FCC To Vote On Adding 6Ghz Band To Wi-Fi 6 To Improve Speeds (gizmodo.com) 39
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Devices with Wi-Fi 6 started rolling out at the end of 2019, but now, a new vote proposed by the FCC could open up the 6Ghz band to unlicensed wifi and add a massive speed boost to wireless gadgets. Backed by Chairman Pai, the FCC vote is scheduled to take place on April 23rd, and if passed would add 1200MHz of available bandwidth to the usable wifi spectrum which the FCC says would "effectively increase the amount of spectrum available for Wi-Fi almost by a factor of five."
Not only would this improve things like latency and download and uploads speeds, because the 6Ghz band was previously mostly used to support things like wireless backhaul, microwave services, and a limited number of public safety services, new 6GHz wifi devices wouldn't really have to compete with other gadgets for spectrum, unlike the existing 2.4Ghz wifi band which often suffers from interference caused by household appliances. The move is also seeing widespread industry support from a number of groups including the Wi-Fi Alliance, which earlier this year announced the creation of the Wi-Fi 6E which incorporates the 6Ghz band into current wireless standards. A number of tech companies also approve of the proposal, including Qualcomm, Intel, Facebook, Cisco and Apple.
Not only would this improve things like latency and download and uploads speeds, because the 6Ghz band was previously mostly used to support things like wireless backhaul, microwave services, and a limited number of public safety services, new 6GHz wifi devices wouldn't really have to compete with other gadgets for spectrum, unlike the existing 2.4Ghz wifi band which often suffers from interference caused by household appliances. The move is also seeing widespread industry support from a number of groups including the Wi-Fi Alliance, which earlier this year announced the creation of the Wi-Fi 6E which incorporates the 6Ghz band into current wireless standards. A number of tech companies also approve of the proposal, including Qualcomm, Intel, Facebook, Cisco and Apple.
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What makes you think Slashdot is hiring?
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Slashdot editing is historically bad. Complaining about it is a tradition.
I can't remember a time when the editing wasn't poor here, and I've been here a long time. (I lurked for some time before creating an account.)
Shouldn't they first consider who.. (Score:2)
..would be alive to benefit from these services?
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1. Sales departments of WiFi 6 hardware
2. There is no #2, this is the end of the list
Re:Shouldn't they first consider who.. (Score:5, Informative)
You missed the primary benefit
1. Users
802.11ac, has a theoretical maximum rate of 1.3Gbps.
802.11ax can deliver a single stream at 3.5Gbps, and can multiplex simultaneous streams to a single endpoint for a total theoretical bandwidth of an astounding 14Gbps.
Considering we don't live in a theoretical world, opening up more bands and bandwidth that doesn't have to compete with your neighbors 20 year old leaky microwave (requiring multiple repeated packets, wasting power) is a good thing.
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Did you post this from your old 56k baud modem? Because I'm pretty sure you and everyone like you said the same thing about DSL.
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"Did you post this from your old 56k baud modem?"
No, I was using a 1200 baud half duplex packet radio via x25, on a 144mgz radio digipeated from one node to the gateway, from a 286 running ka9q NOS in a desqview session. I just upgraded my C64:-)
But currently as relevant as 802.11b
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Did you post this from your old 56k baud modem? Because I'm pretty sure you and everyone like you said the same thing about DSL.
Posted from my Model 33ASR Teletype
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Wall penetration? (Score:5, Informative)
5ghz has a really hard time penetrating more than one internal wall with drywall
The reason why 6ghz was used for backhaul was generally because it was line of sight point to point - no walls, no trees, etc. 2.4ghz works really well because it goes through anything that is
I can see 6ghz doing great for TV to cell phone on the couch where you have good line of sight, but getting 6ghz in the garage is gonna be brutal without a wifi access point in each room, with 2.4ghz or 5ghz backhaul between mesh routers.... at which point, what's the point of 6ghz?
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I see this like replacing a big Amazon Echo device with Echo Dots... you may need one for each room you want to reach, but these devices should be cheap enough to get a signal to your iPhone without the risk of broadcasting to your neighbors.
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I see this like replacing a big Amazon Echo device with Echo Dots... you may need one for each room you want to reach, but these devices should be cheap enough to get a signal to your iPhone without the risk of broadcasting to your neighbors.
In a residential setting, as it is now people are lazy with the placement of their one Router / access point, and usually hate using wires. So ideally you would have your router wired to small 6Ghz access points like you say... but people hate wires, nor do they have a clue how to setup equipment. It could work well in institutional settings: Eg a library, Starbucks, or airport where people pay to put in real equipment and you have a high user density.
Where we already have a 5Ghz band that isn't shared with
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Wifi6 has provisions for using multiple frequencies in parallel for multiple devices at once and/or higher aggregate bandwidth for a single device.
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Lower latency + higher transfer rates + clueless non-technical customers = billing bonanza! (I agree with your sentiment in general. We're iterating this particular segment of the technology faster than there is any material benefit for it, and this shit needs to stop now.)
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at which point, what's the point of 6ghz?
1. WiFi manufacturers get to convince you that the NEWEST and GREATEST THING is 6GHz WiFi, and that you absolutely MUST HAVE IT or you'll be left behind, so they win on sales
2. Ajit Pai can afford that new sports car he had his eye on
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I don't think anyone has much cared about which wifi specification since g... 802.11n and ac were cool and added range but if the world stopped at g + mesh networking protocols we would be fine. I don't think average consumers much care about wifi standards enough to upgrade
Re:Wall penetration? (Score:4, Interesting)
yep, 1Gbps bandwidth does not mean as much at home if everything you interact with is over a cable modem bottlenecked at 80Mbps. IT helps with device to device traffic but not a lot of that happens. Chromecast is probably the biggest example of having to re-cast your internet bandwidth across to another device. And even at 4k resolution thats only about 15Mbps.
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While Chromecast does do screen mirroring, where packets flow router-device-router-Chromecast, in most usage situations the device simply sends a URL to the Chromecast, which then goes and directly streams the content. The only data flowing back to the device are telemetry and commands.
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Even here in the USA there are many places with multiple hundreds of Mbps over cable, or even Gbps speeds now. Up here in Humboldt Suddenlink is offering 1 Gbps cable for a fairly reasonable price, although I do hear it's a bit flaky. Sadly the Airbnb I'm still in (the housing market up here being extremely competitive) has ATT DSL and it goes down all the damn time. I haven't done a speed test but it seems to be under 20 Mbps... I would do one now but the owner has the AP in her room and she turns it off a
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ax added a lot of stuff to improve mesh networking and large numbers of devices in close proximity, as did ac. MIMO came in with n and multi user MIMO with ac. Using beam forming really helps for multiple devices.
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N helped that a lot.
AC really helped.
Routers with multiple bands give us a chance to spread out the traffic, that has helped the most.
Re:Wall penetration? (Score:4, Interesting)
5ghz and 6ghz have similar wall penetration. But they are increasing the available bandwidth from 600mhz to 1.8GHZ of spectrum. That's huge. Also it'll be fine when serving big open spaces. Stadiums don't have LOS issues but they do have extreme congestion issues.
Right now I've got a CAT6 cable on order because working from home I get a 6ms ping to my remote workstation in the office at 2mbps. But as soon as I run fullscreen video and the bitrates spikes to 40mbps I get 50ms pings because of spectrum congestion.
I also have a wireless mesh network now and the uplinks are on 5ghz. That works fine again at low bandwidth usage. But if I get close to the full 600mbps uplink speeds to a mesh node I get 100+ms pings. Having 4x more spectrum to spread out some of that traffic across means we could use dedicated channels to each mesh node and not have them all competing for the same spectrum.
*All* the open bands have problems (Score:3)
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2.4 GHz is used by microwave ovens because it was already an ISM band and unlike 900 MHz, the wavelength is short enough to use a choke ring in the door to seal it. Absorption by water generally increases at higher frequencies however the absorption peaks are much higher in frequency. Dielectric heating of water works fine all the way down to HF frequencies as anybody who has cooked a hot dog in a tank coil can testify about.
I would not mind having one of the old style 900 MHz microwave ovens as they were
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According to the Youtube videos, 5ghz has no problem penetrating yer brane.
6GHz will go "right through your soul". Ask any "alternative anything" nutter.
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The idea is to have more low power APs, say one in each room where you need a lot of bandwidth. They can then have a wired or wireless backhaul. The fact that it doesn't penetrate walls well actually helps to section off areas of your home/building so they can all have high bandwidth.
Long range wifi is really bad anywhere that there are lots of competing networks or devices. As people need more bandwidth for things like streaming 8k TV. Backhaul is still a pain if you can't wire it in but at least you can u
New devices? (Score:2)
Will current 802.11ax devices be able to support the new band with firmware update? Or will we have to buy all-new equipment?
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Yay! Good thing I haven't bought any AX routers yet. Too bad there's a lot of wifi6 NICs based on Intel's buggy-arsed AX200 out there. Including ones integrated into laptops and motherboards.