowded for such high traffic—overlapping channels cause serious congestion for your connections. Thus, Wi-Fi 6 technology is extremely efficient, and together with a wide and well-delimited bandwidth, is a must when approaching and using it, when using multiple devices, or when traffic increases sharply.
Wi-Fi 6E uses the capabilities of the 6 GHz band to enable high-bandwidth applications, fast data transfer (such as HD video streaming and virtual reality) and lower-latency connectivity for online gaming applications.
Wi-Fi 6E main features
Due to its similar characteristics to the 5 GHz band, the 6 GHz band offers additional spectrum capacity. It offers adjacent spectrum blocks to accommodate 14 additional 80 MHz channels or 7 additional 160 MHz wide channels and less congested spectrum, far away from the gradually becoming outdated technologies, like Wi-Fi 4 or Wi-Fi 5.
Reducing network congestion
Unlike the highly congested 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, the 6 GHz spectrum is much wider and only handles the establishment of Wi-Fi 6E connections. This eliminates the problems experienced by most devices with Wi-Fi connections. Also, channels on the new 6 GHz band will not overlap, greatly reducing network congestion.
Extended Wi-Fi signals and fast speeds
Wi-Fi 6E allows the addition of 7 extra 160 MHz channels, which double the bandwidth and throughput, allowing many more simultaneous transmissions. Just perfect for users who enjoy 8K movies, AR/VR games, and large file downloads.
Wi-Fi 6E’s drawbacks
From the need to buy a new relatively expensive device, to its shorter range, Wi-Fi 6E has a fair share of drawbacks. One can think about Wi-Fi 6E as an additional option to Wi-Fi 6, applicable to certain situations.
Wi-Fi 6E requires new devices
No existing Wi-Fi equipment, including the latest Wi-Fi 6 routers, works with this band. To take advantage of those new 6 GHz channels in Wi-Fi 6E, you’ll need to be using devices that support it. In other words, you’ll only be using Wi-Fi 6E once you pair a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled client device and a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled access point. For example, if you have many Wi-Fi 6 devices and a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled router, your devices will all be using Wi-Fi 6 on the typical 5 GHz or 2.4 GHz channels. Wi-Fi 6E devices will be backward compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and previous standards. Like the dual-band case, for backward compatibility, you can expect any Wi-Fi 6E-capable router to have a 5GHz band, and likely a 2.4GHz band, built-in. In other words, it will be a relatively expensive tri-band router.
The good news is that since the start of 2022, Wi-Fi 6E hardware has become more common, so there are some good routers on the market from manufacturers like Netgear, Asus, or TP-Link.
Higher frequencies mean shorter ranges
Higher frequencies always mean shorter radio broadcasting ranges. The 5GHz band has a shorter range than that of the 2.4GHz one. So, naturally, the 6GHz band is likely behind the former. Of course, this assumes that the 6GHz will use the same power level (dBm) as existing bands, since more power can compensate for the higher frequency.
