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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

You really want 6e or 7 these days so you can shift to 6GHz. There are many more channels available, adoption is limited so there's less congestion and the signal attenuates more quickly and has higher free-space path loss as well. Sounds like you may already know all that but for anyone thinking about investing in an upgrade, the reasons listed above are why you'd want to invest in the latest tech.

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Why would faster signal attenuation be a good thing?

Don't need to fight for spectrum with the neighbors.

Less area means less sources of interference for others (this property is also true in the other direction). So the attenuation reduces the signal area, and stronger attenuation lets the transmitter be "strong" in the house without the downsides in congested areas.

Imagine sharing the spectrum in an apartment in a high population density city.

In a condo in an urban population center, and next to a busy 700+ pupil elementary school across the street, WiFi (both 2.4 and 5 GHz) work beautifully. On 5GHz, seeing 600M down and 100M up, as per ISP contract, the same as on wired Ethernet.

I guess that's because people here tend to use 5G mobile networks and not so much WiFi, maybe not at all, so there's little contention. (Perhaps this makes it obvious, but not in the USA.)

Small houses don't need a signal that travel through many walls. Probably no roof and floor too. So you can trade speed for range and have no overlaps with neighbors.

Instead large houses need signals that go through roofs, floors and walls. But they probably also have a lot of family members inside, each one with their one, two or three wifi devices that interfere with the rest of the family. Maybe one repeater per room and 5 or 6 GHz would be good there too. 3 different video streams to people of the same couch could still be challenging.

notice wifi standard does not guarantee which frequency it will use. You can have wifi 6 on 2.4ghz wifi

That does depend on which wifi standard. Wifi 5 is only 5ghz, wifi 6E is only 6ghz, and there is no wifi 6 on 6ghz. 6 being separate from 6E.

Check out the table on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wi-Fi_generations

Yeah, I've been playing around with the "new-ish" ESP32-C6 chip. It's a $6 dev board, so probably in the sub dollar range in bulk for the chip itself, and has WiFi 6! I originally thought WiFi 6 meant 6ghz, but it's limited to 2.4ghz.

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