Why You Should Be an Early Adopter of Wi-Fi 6
The next-gen Wi-Fi is here to stay, and it’s time to learn all about why you should adopt it early.
After being on backorder for two months, last Wednesday held a happy sight: a cardboard box from B & H Photo. In that box contained an item I’ve been excited to test and use on a daily basis: Asus’s Zen WiFi XT8 router. For a majority of people, getting a new router isn’t all that exciting. Many do just fine with whatever their ISP comes in and installs for them. But it’s bad enough to pay a $10 “equipment fee” for their modem; it’s completely unnecessary to pay another $10 a month for a supplied router that hasn’t been considered high-tech since 2009.
What’s really exciting about getting this router is that it checks off two major items in future-proofing a smart home:
- It’s a mesh network system
- It implements the new Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax standard
When you’re looking to get a new router — no matter what it is — there’s a number of criteria to consider, like how big of a space you live in or how you use the internet. I like to compare it to watering a lawn. The Internet, much like water, is piped to your home as a utility. Your modem isn’t actually the source of the internet, but instead acts kinda like a water spout: the spout takes the incoming water and gives it a place to be connected to a hose. Your router then acts as a hose/sprinkler system. It takes the signal from the modem and spreads it throughout the home. Obviously, when you’re watering your lawn, you don’t want to skip any patches of grass. If you do, then you’ll quickly come to see the tan, spikey signs of a dead lawn. The same applies for your internet service — if your router fails to spread the internet signal from where it’s plugged in to the farthest reaches of your home… no more cat videos.
As our lives become more and more entrenched in connected devices, it becomes equally important to invest in a network system that is going to be able to handle the load. This is what kicked off my hunt to replace my beloved Netgear router with something that could really turn things up to 11. I soon learned to keep the two above qualifications in mind and my search was narrowed to only a handful of capable routers.
Routers should be purchased with the long-term in mind. They aren’t like phones or wearables, meant to be replaced every 2–4 years. A good quality router can easily last for ten years. However, the wireless protocol standards (notated by 802.11) tend to change every four or five years. This is why it’s so important to look at future-proof options and why I’d recommend looking into Wi-Fi 6 routers now, if you’re in the market. It’s bleeding new and sure, you probably don’t have a whole lot of Wi-Fi 6 capable devices yet, but getting one now means you’ll be ready for when more devices with the capability come. But before we get further into the why, let’s step back and look at the whats of Wi-Fi to begin with.
History of Wi-Fi
Wireless Fidelity (did you know that was what it stood for?) has had a long upbringing. It reaches back to the ancient ages of the late 90s…. 1997, to be exact. In that year, the first 802.11 protocol was developed and released to consumers. While the technology of transmitting wireless internet signals via infrared dates back to the very early 70s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) formalized the 802.11 protocol as a way to wirelessly transmit data. Thus, Wi-Fi was born. In 1999, 802.11b was released and widely accepted as the first well-known iteration of Wi-Fi in consumer devices.
Since then, Wi-Fi has seen generational advancements, with each generation incorporating faster transfer speeds and advanced features. The breakdown of what each generation is, when it came out, and what it influenced is as follows:
- 1999 — Wi-Fi 1 (802.11b) = 1 to 11 Mbit/s
- 1999 — Wi-Fi 2 (802.11a) = 1.5 to 54 Mbit/s
- 2003 — Wi-Fi 3 (802.11g) = 3–54 Mbit/s, introduced Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) passwords, with WPA2 introduced later in 2004
- 2009 — Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) = 72–600 Mbit/s
- 2013 — Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) = 433–6933 Mbit/s
- 2019 — Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) = 600–9608 Mbit/s, with the introduction of WPA3 in 2018
Basically, each generation improves on the previous generation in how much it can handle at once. Going back to our sprinkler scenario, Wi-Fi 1 is like watering your lawn with a spray bottle, while Wi-Fi 4 is like using a hand-held gardening nozzle, and Wi-Fi 6 is like using an oscillating or pulsating sprinklers (my knowledge of these lawn-related things is, if anything, an indication of how I earned money as a kid). If this pattern of generational improvement seems familiar, then good! It should be! Because there’s another generational piece of wireless technology that somehow gets a bad rep, despite using a very similar method of delivery as Wi-Fi: mobile telecommunication. The “G” series of networking is responsible for you being able to have a working cellphone.
While 4G has been around for a while without people making too much of a fuss, 5G (the newest generation of cellular networking tech) somehow has people wrapping their heads in tin foil. This Alex Jones-ian belief of 5G causing cancer or being a ploy for mind control is, of course, ridiculous. Yet it somehow needs to be reiterated. Meanwhile, people don’t have a lot to say about Wi-Fi 6. Most people don’t even know what it is in the first place. It’s a good thing I’m here.
What is Wi-Fi 6?
Referring to the timeline above, Wi-Fi 6 is the newest 802.11 protocol for wireless networking, dubbed 802.11ax. It’s geared for high-speed internet and our very tech-laden lives, able to handle up to 9608 Mbits/s (which is roughly 1.2 Gigabytes of data every second). That is an insane amount of data. If you were able to take full advantage of that speed, you’d be able to download a 1080p movie in about five minutes and a 4K movie in under two hours. Compare that with Wi-Fi 4 from just ten years ago — downloading a 1080p movie would’ve taken an hour and a 4K movie (which didn’t even exist in 2009) would’ve taken a day to download! While the jump from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 isn’t as drastic, it is still a 28% jump in speed.
What makes Wi-Fi 6 truly special is how it handles large amounts of connected devices all at once and how energy efficient it is. Wi-Fi 6 uses more bands in the electromagnetic spectrum than its predecessors, which means it can juggle things around without causing interference. For the average consumer, this means their 11 devices can all be doing something at the same time without suffering any latency or buffering issues. And if you’re a tech enthusiast, your 30+ devices can also all be doing something at the same time without latency.
Okay, okay, I get it now. But then what are “mesh” networks?
So now we understand what Wi-Fi is and how it works, it’s time to add another variable: mesh networking. In our sprinkler situation, mesh routers work like a full irrigation system. Multiple routers are placed throughout a home and provide an overlapped network that meshes together. One router, connected to the modem, acts as the head honcho. Every other router in a mesh system can be placed wherever and only need to be plugged into the wall for power. These are known as nodes, and take the initial signal from the head router and bounce it around, repeating and enhancing the signal.
Mesh networks thrive in large spaces. Sometimes you need water to reach the furthest part of your lawn and maybe your local Home Depot doesn’t sell a single sprinkler to do the job. That’s when you need multiple. The same thinking applies to mesh networks. The bigger the home, the more mesh routers make sense as a way of evenly spreading signal strength without any gaps or dead zones.
Why buying one now makes sense
I’ll admit it: despite owning one, I was hesitant to jump on board the AX/Mesh train when I first started to look at routers, because why in the hell would anyone who lives in a 800sqft apartment need one? It’s like going from a Jetta to a Jaguar when you live hundreds of miles away from any kind of environment that a Jaguar would benefit from. But remember what I said before about future-proofing? I meant it.
You probably don’t need an AX router, mesh router, or a combination of the two right now. But you will need one tomorrow. Our personal devices will only increase in number, and each one will eventually fight for bandwidth to give you the cat videos and weather updates you want. In addition to that, more rich content eats up more data. The average 4K movie is 100GB in size! Being able to stream that is a feat that is only achievable in more recent years. Being able to stream it in its full capacity without buffering is the achievement of tomorrow.
Even if we were to put all that to the side, 2020 has proven us capable of doing more from home than we ever thought possible pre-pandemic. COVID-19 has not just highlighted the flaws in America’s public health infrastructure, but has also highlighted the practicality of working from home full-time. More and more employers are shifting employees into working from home through 2021, with some even considering it a permanent change in workflow. In the before-times, I can almost guarantee your office space had a better, more robust wireless network than your home (even if you can’t load Reddit on Wi-Fi). That kind of reliability was taken for granted, and is now missed by many of us. So in order to get back to that office-level of productivity, you’re going to need a network that can support it (and you won’t have an IT team blocking your favorite social media platforms).
Is it overkill right now? Yes. Was it partially so I could enjoy Tik Tok videos in the bath? Yes. But will it be able to last ten years of unreal amounts of tech all at once? Hell. Yes.
Joe Staples is a tech writer based in Brooklyn, NY. When he’s not testing what this new router can do on speedtest.net every ten minutes, he’s doing finger exercises before this week’s lineup of tech announcements. He publishes his articles weekly on Substack, along with news tidbits he finds throughout the week. He’s also usually found on Twitter, keeping tabs on what’s new in consumer tech, entertainment, and all things nerdy.
And the best part: he’s for hire.
You can contact him via email or Twitter.
@joeisastaple | joeisastaple@gmail.com
