Wifi 6 / 6E - will you be upgrading?

[root]

Wifi has come along way over the years and argubly paved the way for mobile phones and laptops to become such a huge thing. I remember being tethered to a desktop where the phone line and later where the cable line (the sheer luxury of 256k broadband!) came in.

My first router was a Belkin affair that ran so hot it cooked itself about 4 times and had to be replaced under warranty. I avoid Belkin gear to this day. The unit was tiny, so no suprises as to why it overheated.

These days I do about 70% of my computing over wifi when I’m not working though I do feel things are a lot snappier to load on a hardwire.

Will you be upgrading to Wifi 6E or Wifi 6? I find 802.11ac is pretty good for performance, and I get around 300-400meg on a speed test. I can’t possibly envision needing all that bandwidth (yet) though it would be nice to get my full 1GB line speed wirelessly.

What Is Wi-Fi 6E?

Wi-Fi 6E adds support for 6GHz spectrum, plus faster wireless speeds and lower latencies, but you'll need a new router and Wi-Fi 6E-compatible devices to tap into those new airwaves. Should you upgrade now?

www.pcmag.com

 

[Philtrum]

I think I’ll hold off until Wifi 6 has been around for a bit longer. Not many devices support it at the moment and I don’t want to upgrade all my hardware. Current Wifi 5 is good enough for what it is.

 

[markanderson]

Wi-Fi 6E devices will be backward compatible with Wi-Fi 6 & earlier Wi-Fi standards, but in order to use the new 6GHz channels, you'll need a Wi-Fi 6E router & a Wi-Fi 6E client device (meaning computers, phones, smart home devices, and other gadgets that support Wi-Fi 6E).

Wi-Fi 6 is the latest update to the wireless networking standard. Wi-Fi 6 is based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard and will be faster, have more capacity, and improved power efficiency over its predecessor 802.11ac (now also known as Wi-Fi 5—read on to find out more!).

 

[strollin]

No upgrade here. Faster wifi wouldn't buy me anything. Sure a speedtest would improve but in oractical terms the gating factor is the website you are accessing. My current wifi is already faster than the majority of the websites I visit can deliver.

 

[root]

No upgrade here. Faster wifi wouldn't buy me anything. Sure a speedtest would improve but in oractical terms the gating factor is the website you are accessing. My current wifi is already faster than the majority of the websites I visit can deliver.

I think this is a fair point. I’ve long got rid of my expensive gigabit fibre that probably made about 20% of things faster and taken a basic DSL service that gets me 70meg, which is more than enough for just about everything I do online these days.

It can be frustrating when websites are cluttered with ads, junk or just poorly managed and load dog slow. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into optimising this site to perform as well as possible globally - around half of that is using minimal plugins, not doing user analytics etc.

The sheer amount of stuff that gets blocked either by my network adblocker and/or browser based blockers is crazy. I think some sites are more tracking code and ads than actual content.