Use of 6 GHz Band for Wi-Fi Critical as ISPs Raise Speeds to the Home, Experts Say
Use of the 6 GHz band will make Wi-Fi more efficient and means Wi-Fi devices won’t have to also work in legacy bands, said Rolf De Vegt, Qualcomm Technologies vice president-technical standards, on a Qualcomm webinar Tuesday. De Vegt said…
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6 GHz is the right band to meet today's needs. Wi-Fi started out with only about 90 MHz of spectrum in the 4.2 GHz band before the 5 GHz and then 6 GHz bands were added, he said. The addition of 6 GHz in 2020 (see 2004240011) more than doubled the amount of spectrum available for unlicensed, he said. “When devices operate in 6 GHz there is no need to support all the legacy modes,” which are “slower modes and less efficient,” De Vegt said. “What we can really focus on when we deploy networks in the 6 GHz band” is using “the most modern and the latest techniques for those particular Wi-Fi networks,” he said. The opening of 6 GHz is “extremely timely” as fiber is built out worldwide, he said. Without the 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi would become “the bottleneck” in the network, he said. The amount of the band opened for Wi-Fi varies around the world, but “leading tech nations” like the U.S., South Korea, Canada and Brazil are making the full band available, and not just the lower 500 MHz, recognizing “this is going to spur a lot of growth and innovation in all kinds of industries,” De Vegt said. “Wi-Fi connects the world” and now carries most wireless data network traffic, he said. Currently, an estimated 19 billion Wi-Fi devices are in use worldwide, he said. Wi-Fi networks are growing in every home, “it’s not just about your laptop or phone,” said Alap Modi, principal solutions architect at Wi-Fi equipment company Eero. The types of use cases that are growing require fast speed and low latency and that’s what 6 GHz offers, he said. ISPs are offering faster and faster connections to the home, but “inside your home you are still relying on Wi-Fi,” he said. Eero offers devices that use 160 MHz channels, and that offer multi-GB speeds in the home, he said.