I’ve got an AMPLIFI mesh system that boosts my WiFi signal tremendously when I’m at home. I own an iPhone X which gets great reception when roaming.
Can someone explain in non-tech speak what the advantages of 6G is and whether I need to upgrade my phone to take advantage of it?
This article was beyond my non-techie brain’s comprehension.
Tagging @mbravo @yaypie @ChrisJenkins
Imagine that wifi routers and clients are people standing in a room talking to each other. Every client is friends with one particular router and only wants to talk to that router, and that router only wants to talk to its clients.
A small room with lots of routers will quickly become so noisy that the routers and clients have trouble understanding each other, because other routers and clients keep drowning them out with their own conversations.
One way to fix this is to make the room larger! Then the routers and clients can spread out more and their conversations won't interfere as much.
The new spectrum the FCC is making available, which will be used for 6GHz wifi, is like a really, really big room. Maybe even as big as a baseball stadium or something similarly large. It means that lots more routers and clients can be talking to each other at the same time in more or less the same area without drowning each other out.
Your current phone and wifi router won't be able to support it with just a software upgrade, so if you want to benefit from 6GHz wifi you'll eventually need to buy new devices. But if your current wifi is working fine, there's probably not an urgent reason to upgrade.
How's that for an explanation? 😁
There's often a lot of fanfare when a new wireless standard is announced, but it's not often mentioned that upgrading the router alone usually isn't enough to actually get the benefits of the new standard. You also need computers or phones or whatever that meet the new standard. You may see an improvement with MU-MIMO, even if your devices don't meet the newest standard. But that's also only going to matter if you have more than a few devices using the network at once. I think most users won't see a huge difference, especially if all you do on your home network is surf the web and stream video. If you transfer a lot of large files you will definitely benefit from higher speeds. Apartment dwellers probably will see a benefit from the 6GHz spectrum due to the density of wireless networks in apartment complexes. But I don't see a point in upgrading until at least your main devices meet the new standard. And if you don't have any complaints with your wireless network currently, don't worry about it.
Thanks for the very clear explanation, Ryan! I am officially now “un-confused.” Hope life is treating you well.
🎂
