The latest generation of Wi-Fi is here. It's actually been around for
a little bit recently, which is Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E by extension. Now the technical term is actually
802.11ax, but I guess they figured the number system works a little bit better. So the previous one, 802.11ac is there for Wi-Fi 5,
but the latest one is 6. Now the other one, Wi-Fi 6E,
you might not have heard of. It's still part of Wi-Fi 6, but
has one important additional feature which is actually huge. So what I'll do is first explain
what that big difference is. And then also how Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are
both way better than Wi-Fi ac or Wi-Fi 5, the previous one. And of course, I'll try to break
down the really technical stuff and explain it as simply as possible. So you don't have to
be some kind of expert. Before we jump in though, I want
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you can also click on the same link down in the description. And now let's continue. So what is the deal with Wi-Fi 6 and 6E? Well for context, I do want to
point out they both do have the same features and improvements over Wi-Fi 5. I'll go over what all those are
afterwards, and they include all of these things, but it's important
to know that 6 and 6E do have basically the same functionality. However, the difference comes
in the frequency spectrums. So while Wi-Fi 6 supports the same 2.4
and 5 GHz bands as previous Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6E will actually support an additional
third 6 GHz band that was just recently opened up by the FCC and registered for
unlicensed use, meaning Wi-Fi can use it. And other countries are also
opening up part of the 6 GHz band, all for use in Wi-Fi. And this might not sound like a
big deal, "oh we already have dual bands, why do we need three bands?" But it actually is a huge
deal and I'll explain why. Practically speaking
though, what does this mean? How is it any better? Well, the biggest benefit is going
to be in spectrally noisy areas. And what I mean by that is areas that
have a lot of Wi-Fi signals bouncing around a lot of access points and routers. For example offices, apartment buildings,
public venues, stuff where a lot of people are going to be on their
phones and all connecting to similar Wi-Fi hotspots. With this new spectrum, it's
going to allow a whole bunch more space for Wi-Fi channels. So different access points don't have
to be competing over it, and it's going to have way less interference. You see when you set up a router,
you have to choose, or have it auto choose, a single channel it's going
to operate on and then all your devices are going to be connecting on that single channel. And the channel is basically a certain
range of the full 2.4, 5, or 6 GHz range. You only choose a small part of it. The fewer the channels, then
the more those are going to have to be shared by nearby access
points such as your neighbors. If you have more than three neighbors,
like an apartment complex nearby, then there is going to be some
overlap, and you're going to have to both be potentially using the
same channel, it's going to cause a lot of interference. And the current 2.4 GHz, especially,
but also 5 GHz range, both have some shortcomings that 6 GHz will solve. Consider 2.4 GHz, for example. The most common one, ironically. Did you know that there are literally only
three non-overlapping channels on 2.4 GHz? And it's used by a whole
bunch of other stuff, not just Wi-Fi. It's used by Bluetooth, baby monitors,
car alarm sensors and stuff, even garage door openers, microwave's when
you run them, and not to mention a whole bunch of different smart home
protocols like ZigBee and stuff. I mean, it's a mess. Now the 5 GHz spectrum should
theoretically have fixed this. I mean, it's got the entire 5 GHz
to work with, so that's way more than the basically 100 MHz of 2.4. So why is 6 GHz so much better, even
though 5 GHz is basically the same amount of frequency, and we have that now? Well, in reality, the actual really
usable amount of the 5 GHz spectrum is not as big as you might think. Now it is significantly
bigger than 2.4 GHz. For example, where 2.4 only has three
non-overlapping, 20 MHz wide channels. 5 GHz has 25 channels. Except not really. You see 16 of those 25, 5 GHz
channels are what are called DFS channels: Dynamic Frequency Selection. These are channels that happen to share
the same frequency used by radar from airports, weather radar, stuff like that. And there's actually a law in the United
States and elsewhere that basically says because radar was used before and they
don't want Wi-Fi interfering with it, even though Wi-Fi can technically use
these channels, all Wi-Fi devices and routers have to have technology built
in to be able to detect radar signals. And if it does, it has to shut off the
Wi-Fi, which means if you live near an airport or near a weather radar
station that's sweeping by all the time, then those DFS channels are probably
going to be completely useless to you. And also because of these restrictions,
a lot of consumer grade routers don't even allow you to select these channels. Because if people didn't know about this
and they started using those channels, and then their Wi-Fi kept randomly cutting
out, then they would probably blame the router for having crappy connectivity
when it's just following the law. So they don't even let
you connect to those. So really you have a very limited
number of those 5 GHz channels that don't have this restriction in there. So really you only end up with nine truly
free Wi-Fi channels, which is still better than 2.4, but with five GHz ac Wi-Fi. There's actually a technology that a lot
of routers use, or are able to use, where it combines different multiple channels. So you can have 40 MHz channels made of
two 20 MHz channels or even 80 or 160 MHz wide channels, combining a whole bunch. And usually, an ac router is going to
try and by default do about 40 MHz wide. And considering the DFS channels,
that means there are only about four 40 MHz wide usable channels if you're going to do that. It's not required, but it will
get you the higher speeds. If you are in a very, very crowded
environment, then you will probably have to only use 20 MHz wide, even on 5 GHz. And then if you wanted to use a 80 MHz
wide channel, there's only two of those. And with the 160 MHz, then both of
them are either completely engulfed or partially engulfed by those DFS channels, so you might not even want to use those. But again, 5 GHz is still
way better than 2.4 in pretty much every way, except range. It's faster, there's more channels. But since those non DFS channels,
which are limited, are pretty much the standard ones, then it might not cut
it going forward to be future-proof. That's where 6 GHz comes in. And the 6 GHz full spectrum is
actually from 5.925 to 7.125 GHz. That's actually 1200 MHz, a
little bit more than a full GHz. And that means it supports a
whopping fifty-nine 20 MHz channels. And then those can be divided
into twenty-nine 40 MHz, fourteen 80 MHz or seven 160 MHz. However, there are some caveats. For example, in the United States, the
FCC did regulate which parts of that full spectrum can be used outside with standard
or higher power Wi-Fi access points. And which can be used in
lower power indoor use. Now the good news is that for
indoor use consumer uses, you can use any of the channels. All of them are allowed. It's just that on outside routers,
which might be used on venues and stuff, then those are restricted and
only 41 out of the 59 are usable there. But still you don't have to worry about
that restriction unless you're running a business or something like that. And it's still a whole
bunch, 41 it's still a lot. The other major caveat, which is the most
unfortunate, is that if you're outside the United States and Canada and some other
countries, most of Europe, for example, is not adopting yet the full 6 GHz spectrum. They have only adopted an unlicensed
use of 5925-6425 MHz range, which is half of what the United
States and Canada have done. That means that those of you who
are in Europe or elsewhere on this map where it's labeled, are only
going to have twenty-four new 20 MHz channels supported worldwide. Now I'm really hoping, and it does
seem like this is the case for now, that Wi-Fi chip manufacturers are
just going to by default add in the capability for all of these chips to
support the full 6E / 6 GHz spectrum. And not just limit it because it's
limited halfway in Europe, but they should definitely at least add the capability to
have the full thing and maybe enable it by software later in case Europe does end
up adopting the full 6 GHz spectrum, which there has been some pressure to do that. Though they haven't really
talked about it yet. But anyway, the basic huge benefit
of 6 GHz is that you're going to have way more space and able to not only
have more channels, if you need less interference, but you can also have
way bigger channels that are going to have a lot more bandwidth, especially
if you're not in such a crowded area. But what's also cool is with this
many channels, say you're an outdoor concert venue where there's thousands
of people all on their phone. And you, as the venue set up
person, you could set up 40 different Wi-Fi access points,
basically right next to each other. And each of them could have their
very own individual channel. So even though they all connect
to the same network, as people use their devices to connect to the same
Wi-Fi network, it'll show up as one as a mesh network, but their phone
will automatically connect to one with the least interference. It'll be able to balance across 40
different things and just to have way less interference for all those people. If that makes sense. Now, there are only a handful
of Wi-Fi, 6E devices so far. I believe for in terms of routers,
asus, Linksys and Netgear have a few. And as for devices, I believe
the Galaxy S21 Ultra has it. And I believe the upcoming iPhone is
supposed to be rumored to have it. So it's coming along, just you know,
it's going to take a little while and you will have to upgrade your router
to be able to use that, by the way. Now I did say I'd go over some of the
big ways that Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are both way better than Wi-Fi 5, more than
just having this extra new frequency. First of all, it's a
lot faster potentially. So you can have up to 3.5 *Gigabits*
per Wi-Fi stream, spatial stream they're called, and you can have
four of these (up to), depending on how high-end the device is. And therefore theoretically,
one Wi-Fi router could have a throughput of like 14 Gigabits per
second, which is kind of insane. The other big technological feature
of Wi-Fi 6 is something called OFDMA. This basically allows the router to
split one channel into many subunits and broadcast to several devices at
once, for like every broadcast "pulse", I guess you could say for every "time
unit", it can then do multiple devices. Whereas right now, they only send data
on the whole channel to one device. Now, technically if the router supports
something called MU-MIMO, which is multi-user multi-input multi-output,
then it can technically talk to multiple devices simultaneously,
but this OFDMA will be another way and be combined with that. So it'll just be way more
efficient and connect to a whole bunch of different stuff at once. And then there are several more
technical improvements, all designed to increase the efficiency of Wi-Fi 6 in
particularly high density environments. That was really the main goal when they
were creating Wi-Fi 6, is to just be used when there's a lot of density. Because we're kind of
experiencing that right now, and just Wi-Fi devices
becoming more ubiquitous. Internet of things, lot more
devices are going to be crowding our waves, we need more space. If you do want a much more full
explanation of all the little technical details and improvements
Wi-Fi 6 does have, I did make a video about that a couple of years ago. So I went into detail there you
can click on, I'll pop it out. So yea, all that stuff though is
for both 6 and 6E, it's just with 6E you get that extra bandwidth. And I think that pretty much covers it. So thanks again to Blinkist
for sponsoring this video. Again, you can go to
Blinkist.com/ ThioJoe. You get a free week trial if you're one of the first 100, and
I'll put the link in the description. If you guys want to keep watching,
I'll put a link to that video where I explained way more in detail the
different advantages of Wi-Fi 6. You can click on that right there. If you guys enjoyed the video,
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