To take advantage of Wi-Fi 6E, you’ll need new access points (APs) and new clients. The APs for Wi-Fi 6E have three radios: the older 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, and a new 6GHz radio. These APs are widely available, and all the major Wi-Fi AP vendors are already shipping or will be shipping Wi-Fi 6E APs within the next year.
But APs are only half the story. You’ll also need clients able to work in the 6GHz band to talk to those new APs. Major wireless chip vendors such as Intel and Broadcom have been shipping technology that supports Wi-Fi 6E since 2021. This means that this capability is slowly appearing in smartphones, tablets and laptops, but it is far from universal and will take a few years to become standard and expected, the way 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless is today.
READ MORE: Learn how the University of Michigan executed a network connectivity upgrade.
How Is Wi-Fi 6E Faster Than Wi-Fi 6?
Faster is a tricky word when it comes to Wi-Fi. You’ll see that client laptop speeds are the same in Wi-Fi 6E as they were in Wi-Fi 6. That’s because the technology is the same, so there’s no improvement in per-client speed in Wi-Fi 6E over Wi-Fi 6. A single user in a room alone won’t see any improvement.
However, Wi-Fi 6E can let you deliver faster wireless for two main reasons. First, because there’s more bandwidth, you can use wider channels without interference. If you have been wary of using the 40MHz, 80MHz, or 160MHz channel capabilities of newer Wi-Fi versions, the 6GHz band gives you a lot more room and flexibility to use these wider channels, which directly translates to higher performance for each user.
Second, the greater spectrum availability in the 6GHz band of Wi-Fi 6E lets you set up Wi-Fi networks with less interference between APs. All the newer versions of Wi-Fi really encourage a high-density access point deployment: pack in more APs so there are fewer users on each AP. Higher education IT managers who have installed multiple APs in large classroom environments are already experiencing the benefits of this model. With Wi-Fi 6E’s abundant bandwidth, high-density deployments even in packed lecture halls mean less sharing and less interference, again delivering faster performance to everyone.