Before the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January, I wrote a piece about how I couldn’t wait for products based on the new WiFi 6E standard. In it, I described how a mesh network based on 6E would be the cherry on top of my new installation, which would be based on Verizon FIOS as the wide area connection.
Well, everything went according to plan, except for the 6E gear. Vendors gave me the distinct impression that releases would come in the first quarter of 2021, and here are we, a few days from quarter’s end, and there’s just one announcement of availability. But even then, there’s a catch: it’s from TP-Link, and it’s only in China.
TP-Link sells in the United States under the Archer and other brands, but its 6E page here is all arm waving and pageantry for the moment. Meanwhile, other vendors are mum (I’m lookin’ at you, Linksys). No one is saying what the holdup is about, but I’ll venture a guess or two in a few moments.
The big innovation with 6E is the introduction of the 6GHz band, and not just any 6GHz band, but a big, fat one, 1.2GHz wide, with potential for seven 160MHz channels, or up to 59 20MHz channels. That’s a lot of bandwidth, particularly because, at least at first, there’ll be hardly any traffic up there. All existing WiFi channels run in either the 2.4GHz (older) or 5GHz (newer) band.
