Before the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, I wrote a chunk about how I couldn’t look forward to merchandise based mostly on the brand new WiFi 6E customary. In it, I described how a mesh community based mostly on 6E can be the cherry on high of my new set up, which might be based mostly on Verizon FIOS because the wide-area connection.
Well, every thing went in line with plan, aside from the 6E gear. Vendors gave me the distinct impression that releases would come within the first quarter of 2021, and right here we’re, just a few days from quarter’s finish, and there’s only one announcement of availability. But even then, there’s a catch: it’s from TP-Link, and it’s solely in China.
TP-Link sells within the United States underneath the Archer and different manufacturers, however its 6E web page right here is all arm waving and pageantry for the second. Meanwhile, different distributors are mum (I’m lookin’ at you, Linksys). No one is saying what the holdup is about, however I’ll enterprise a guess or two in just a few moments.
Potential to host as much as 59 channels
The huge innovation with 6E is the introduction of the 6GHz band–and never simply any 6GHz band, however a giant, fats one 1.2GHz huge, with potential for seven 160MHz channels, or as much as 59 20MHz channels. That’s a number of bandwidth, notably as a result of, at the least at first, there’ll be hardly any site visitors up there. All present WiFi channels run in both the two.4GHz (older) or 5GHz (newer) band.
Initially, with out a number of endpoint gadgets utilizing 6GHz, the band might be used principally for backhaul site visitors between mesh components and with the wide-area gateway, however even that enchancment will trigger native efficiency to skyrocket.
So, again to the holdup. One cause might be {hardware} points, which translate to price adders. Early on, distributors had been saying that WiFi 6E may reuse the {hardware} already in existence for WiFi 6 as a result of every thing concerning the two requirements is similar aside from using the 6GHz band.
The reasoning was that 6GHz was shut sufficient to 5GHz in order that antennas and different components may serve for each. If for any cause, this turned out to not be totally true, then some reengineering can be required, including each price and delay.
Range may be one other difficulty stalling improvement
The different difficulty might be vary. In normal, vary and robustness of radio indicators decreases as frequency rises, and distributors have admitted that the 6GHz merchandise have a shorter vary than different WiFi entry factors. This downside is generally solved by the mesh idea, which places a lot of entry factors close to one another and has them share and move on site visitors, however there may be nonetheless a possible difficulty with impenetrable partitions, to not point out the price of a requirement to have, say, 4 as a substitute of solely two nodes.
Be that as it could, I stay obsessed with WiFi 6E and plan to accumulate a bunch of nodes as quickly as I can. Having swapped out my previous cable for an optical trunk, switched my 10/100 change out for a gigabit model and transformed my previous cable to Ethernet-quality with a few MoCA nodes, I managed to maneuver my ping time down from 81ms to 13ms, obtain pace up from 9.05Mb/s to 629.49Mb/s, and add pace up from 5.88Mb/s to 109.44Mb/s.
Now, all I want is a solution to get these improbable quickens into the air. I’ve bought my eyes peeled for these WiFi 6E merchandise after they lastly hit the market, hopefully in only a few extra months.
