January 2022 • Macworld 43WHAT’S UP
WITH THAT E?
It’s hard to believe,
but the Wi-Fi
standard has been
using the same
chunks of the 2.4-
and 5GHz frequency
bands for over 20
years. Wi-Fi 6 is just
the latest attempt to
use fancy processing
to wring more bandwidth out of it and
make it more reliable.
In April of 2020, the FCC took
the long-awaited step of offering
up 1,200MHz of new unlicensed
spectrum in the 6GHz range, more
spectrum for Wi-Fi than we’ve ever
gotten at once. Wi-Fi 6E is simply the
first technology to support these new
radio frequencies. It didn’t get a new
name because it’s not actually a new
technology – the encoding standards
and block size and all the other stuff
are exactly the same as Wi-Fi 6.
That’s also why it’s not called
Wi-Fi 7, which is otherwise known as
802.11be and is still a few years out.
Since it’s still Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E is still
classified as 802.11ax, but they stuck
an ‘E’ on there so people know which
products are able to use the new
6GHz spectrum.
MORE SPECTRUM MEANS
MORE BANDWIDTH
The 1,200MHz of new spectrum in
the 6GHz range is divided up into
fourteen 80MHz channels and seven
160MHz channels (they overlap).
Wi-Fi 6E routers can use these new
channels in addition to the 2.4GHz
and 5GHz channels already available
to them, which means they can move
a lot more data at once.
How much more bandwidth? Well,
that will depend on the router and
the device and what features they
support, but we’re talking about
multi-gigabit speeds at the high end.
Wi-Fi 6E sets up Wi-Fi to support the
internet of the future, speeds that are
currently way faster than the internet
coming into almost any home.
Technically, the top theoretical
limit of Wi-Fi 6E is the same as you’d