iPhone 13 Models Again Rumored to Support Faster Wi-Fi 6E

[falkon-engine]

Does 6E offer even less latency than regular wifi6? If so, that would be big for the future of VR/AR

6E is basically Wifi 6, but with the important distinction that it operates in the 6 Ghz band. 6 Ghz is important because 1, there aren't many incumbent devices that will interfere with Wifi meaning better speeds, but the second and more important point is that you can finally run 160 Mhz channels cleanly without interruption. With 5Ghz, if you try to run a 160 Mhz channel, due to the limited spectrum available, you will have to operate within the DFS bands. Running 160 Mhz is important because with 80 Mhz channels, a typical 2x2 wifi6 chip inside your computer will connect at 1.2 Gbps. But with 160 Mhz channels, you will get a 2.4 Gbps connection, meaning your actual wifi speeds (upload and download) can exceed the speed of 1 gbps wired LAN connection!

DFS means dynamic frequency selection, which is a mechanism codified into law across the globe to protect RADAR from Wifi. In order for any router to certified for operation within the USA (and various countries), the FCC mandates that the company show that if the router detects radar, it will vacate the DFS channel immediately. So say you're on a Zoom call, your router is set to the 160 Mhz mode, and while you're talking on your call, the airport or military uses the same radar channel as your wifi. Boom! You're kicked off... and you have to wait while the router sets up shop another channel.

Running 160 Mhz on the 5 Ghz band is unstable because your router can be kicked off at any time without your intervention or control if it "detects" radar. The radar "detection" may even be a false positive, but the router will still hop to another frequency regardless. This cycle can go on indefinitely as long as the router is on a DFS channel. Just depends on if you have radar in your radio environment. This is frustrating because your connection to the internet can drop in and out while the router is hopping to another frequency. This is terrible for real-time applications such as calls, etc.

But with 6 Ghz, there is no such problem, as there will be no DFS mechanism. I presume that the weather band and military radar don't operate within 6 Ghz. So you can operate 160 Mhz within the 6 Ghz band cleanly and without any interruption. And get maximum speed. And when Wifi 7 comes, 802.11be, we will get 320 Mhz channels for even more maximum speeds. Also, 6 Ghz will bring a ton more bandwidth to Wifi. There will be more frequency bands available to wifi in the 6 Ghz band than the 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz bands combined. 6 Ghz is probably the biggest update to wifi in 20 years.

 

[MacBH928]

I aways love talking to people that don't understand WIFI, I engineered and installed the very first Motorola access point back in 1992 at the General Motors EDS technology labs. And have been a Ham,CB radio and GMRS licensed person. I see them all the time trying to purchase wifi extenders and other crap, when most of the time their problem is where their main router is located and they are trying to run 12 devices in a congested neighborhood on a 10 year old wireless 802.11N router they got at Walmart and dont know why their WIFI is not working correctly.

All channels will get congested everything is wireless now.

What are your best advice for setting up a router? Does brand matter?

 

[MacBH928]

6E is basically Wifi 6, but with the important distinction that it operates in the 6 Ghz band. 6 Ghz is important because 1, there aren't many incumbent devices that will interfere with Wifi meaning better speeds, but the second and more important point is that you can finally run 160 Mhz channels cleanly without interruption. With 5Ghz, if you try to run a 160 Mhz channel, due to the limited spectrum available, you will have to operate within the DFS bands. Running 160 Mhz is important because with 80 Mhz channels, a typical 2x2 wifi chip inside your computer will connect at 1.2 Gbps. But with 160 Mhz channels, you will get a 2.4 Gbps connection, meaning your wifi speeds (upload and download) can exceed the speed of 1 gbps wired LAN connection!

DFS means dynamic frequency selection, which is a mechanism codified into law across the globe to protect RADAR from Wifi. In order for any router to certified for operation within the USA (and various countries), the FCC mandates that the company show that if the router detects radar, it will vacate the DFS channel immediately. So say you're on a Zoom call, your router is set to the 160 Mhz mode, and while you're talking on your call, the airport or military uses the same radar channel as your wifi. Boom! You're kicked off... and you have to wait while the router sets up shop another channel.

Running 160 Mhz on the 5 Ghz band is unstable because your router can be kicked off at any time without your intervention or control if it "detects" radar. The radar "detection" may even be a false positive, but the router will still hop to another frequency regardless. This cycle can go on indefinitely as long as the router is on a DFS channel. Just depends on if you have radar in your radio environment. This is frustrating because your connection to the internet can drop in and out while the router is hopping to another frequency. This is terrible for real-time applications such as calls, etc.

But with 6 Ghz, there is no such problem, as the weather band and military radar don't operate within 6 Ghz. So you can operate 160 Mhz cleanly and without any interruption. And get maximum speed. And when Wifi 7 comes, 802.11be, we will get 320 Mhz channels for even more maximum speeds.

The future looks nice but we a have a very long time until we have a reason to buy a Wifi6E router, even the just released iphone 12 doesn't have it so we are talking 4-5 years into the future.

As for DFC, even if you leave near an airport or military base, Wifi should not be able to reach that far?! Or is their radar reaching far enough to my Wifi signal?

 

[falkon-engine]

The future looks nice but we a have a very long time until we have a reason to buy a Wifi6E router, even the just released iphone 12 doesn't have it so we are talking 4-5 years into the future.

As for DFC, even if you leave near an airport or military base, Wifi should not be able to reach that far?! Or is their radar reaching far enough to my Wifi signal?

You will be surprised how far Wifi signals can travel. Also don't forget, there's indoor wifi but also outdoor higher power wifi as well, near stadiums, malls, etc. So to protect the weather band and military operations from harmful interference, countries across the globe mandated DFS in the 5 Ghz band. So even if our indoor low power routers don't interfere with radar (idk if they do or don't), once the router "detects" radar, it must vacate the DFS channel.

Also, I've played around with 160 Mhz channels, and I can tell you the wifi speeds are unbelievable. May not be that big a deal for iPhones, but for a LAN, especially now that folks are working from home, 1 gbps lan connection is very slow when you have large (gigabytes) files to transfer over the network. Think video editing, music production, etc connected to a NAS. A faster connection reduces the wait time for uploading/downloading files and increases productivity.

So I'd argue that the speed increases that will come with wifi 6E is needed NOW for some applications and workflows. A 10 gbps wired connection is king, but not everyone has the money or ability to install 10 gbps equipment and cabling within their walls. So as wifi increases in speed, it will bring big benefits to those that need it and can't afford to go wired.

 

[liberte1776]

Where’s the new Time Capsule w/6E?

 

[827538]

I'm going to be really disappointed if the new macbooks that come out mid-year don't have wi-fi 6e. Not that it will matter that much, but I tend to keep my laptops for like 7 years.

Yeh I will be too. .ax brought some great changes over from the LTE space but 6GHz band is where everyday consumers will really notice the improvements. I'm planning a whole Ubiquiti AP upgrade when they release their 6E AP's. I spent the majority of my time using WiFi, it's more important to me than LTE or 5G.

The iPhone 13 should have it all, dual SIM 5G (currently you can only have one 5G SIM and the other LTE), frequency aggregation, VoNR and SA. Throw in WiFi 6E and it basically has every single conceivable thing you could want in your modem.

 

[827538]

It's gonna be Wifi 7, aka 802.11be. It's going to be a beast. 320 Mhz channels, link aggregation (i.e., combine data transmissions over 2.4, 5, and 6 Ghz), and so on.

320MHz channels will be of questionable utility but link aggregation is going to be really really good. The X60 modem in the iPhone 13 will have link aggregation for 5G bands which is very useful.

 

[827538]

Does 6E offer even less latency than regular wifi6? If so, that would be big for the future of VR/AR

Not unless the 6GHz band is uncongested vs congested 5GHz band. Uses the exact same .ax interface.

 

[827538]

What is MoCA?

Dinosaur technology.

 

[827538]

May I ask, if this is such a big jump, while the 6 wasn’t, then why WiFi 6 is not WiFi 5E and WiFi 6E is not WiFi 6 or 7? I don’t get it, bigger tech jumps go along with a more noticeable name change.

WiFi 6 was all about efficient use of the spectrum, essentially it copied LTE tech where the signal was chopped up and shared with multiple clients at once (very basic idea of it), previously WiFi 5 and before (802.11ac) was like a machine gun on a merry go round. It could only really talk to one client at a time (MU-MIMO sort of works to combat this but it's still not the same).

WiFi 6 isn't about insane speeds it was about efficiency. Put a hundred people with .ax under a .ax AP and they will have a much better experience than 100 .ac clients under a .ac AP.

WiFi 6E is the same new 802.11ax standard but includes the newly released 6GHz band which is absolutely huge, 1200MHz if I remember correctly. Far bigger than 2.4GHz and 5GHz combined. Think of it like having 10 usable lanes to a hundred, combine it with the efficient 802.11ax interface and you have some major gains.

WiFi 5 - 802.11ac
WiFi 6 - 802.11ax
WiFi 6E - 802.11ax (but with a new band opened up).

 

[827538]

The future looks nice but we a have a very long time until we have a reason to buy a Wifi6E router, even the just released iphone 12 doesn't have it so we are talking 4-5 years into the future.

As for DFC, even if you leave near an airport or military base, Wifi should not be able to reach that far?! Or is their radar reaching far enough to my Wifi signal?

You can buy both a 6E router today and 6E devices.
By Q4 of 2021 nearly all my devices could be 6E, iPhone, MacBook, AP.

 

[nquinn]

You can buy both a 6E router today and 6E devices.
By Q4 of 2021 nearly all my devices could be 6E, iPhone, MacBook, AP.

Right? Getting tired of people acting like 6E is some future concept. Routers and pc cards already exist, and huge amount of new devices and laptops in 2021 will all have it. It's silly to buy wi-fi 802.11ac tech which is essentially 7-8 years old at this point.

 

[seek3r]

I find it cute that we keep talking about increased WiFi speeds, when a good percentage of people are bottlenecked by their own ISPs. I find it already bad enough that we can't get a standard down on a Wi-Fi format, like we did back in the G/N/AC days. (I know, Wi-Fi 6 has been out now for a while, but lets be honest - it took quite a bit for it to be standardized, only to have another signal type bounce into the picture). Personally, I'm not doing so many things inside my own home network to see the huge advantage passed casting a video (which even then is rare in itself). I'll forever be tied to my ISP speeds, which in the US is slow by nature.

Some of us shuffle more bits around our internal networks, you know?

 

[MowgliWolf]

Based on the bits n bobs coming up, it looks like the 13 is going to be pretty damned fine, here’s hoping they don’t drop the mini, absolutely loving it!

 

[swm]

Not everything done over Wifi is then sent over the internet.

that's true, but we have a trend to persuade people to keep their crap in the cloud instead of storing it locally in their WiFi accessible local network.

then you have Verizon FIOS and other smaller ISP's all proving 1 gig.

please, don't get fooled by the speed of the local 'loop'. this is pretty much the same argument. your ISP may give you a symmetric 1Gbps connection in their access network, but that doesn't mean you have this speed always available towards the internet.
we just cannot afford to build non blocking networks, and there's nothing wrong with that.
if you check out the actual throughput on your access line, or the average of say all 1G connected customers in an ISP, you'd be surprised how low the actual data traffic is.

nowadays tech is getting labelled obsolete before it can produce enough revenue in favor of pushing (mostly unnecessary) new features/tech down your throat, just for the sake of 'sustainable growth' - using a secret tool called 'marketing' to make you believe you need it

 

[gene731]

What is MoCA?

Perhaps this will help you out.

MoCA - Multimedia over Coax Alliance

MoCA networking over coax standards deliver premium broadband coverage and quality of service experiences customers expect.

www.mocalliance.org

 

[HarryWild]

I knew was coming too! Still brought the 12! Also upgradw my router too to WiFi 6, not 6E. Stupid me?

 

[bsanek900]

Hi. Off topic. Help me find the picture from the iPhone that is depicted in the news

 

[macsareveryinteresting]

That would be pretty cool to have faster Wi-Fi. Although 5G ultra-wide band can beat some Wi-iFs with the speed.

 

[Populus]

WiFi 6 was all about efficient use of the spectrum, essentially it copied LTE tech where the signal was chopped up and shared with multiple clients at once (very basic idea of it), previously WiFi 5 and before (802.11ac) was like a machine gun on a merry go round. It could only really talk to one client at a time (MU-MIMO sort of works to combat this but it's still not the same).

WiFi 6 isn't about insane speeds it was about efficiency. Put a hundred people with .ax under a .ax AP and they will have a much better experience than 100 .ac clients under a .ac AP.

WiFi 6E is the same new 802.11ax standard but includes the newly released 6GHz band which is absolutely huge, 1200MHz if I remember correctly. Far bigger than 2.4GHz and 5GHz combined. Think of it like having 10 usable lanes to a hundred, combine it with the efficient 802.11ax interface and you have some major gains.

WiFi 5 - 802.11ac
WiFi 6 - 802.11ax
WiFi 6E - 802.11ax (but with a new band opened up).

Thank you for your great explanation, now it is more clear for me why this is an Extended WiFi 6.

I have one more question. I live, during some months, in a house where the walls are thick. I guess I won’t have any luck with 5GHz and even less luck with 6GHz when trying to connect distant points (40 linear meters max) of the house. Is there any solution for long distances/thick walls for WiFi 6E? Or am I condemned to use technology from 15 years ago? Thank you

 

[827538]

Thank you for your great explanation, now it is more clear for me why this is an Extended WiFi 6.

I have one more question. I live, during some months, in a house where the walls are thick. I guess I won’t have any luck with 5GHz and even less luck with 6GHz when trying to connect distant points (40 linear meters max) of the house. Is there any solution for long distances/thick walls for WiFi 6E? Or am I condemned to use technology from 15 years ago? Thank you

You're welcome, yes it's Extended .ax to 6GHz.
The 2.4GHz spectrum also works with .ax so that might help.

If I was you I would lay some CAT 6A S/FTP (shielded folded twisted pair), run a line from your existing router to a new AP to increase coverage. I'm not a fan of 'mesh' networking. I much prefer hard wiring AP's to a switch. I worked as a network operations engineer in college and have a degree in electrical engineering.

People forget that beam forming (phased array) is a thing. Most good routers will aim and bounce signals to get to you, it's why 5GHz is surprisingly effective.

 

[Glee217]

I aways love talking to people that don't understand WIFI, I engineered and installed the very first Motorola access point back in 1992 at the General Motors EDS technology labs. And have been a Ham,CB radio and GMRS licensed person. I see them all the time trying to purchase wifi extenders and other crap, when most of the time their problem is where their main router is located and they are trying to run 12 devices in a congested neighborhood on a 10 year old wireless 802.11N router they got at Walmart and dont know why their WIFI is not working correctly.

May I ask a Network Engineer on his take on this Asus Rt-ax92u wifi 6 mesh router ? I have a two story 900 sqr ft house living in SF California where the houses are literally built connected to each other. My rented eero gets maxed 450Mbps on wifi if next to the router. So thinking of buying a mesh router instead of renting. Please help. Thanks.

 

[Yammabot]

Can’t wait to hear of a sub $300 actual 6E rougher that has good reviews!

 

[subi257]

sweet. Nice to hear webpages might load in .4 seconds instead of .44 on the next iphone.

That will only be if you in a place that has WiFi6E as their infrastructure.

 

[Populus]

You're welcome, yes it's Extended .ax to 6GHz.
The 2.4GHz spectrum also works with .ax so that might help.

If I was you I would lay some CAT 6A S/FTP (shielded folded twisted pair), run a line from your existing router to a new AP to increase coverage. I'm not a fan of 'mesh' networking. I much prefer hard wiring AP's to a switch. I worked as a network operations engineer in college and have a degree in electrical engineering.

People forget that beam forming (phased array) is a thing. Most good routers will aim and bounce signals to get to you, it's why 5GHz is surprisingly effective.

Oh, I didn’t know the .ax protocol is available on the 2.4GHz band spectrum. That’s a relief and with that, I don’t think I’ll need much more, because in that house, the Internet speed is not greater than 100Mbps.