Wifi 6e routers

[danielanthony]

I've seen several Wifi 6e routers available to purchase on US websites, but nothing over here in England.

Netgear RAXE500 would suit my needs, I have several Wifi 6e devices which I'd like to fully use.

Any idea when Wifi 6e routers will be turning up? My Google-fu has failed.

 

[WJA96]

I've seen several Wifi 6e routers available to purchase on US websites, but nothing over here in England.

Netgear RAXE500 would suit my needs, I have several Wifi 6e devices which I'd like to fully use.

Any idea when Wifi 6e routers will be turning up? My Google-fu has failed.

I'm not aware of anyone in the UK that actually has stock but there are plenty of units coming from ASUS, TP-Link, Linksys, Zyxel and the Netgear you mentioned. Send OcUK customer services an e-mail asking when stock will land. If they're on a ship en route they should be able to give you a delivery estimate.

From the stuff I've seen in testing that I can't name I wouldn't get your hopes up for anything 6GHz very far outside the room the access point is broadcasting from. The ability of 6GHz to penetrate walls and windows seems to be massively less than the 5GHz signal from an equivalent WiFi6 access point. If you live in a barn conversion, loft or open-plan house then you might see a benefit but on the one client device I have I get about 2Gbps over the WiFi6E link in the room and it drops to WiFi6 at about 900Mbps as soon as the client is outside of the room. And that that's before you start asking sensible questions about what kind of wireless devices can exploit large file transfers or data streams in excess of 1Gbps that wouldn't be better cabled to give 2.5, 5 or 10Gbps data rates completely reliably.

 

[Hyburnate]

I'm not aware of anyone in the UK that actually has stock but there are plenty of units coming from ASUS, TP-Link, Linksys, Zyxel and the Netgear you mentioned. Send OcUK customer services an e-mail asking when stock will land. If they're on a ship en route they should be able to give you a delivery estimate.

From the stuff I've seen in testing that I can't name I wouldn't get your hopes up for anything 6GHz very far outside the room the access point is broadcasting from. The ability of 6GHz to penetrate walls and windows seems to be massively less than the 5GHz signal from an equivalent WiFi6 access point. If you live in a barn conversion, loft or open-plan house then you might see a benefit but on the one client device I have I get about 2Gbps over the WiFi6E link in the room and it drops to WiFi6 at about 900Mbps as soon as the client is outside of the room. And that that's before you start asking sensible questions about what kind of wireless devices can exploit large file transfers or data streams in excess of 1Gbps that wouldn't be better cabled to give 2.5, 5 or 10Gbps data rates completely reliably.

What 6E device are you running? Keen to order one and play around with it as we do a lot of schools where client capacity is the biggest issue and 6GHz is a god-send due to the number of non-overlapping channels

 

[WJA96]

What 6E device are you running? Keen to order one and play around with it as we do a lot of schools where client capacity is the biggest issue and 6GHz is a god-send due to the number of non-overlapping channels

I've sent you a trust message.

 

[Hyburnate]

I've sent you a trust message.

Cheers! Makes sense

 

[Firegod]

Yeah I read an article where they tested the distance and speeds on a 6E router. Literally anything more than I think 25ft away and the speed nose dives. It's fine I guess in that you can still use the other freq. bands (5Ghz or 2.4GHz) but I think as mentioned unless you are open plan or in the same room as the router then 6Ghz would be useless and slower than 5Ghz for throughput.

Here is the article - https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/features/wi-fi-6-and-6e-explained

At 3ft they were transfering a file at 1833Mbps and moved 25ft away and the speed dropped to 423Mbps. 25ft = 7m so that is like moving from one room to another in a house potentially there in that scenario.

EDIT: So I guess to use 6E reliably, then you need a mesh setup with multiple nodes to do the handoff. I saw the Orbi 6E kit with 3 nodes is something like $1,500. Ouch!

 

[WJA96]

I was posting 2 years ago that we would need access points in every room. Whenever we do a house fit-out now we automatically run in provision for a wall-mounted AP in every room because people will want it at some point. Once 6E becomes widely used, the appropriate UniFi In-wall access point will be the device to have.

I still question the use-case for Wireless LAN running over 1Gbps - anything consuming data that fast is almost certainly better wired.