5 Reasons to Care About WiFi 6E

In April, the FCC voted to open a new section of the spectrum, from 5.925 to 7.125GHz, commonly referred to as “the 6GHz band” to unlicensed use. The Wi-Fi Alliance branded this new spectrum and the devices that can take advantage of it under a new name: Wi-Fi 6E. This means higher average data rates and lower average latency. Here are some key points to consider on how this might affect you, your products and services:

1. If speed matters to you or your customers, this is an opportunity for differentiation. Adding support for 6GHz WiFi has the potential to dramatically improve speed performance. It does, of course, require updated routers to connect with, so it’s not just your devices that need to be updated. For something like downloading security video from municipal busses or pushing full 4k video streams from cameras at a sporting event, this will make a very big difference.
2. If you haven’t historically been able to use a wireless connection, this new bandwidth raises the opportunity for disruption in your market. Either using actual WiFi 6E or using a custom wide band radio design, you can do things with this much spectrum that used to require wires. For example, running 48 simultaneous audio channels with multiple redundant signals from a live stage performance to your mixing and broadcast system with so little latency you can’t hear the difference from using a wired snake.
3. Previously, only wires or microwave links have provided this sort of bandwidth in an unlicensed format. Because of this new level of bandwidth, there is actually the opportunity to create new markets and market segments that didn’t exist. A lot of technologies contributed to the ability to build the first iPod. The iPad tablet took a special use-case industrial niche product and created a commercial main-stream market. This is a big enough game changer that you can actually do things here that you simply couldn’t before.
4. Because this is such a big change, it creates the opportunity for new players to jump into existing markets. Showing up to market early with a really well done WiFi 6E access point for instance has the potential to effectively launch a new consumer or enterprise networking brand. Anyone who wants to take advantage of this new bandwidth has no choice but to deploy new access points. This will almost certainly cause a surge in sales that could be leveraged to create a new brand.
5. To get anything out of this, you need new stuff. And those radio parts aren’t commercially available right now. The major WiFi chip manufacturers will be launching new products over the next few quarters and F3 Wireless will be working with them to deploy those radios into products.

If you’re wondering how WiFi 6E factors into your product or service offerings, we’d be happy to answer questions and get you on the right track. You can find us at www.f3wireless.com or [email protected].