
Wi-Fi is getting its biggest upgrade in 20 years - ciccionamente
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/23/21231623/6ghz-wifi-6e-explained-speed-availability-fcc-approval
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ornornor
> 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.

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ac29
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.

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fomine3
But consumer still should know about radio frequency because available
distance and bandwidth is very different.

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finnthehuman
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.

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

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ac29
According to the Ars article, this is for low-power indoor use only.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-fcc-ratified-
wi-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-fcc-ratified-wi-
fi-6e-this-morning/)

