Wi-Fi is getting its biggest upgrade in 20 years | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi is getting its biggest upgrade in 20 years

theverge.com

29 pointsciccionamente16 comments

> But “Wi-Fi 6” means your device is still operating on the same old spectrum, so starting later this year, you’ll want to start looking for the label “Wi-Fi 6E.” That stands for “Wi-Fi 6 extended into the 6GHz band.”

Why do we keep doing this?? It’s as if we’re trying as hard as we can to confuse consumers... “WiFi 6”? Yeah that’s not WiFi 6ghz, that’s 2.4 and 5. But “WiFi 6E” now that’s 6ghz.

Because this is consumer branding, the vast majority of which couldnt tell you what frequency their WiFi devices use, or even what a radio frequency is. They can understand that Wifi 6 is newer than Wifi 5 and so on. Maybe 6E should have been called Wifi 7 or 6+, but that's a nitpick and just about anything is better than the 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/etc mess.

But consumer still should know about radio frequency because available distance and bandwidth is very different.

Aaah, fond memories. I was working at an electronics store back when "draft-N" was a thing. Good luck to everyone stuck explaining 6E to impatient 50-something fathers, my thoughts are with you.

Ultimately it won't have to be explained since equipment will just negotiate, but the flip side is that virtually no one will be using 6 GHz for the next ten years or so.

>Ultimately it won't have to be explained

If there are two boxes on the shelf, one with "Wifi 6" written on it and the other "Wifi 6E", it will be someones personal hell to explain the difference between the two to a customer who is not technically minded enough to understand "6E is faster, but only if your other devices are also 6E", but is completely obsessed with making the absolute optimal decision about whether the extra $20 is worth it.

10 years? Are you crazy.. Article says equipment will be available later this year.

And most people replace their router every 5-10 years when the old one dies. And/or get whatever cheap box their ISP sends them.

But you need a 6E AP and one or more 6E clients to actually use 6E and most people will just have one or the other.

Availability isn't usage. Most people don't get new routers every year.

Fair enough but it is not going to take 10 years before people start using this spectrum.

At least they aren't renaming old standards like the USB-IF does.

I think I had seen some references to which letters were now WiFi 4 and 5... But to your point, they haven't turned everything to WiFi 6-full speed (aka slow)

What a shit headline, and such irony when I click the link and see a giant banner declaring that "explanatory journalism has never been more important."

The article starts from the premise that raw spectrum is the way to measure significance of WiFi standard revisions to sell ax as a bigger enhancement over the previous standard than when n or ac hit the market. Then a few paragraphs later The Verge to hedge down into "Will this make Wi-Fi faster? Sort of" and "the new airwaves should help bump your speed up."

So, the "biggest upgrade" in 20 years is better throughput for the handful of RF environments where the bottleneck isn't already the uplink? Cool.

This will be great for rural fixed wireless ISPs. The more channels that might not have interference, the better.

According to the Ars article, this is for low-power indoor use only.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-fcc-ratified-wi-...

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