Should I upgrade from WiFi 6, to at least 6e, at this point?

[glens]

Agreed with all who said "don't do it". I can get >1Gb realized wireless transfers between 5GHz AX (160MHz) wireless clients.

 

[iFrogMac]

Agreed with all who said "don't do it". I can get >1Gb realized wireless transfers between 5GHz AX (160MHz) wireless clients.

Well I can get up to almost 800 Mbps down on 5Ghz 80 MHz, it's usually in the 700s though. The problem here might be, Apple limited the 160 MHz support to 6Ghz only which would mean I'd have to get new hardware to get it. I did try enabling 160Mhz yesterday, but it still only showed at 80 MHz and that's when the claim the 160 MHz support may be for 6Ghz only on apple devices. Either way, I'll just let it.be for now. Considering the iPhone 15 series now has USB C, it's probably reasonable to expect I can get a USB C to gigabit Ethernet adapter and just hardwire the phone with a long cable to the switch, if I want faster speeds, if 160 MHz isn't going to work for me.

 

[Broken Hope]

Well I can get up to almost 800 Mbps down on 5Ghz 80 MHz, it's usually in the 700s though. The problem here might be, Apple limited the 160 MHz support to 6Ghz only which would mean I'd have to get new hardware to get it. I did try enabling 160Mhz yesterday, but it still only showed at 80 MHz and that's when the claim the 160 MHz support may be for 6Ghz only on apple devices. Either way, I'll just let it.be for now. Considering the iPhone 15 series now has USB C, it's probably reasonable to expect I can get a USB C to gigabit Ethernet adapter and just hardwire the phone with a long cable to the switch, if I want faster speeds, if 160 MHz isn't going to work for me.

My 15 Pro connects to my 86U at 160MHz on the 5GHz channel so it’s not limited to just 6GHz.

 

[iFrogMac]

My 15 Pro connects to my 86U at 160MHz on the 5GHz channel so it’s not limited to just 6GHz.

OK, must have been something else then because when I turned on 160 Mhz it changed channel selection to Auto, and enabled the option to also use DFS channels. I restarted the phone, and the speeds were no better, even a bit slower than when I had the router statically set to channel 36 at 80Mhz. I've been told you can manually force 160 without auto selection and why I've kept it at channel 36 for 5Ghz as I've also read channel 36 is a good option for manual 160 Mhz use.

 

[glens]

The only DFS-free 160MHz is at the very top of the 5 GHz band, and so far the only devices I have which can to that are my XT8s; no clients.

 

[sfx2000]

For future compatibility, would it be ideal to upgrade from this WiFi 6 router to at least 6e?

Getting the thread back on track - one can never predict the future...

One can always spend the hard-earned cash on probable solutions perhaps - hopefully not in the fear of missing out on something...

The current crop of WiFi6 devices are stable and mature - and to be honest, they don't offer much more than what was available with the WiFi5 devices that have been on the market for years, at least for WiFi.

A 2-stream client over WiFi5 is going to give up to 800 Mbit/Sec on a 5Ghz channel using 80MHz wide channels - and this was available 10 years ago... with Wave1 deployments, Wave2 added MU-MIMO and a couple of other things, but no real improvements.

WiFI6/6e and 7 are incremental updates - 6e opened up additional channels, but at a cost of that additional radio, and WiFi7 is an incremental update from there.

Folks might say, well what about WiFi6 OFDMA and UL MU-MIMO - sorry to say, after looking at hundreds of WiFi captures, those features are not even used in the real-world - One can see it in the AP beacon frames, and in the probe requests from clients, but in the association request/response handshakes, things fall back to an essential set of features for 11n in 2.4GHz and 11ac Wave1 for 5GHz...

And I see this across all the vendors - QC-Atheros, MediaTek, Intel, and Broadcom

The radio's have improved over time - but also consider that performance is really defined not by the AP, but by the client, and there, it's the range from the client to the AP. And that is because of physics - from the analog RF domain over to digital processing and Shannon limits (how many symbols can we push into the channel, and how many can we recover on the other end in a noisy domain).

Going from a 10 year old WIFi5 router like the Asus RT-AC68U, Netgear R7000, or Airport Extreme 2012 edition - there are obvious benefits - better software, more capabilities, the move from armv-7a over to armv-8 and higher clock speeds, along with improvement on the switch elements and network offload engines... only recently have we observed 2.5Gbe ethernet...

Those improvements are already in place with the current crop of WiFi6 Router/AP's - and this initial crop of WiFi7 devices does not add to this - it's the first wave to get devices to market.

 

[tgl]

The current crop of WiFi6 devices are stable and mature - and to be honest, they don't offer much more than what was available with the WiFi5 devices that have been on the market for years, at least for WiFi.
...
WiFI6/6e and 7 are incremental updates - 6e opened up additional channels, but at a cost of that additional radio, and WiFi7 is an incremental update from there.

I largely agree with @sfx2000's points here. The state of the art now isn't that much beyond where it was with WiFi 5, at least so far as single-client performance is concerned. If you buy the right gear, you can get better aggregate performance for a collection of clients ... but for typical use the effective limit is going to be the speed of your internet connection, so for most of us that argument isn't terribly compelling either.

But I do think one point is being undersold: the 6GHz spectrum is a game changer, at least for those of us who live in densely wifi'd areas. WiFi 6e brings a ton of new spectrum, allowing gigabit performance to be a reality not a mirage. And in this context the short range of 6GHz signals is a feature not a bug. Even when your neighbors all have 6GHz gear, not that many of them will be close enough to be a problem for you.

So for myself, I've bought 6e-capable APs, and I'm slowly upgrading my performance-critical clients to 6e, and I figure I will be happy with that for some years to come. WiFi 7 is still too far down the pike to justify spending money on. But if you don't have near-term plans to buy 6e-ready clients, it's useless to spend money on 6e-ready APs.

 

[sfx2000]

But I do think one point is being undersold: the 6GHz spectrum is a game changer, at least for those of us who live in densely wifi'd areas. WiFi 6e brings a ton of new spectrum, allowing gigabit performance to be a reality not a mirage. And in this context the short range of 6GHz signals is a feature not a bug. Even when your neighbors all have 6GHz gear, not that many of them will be close enough to be a problem for you.

It can be - one of the nice things with 6GHz is that there is a distinct line of compatibility - 6e doesn't need to support 11a/n/ac, and also with security it's either WPA3 Enterprise/Personal or Open-SAE.

It's clean, it's pure, and currently state of the WiFi art without any of the dust bunnies...

That being said - at an AP level - 6GHz basically is an additional radio outside of the normal for many - 2.4/5GHz as legacy clients would have to fall back to 2.4GHz if the upper band radio isn't lit up in the 5GHz band because it's radiating in 6Ghz.

And that extra radio has a cost associated with it for a limited number of client devices...

In some ways, this is actually the promise of the "tri-band" routers, and there one could light up 6GHz on one radio, 5GHz on another, and 2.4GHz for everything else...

Anyways - getting back on topic - there's no need at present, IMHO, to go for 6e as 7 is around the corner - and there, the first gen Router/AP's are going to extract the maximum "value" for what is essentially an edge-case...

2025 is a better time-frame to consider 6GHz and WiFi7 - the AP chipsets will be more mature, and the cost will inevitably come down as this trickles into the market...

 

[tgl]

That being said - at an AP level - 6GHz basically is an additional radio outside of the normal for many

Agreed --- it's hard to make an AP that supports 6GHz unless it's tri-band, because giving up either 2.4 or 5GHz is a deal-breaker for most situations. (Zyxel has been selling dual-radio models with one 2.4GHz and one switchable 5/6GHz, but I have a hard time believing that they're getting much traction with that.) Personally I'd seriously consider APs with just a 5GHz radio and a 6GHz radio, but that's likely a niche market too given all the 2.4-only IoT gear out there.

2025 is a better time-frame to consider 6GHz and WiFi7 - the AP chipsets will be more mature, and the cost will inevitably come down as this trickles into the market...

If you can afford to wait a year or so, yeah, by all means do that. But if you need to buy APs today, I stand by the idea that 6e (tri-band 2.4/5/6GHz) is your best choice.

 

[glens]

If you can afford to wait a year or so, yeah, by all means do that. But if you need to buy APs today, I stand by the idea that 6e (tri-band 2.4/5/6GHz) is your best choice.

I'd go with that advice.