Wi-Fi 6E. The most advanced and fastest version of Wi-Fi is finally authorized in France. If it promises excellent performance, it remains for the moment reserved for rare devices… and expensive!
We had been waiting for it for months. This time he is available. Wi-Fi 6E is finally authorized in France, as certified decision n ° 2021-2184 of October 14, 2021 published on 1er December in the Official Journal. Clearly, it is now possible to use this new version of Wi-Fi throughout the country to take advantage of its advantages, starting with a higher speed and better signal distribution. However, if the promise of this evolution of the wireless communication standard is attractive, its use is not about to become democratized because the devices (routers, repeaters, computers, smartphones, etc.) capable of using it are still rare. And above all relatively expensive, which will initially reserve them for an audience of specialists eager for performance.
What is Wi-Fi 6E?
Wi-Fi 6E is an evolution of Wi-Fi 6, a simplified “commercial” name – by the Wi-Fi Alliance – of IEEE 802.11ax standard, the most recent version of this wireless network communication technology, which has entered our daily lives for years – to the point where many still confuse Wi-Fi with an Internet connection. Like previous versions, Wi-Fi 6 uses radio frequencies – in other words, electromagnetic waves associated with radio frequencies – to convey expertly encoded digital data. Ratified in February 2021, the 802.11ax standard makes it possible to use a much wider frequency spectrum than the old versions, theoretically ranging from 1 to 7.1 GHz and divided by frequency bands. A characteristic which allows it to use more bands than the 2.4 and 5 GHz already used for the carrier probes by the previous versions such as Wi-Fi 5 (or IEEE 802.11ac), and which makes it possible to limit the saturation of the channels that we sometimes encounter.
That’s not all. Designed to cover large and dense spaces (public places such as train stations, airports, shopping centers or businesses), Wi-Fi 6 uses other technologies with barbaric names such as OFDMA, 1024-QAM modulation, MIMO and MU-MIMO which, without going into indigestible technical details, make it possible to ensure a better connection to each user, with a wider bandwidth – and therefore a higher speed – and a better stability of the coverage. In theory, Wi-Fi 6 should allow speeds of the order of 10 Gbit / s to be achieved with reduced latency, i.e. increased responsiveness. In short, like optical fiber and 5G, 802.11ax is the standard of the future for wireless LANs!
In practice, the Wi-Fi 6E version which has just been authorized in France adds the 6 GHz frequency band for the carriers. More precisely, it authorizes frequencies ranging from 5,945 to 6,425 MHz, ie a usable band of 480 MHz for data. Admittedly, this is less than the 5,945-7,125 MHz band available in the United States, which offers a bandwidth of 1,200 MHz. But this restriction is due to a decision of the European Commission, which has chosen to limit the frequencies that can be used on the continent to leave radio space available for other uses – the 6 GHz band is also coveted by mobile telephone operators … In France, it is Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Posts and Press Distribution (Arcep) which took charge of the file to lead to a decision which has just been promulgated in the OJ.
What are the advantages of Wi-Fo 6E?
As has been said, as an evolution of the 802.11ax standard, Wi-Fi 6E provides both better coverage, greater stability, higher throughput, increased responsiveness to a large number of simultaneous users on a wireless local area network. Provided, of course, that they are equipped with compatible devices. for the others, no problem, since like the previous versions, Wi-Fi 6E guarantees backward compatibility by supporting Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 4, but without the advantages of Wi-Fi 6E. In concrete terms, Wi-FiE, like fiber or 5G, paves the way for uses that are very demanding in terms of bandwidth and latency, such as augmented reality (RA or AR), virtual reality (VR or VR) or streaming in 8K. Uses that make content providers like Netflix or Meta – the new name of Facebook – fantasize about, with its metavers.
What devices are Wi-Fi 6E compatible?
As you can imagine, to take advantage of Wi-Fi 6E, you need compatible devices, which are still quite rare, the standard being very recent. Especially since it is not enough for a computer, a telephone or a router to manage the 808.11ax standard for it to be compatible with Wi-Fi 6E … While waiting for Internet service providers (ISP) like Orange , Free, Bouygues and SFR are implementing this technology in their boxes, you have to be equipped with compatible wireless routers. Or likely to be. Because if some manufacturers have presented Wi-Fi 6E routers, like Netgear with its Orbi RBKE963 system, few models are already available. However, most manufacturers who offer models stamped Wi-Fi 6 should soon offer firmware updates to activate the frequencies authorized in France. The same goes for smartphones. Some phones equipped with a Snapdragon 888 SoC – like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold 3, Xiaomi 11 and 11 Ultra, or Asus ROG Phone 5 and Zenfone 8 – are in principle Wi-Fi 6E compatible, but they will also need to be updated. As for computers compatible with Wi-Fi 6E, they are even rarer… Above all, in all cases, they are top-of-the-range models of the latest generation, and therefore quite expensive. Patience therefore: as always, it will be necessary to wait for the manufacturers to adapt and for the prices to settle down so that the Wi-Fi 6E becomes the standard of the market, as was the case for the previous versions of the standard. . We can bet that the manufacturers will not fail to communicate on this subject to put this argument forward.