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Are you using WiFi 6E in a home/home office setting? Have you seen any benefit to the 6GHz channel?
I'm curious if anyone here is currently using the 6GHz channel with WiFi 6E devices and whether you're seeing a benefit in your experience. Do you feel it was worth purchasing a router/access point with WiFi 6E over WiFi 6? I've been following the rollout of WiFi 6E for a while but I haven't heard much real world feedback.
Context: I have 3 access points at home all at the WiFi 5 standard and I'm considering updating each to WiFi 6/6E. I have few (if any) 6E devices at the minute but would plan to keep the access points for at least 5 years or more.
P.S. this is my first post so apologies if it's in the wrong location or a duplicate. I searched and found no other WiFi 6E discussions ✌️
I have 2 Tp-link AXE75 at home (one as an access point in the other end of the house) on a 1 gbps network and use the 6 GHz band with my pixel 7 Pro all the time.
Honestly? I don't notice much of a difference. Yes I can see 600 mbps if I do an internet test which is absolutely faster than anything I've had before but it's really not made a difference in usage compared to just using regular old 5 GHz.
Maybe if I used a laptop with 6 GHz I might put the connection through more of a strain but I only use my pc with ethernet so.
The only somewhat useful benefit I've noticed was that there was less network congestion on the 6 GHz band because IoT stuff is all on the 2.4 Ghz one and everything else on the 5 GHz one.
The main reason I got this setup was just for future proofing when everything starts coming with 6E by default, but as it stands now I don't see it as much of a benefit for most people.
This is one reason I'm interested. I live in the middle of two rows of townhouses and the 5ghz spectrum is pretty damn busy. I regularly have to monitor channel activity and run calibration tools on my network to keep my signal above the crowd.
People will usually let their router default to picking the least busy channel, causing them to hop all over the place as soon as another router encroaches on them.
Just pick a channel. I've found that having a static channel causes the other routers to avoid yours as best they can, and with 5ghz they have quite the range to choose from.
You probably won't be free of overlap whatsoever, but it'll probably help on those busy congestion periods.
the bigger deal with 6ghz isn't the increased bandwidth, it's the much larger spectrum. 2.4ghz and 5ghz networks have a pretty limited spectrum available, meaning there are only a handful of non-overlapping channels available. It's why WiFi historically sucked in densely populated areas like apartments; everyone's router was fighting over the same five channels.
It also means you can more realistically build larger mesh network without sacrificing a ton of your bandwidth to the backhaul.
In general if you're thinking about an upgrade, you should wait for Wifi 7 because it brings with it a lot of additional improvements over 6/6E which make the 6ghz band more useful. At a high level these improvements are the following:
I think it's important to note that in most cases you'll see the biggest improvement simply by placing your router in a spot where it receives less interference, namely as close to the ceiling as you can on the level you access your devices, or by purchasing access points or mesh devices to extend your network so the signal is strong all the way from the router to your device. In my own not very large condo, I saw speed improvement of somewhere between 50-100% at the furthest point from the router by simply moving my router to a higher point.
Great comment. Just to add, regarding placement, place your access points towards the middle of your environment.
Your signal is a bubble. You want the bubble to cover your house. If your AP is at the edge of the house, and half covering your neighbors, you're wasting your signal (and being a terrible wifi neighbor) .
Honestly the biggest benefits are for larger campus and enterprise deployments, where wireless access points are deployed en mass, and co-channel interference can be a serious problem. Having all the extra channel space on 6 GHz is great when used side-by-side with 5 GHz and even to a point with 2.4 GHz legacy devices. Realistically, unless you're doing large data transfers, I don't think you'll see a lot of difference between 6 GHz and 5 GHz. Personally, as someone who has worked as a wireless engineer for the last 15 years, I'm holding on to 802.11ac on 5 GHz for a while longer. When my current equipment fails I'll probably take a dip into 6 GHz at home. Now, at work? 6 GHz is going in everywhere.
Common sense is the best answer. OP also needs to consider the client devices. A wireless refresh wouldn't be a great investment if only one device in the house would (reliably) benefit.
I bought a 6e router to wirelessly stream to my vr headset. Huge improvement for that use case but haven’t noticed a difference otherwise
Another vote for major improvement using VR and 6E.
That's been my experience too, it's great for lowering latency, but most people don't have the demand on a single client to fully utilize it, except for things like VR or NAS file transfers.
I am also interested in any real world feedback on it. I have 1gig fiber and the option to go to 2gig. Currently have a Linksys Velop mesh. All our devices are WiFi 6 and several 6E capable devices.
I don't have anything that uses 6E yet, but I did buy a 6E router, an ASUS ZenWiFi Pro ET12. I've been impressed with it's range, I can walk 100 yards from my house and still get signal, it's kind of hilarious because I can tell the antenna on my phone drops out before the routers does, as I'll go from full bars to nothing as I enter and leave signal range, with very little inbetween.
I have the same one and I, too am impressed with it. My old router would only cover about 75% of my 1000 sq. ft. house and wifi outside was just not happening. Now, with the mesh setup, I'll have my car on the street before it loses signal. Absolutely worth getting.
Don't have Wi-Fi 6E/7 yet but upgrade from 5 to 6 should be a huge improvement without much cost. Probably $50-100 per Wi-Fi 6 AP vs $500+ per 6E/7, going by TP-Link Omada 6E AP. Plus you'll ideally need a 10GBe PoE switch for these newer 6E/7 AP to take advantage of the theoretical speed.
I have 6e (a single Deco AXE7500 mesh node, as I live in an ~1100 sq ft apartment), on a gigabit fiber connection. The only devices we have that have 6e support are my Pixel 7 Pro and our roommate's new Macbook Air. It doesn't make much of a difference for her unless she's in our living room (as her room is on the outer edge of the apartment, meaning that the distance and walls kill the 6GHz band faster than 5GHz, which works just fine there), and on my phone, it just means I can pull the full 940/940 over WiFi.
I was interested both for futureproofing purposes, and after living in an even smaller studio before this. Place was so small and packed with units that any non-DFS 5GHz channels were as congested as 2.4GHz ones have been for over a decade. Since I switched from the FWA 5G home internet I had at my last apartment to fiber here (as it wasn't available at my last place), I lost the equipment that supported DFS 5GHz channels, and needed another solution to handle an apartment complex where 5GHz is only getting noisier. It helped that I caught the Deco on a sale that meant it was maybe $30 more than the non-6E models, as well.
I'm thinking of getting a second node for the office room (which is by our roommate's bedroom) just to have 6GHz throughout, but I can't justify the ~$130 since neither mine or my partner's laptops support 6E, and my desktop is naturally hardwired with Ethernet. If my laptop wasn't a cheapo secondary portable device for me at this point, I'd consider upgrading to 6E on it (it only supports 1x1 433Mbps 802.11ac, sadly), but that's not in the cards until it gets replaced entirely. I'm the only tech inclined one of us between my partner and roommate, so with them I'm stuck in the "want really good WiFi" loop, to reference what @Greg mentioned at the end of their reply.
It's one of those where, if the added cost is small, it's worth it to futureproof. Failing that, I don't see much use aside from being used as wireless backhaul for multiple mesh nodes, something that I don't think would work well in a home large enough to need a mesh network anyways.
I had to disable all the dfs channels as I live near an air force base and anytime they used radar it would change to a non dfs channel.
I recently upgraded my internet connection to gigabit, which was the factor I needed to actually push me to ugprade my wifi network now that the internet connection actually outpaced it. I wound up getting a TP-Link AXE95 router, which supports Wifi 6E. Most of my stuff doesn't have a 6GHz radio yet, but the couple of items that do certainly can take advantage of it. I figured it was worth a little extra money to give my network a bit more future proofing.
That's what I'm waiting on, the highest I can get is 1g down/35m up. Once the fiber is installed I could go up to 8gig symmetrical but will probably only do 1 or 2 gig.
Not all APs are created equal. You'll see much better performance just by using better equipment. Small / home office network gear doesn't really live up to it's own hype. It's all about consumer marketing.
Consider the quality of the equipment before considering features. You can get anything off the shelf, but you don't know how it's going to handle congestion, or channel interference, whether it actually handles high throughput, channel selection, power levels, roaming with different clients, etc.
Your new AP might promise 6E but then you may find out they cut corners on the memory. Maybe it has buffer issues, maybe it can't prioritize traffic or handle congestion. This is typical of consumer-grade network gear, where customers may not get deep into the technical details, which lets manufacturers get away with underperforming equipment.
Look for reputation and technical reviews first, and features second. Look up Ubiquiti, Aruba and Meraki and see how technical you want to get.
I don’t have 6E, but I just opened fast.com using a phone connected to my 5GHz WiFi 6 AP and got 840Mbps - in the middle of a crowded city, no less - so depending on your specific config it’s quite possible to be getting into diminishing returns between 6 and 6E for a gigabit line.
The irony here is that half the time my phone seems to decide it prefers the fairly anaemic 2.4GHz network that seems to cap out at about 60Mbps and I rarely even notice - certainly not enough to bother troubleshooting why it keeps doing that. Still opens web pages about as fast as a phone can render them, still streams video with more pixels than the screen itself, broadly just doesn’t make a difference that my phone is getting like 5% of the potential speed.
But if I was using any computers on the WiFi, that’d be a whole different ball game - those are all hardwired and I’m still getting impatient enough to consider upgrading to 10GbE, so part of the question will also depend where you are on the loop from “not too worried about the WiFi”, to “want really good WiFi”, to “not too worried about the WiFi, because all the important stuff is using cables”.
Do you have all your access points hard wired or connected by WiFi? That would probably be where you actually see a benefit.
Does WiFi 6E help with stability or is it just speed?
This is kind of just personal incredulity, but if stability isn't addressed then I don't see the point. I took the time to run Ethernet to all my stationary devices (TV, computer, Xbox) and I saw noticeable gains in speed on my mobile devices as my WiFi got less congested.
6e uses 6GHz and improves both speed and stability due to less crowding and larger channels.
Same technical limit as 5GHz (~10Gbps) but more room for things to cruise meaning way better coverage and throughput.