Wi-Fi 5 vs. Wi-Fi 6 vs. Wi-Fi 6E: Which router must you select?

Not extensive back, purchasing a router intended picking between the more mature Wi-Fi 5 typical and the more the latest Wi-Fi 6, with reasonable arguments for deciding on both a single. But now, those two present specifications are contending with a third choice, referred to as Wi-Fi 6E, which the industry has been hyping as Wi-Fi’s most significant enhance in two decades.

All of which complicates what is currently a rather agonizing decision, with corporations this sort of as TP-Connection, Netgear, and Asus advertising routers across all 3 Wi-Fi generations. If you’re attempting to extend your wireless coverage or eradicate useless zones, here’s what you want to know:

Why Wi-Fi 5 still issues

The Wi-Fi 5 standard—known as 802.11ac prior to the market begun branding its expectations the exact same way Apple names its iPhones—launched in 2013, but it continues to be available right now in lessen-expense routers. It is also nevertheless a wonderful selection for a couple of factors:

To start with, there’s no inherent difference in reception variety amongst Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6, so you may be able to get similar coverage with a substantially much less expensive router.

Amazon’s Eero three-pack with Wi-Fi 5, for instance, charges $169, which is $30 a lot less than the Wi-Fi 6 edition with the similar advertised 5,000 square feet of protection. The $200 Google Wi-Fi 3-pack and $269 Google Nest Wifi two-pack continue to use Wi-Fi 5 as well—Google does not even offer you Wi-Fi 6 versions—and you can even get a Wi-Fi 5 mesh system from Vilo for $100. If you’re just attempting to prolong protection or remove lifeless zones, purchasing the ideal Wi-Fi 5 process you can tends to make a lot more sense than getting an inferior Wi-Fi 6 process in the exact price tag array.

Vilo

Also, most of your products in all probability nevertheless use Wi-Fi 5 in any case.

You are going to nevertheless uncover this more mature conventional in the entry-level iPad, nearly all Roku players (except a pair that continue to use Wi-Fi 4), all Intel-primarily based Macs, all PCs from prior to mid-2019, and all Fire Television set products other than the new Fireplace Television set Adhere 4K Max. Though these Wi-Fi 5 gadgets will also operate with more recent Wi-Fi 6 routers, they will not get any rewards from the more recent standard.

One similar be aware: If you’re purchasing a mesh router, you could see them marketed as either “dual-band” or “tri-band.” With tri-band methods, the mesh points have their possess dedicated line of conversation, different from the ones that feed data to your equipment, and that effects in considerably less congestion and superior speeds. Nonetheless, this aspect is not exclusive to Wi-Fi 6 either. A tri-band Wi-Fi 5 method with extra sturdy backhaul may possibly be a better use of your funds than a dual-band technique with Wi-Fi 6.

In which Wi-Fi 6 tends to make perception

Wi-Fi 6 does have some pros more than Wi-Fi 5, but you may possibly be in a position to get by with no them.

If you are splurging on gigabit internet—even while it is overkill for most people—you’ll very likely want a Wi-Fi 6 router to go with it. As the networking expert Dong Ngo has mentioned, Wi-Fi 6 can strike speeds of close to 1,000 Mbps in the real world with most gadgets, although Wi-Fi 5 could get to around fifty percent all those speeds at greatest.

That more velocity won’t matter for expert services like Netflix—which consumes close to 25 Mbps for 4K video—but could appear in handy if you’re downloading torrent data files from the internet, transferring substantial quantities of knowledge among networked storage drives, or streaming from a nearby media server at very significant bandwidths.

Wi-Fi 6’s other massive edge is that it can a lot more competently handle heaps of connections at the very same time. A single new technological innovation, called OFDMA, is geared toward smart household equipment, and may possibly be valuable if you system to join a bunch of Wi-Fi-enabled light-weight bulbs and switches to your community. Wi-Fi 6 also extends a characteristic referred to as MU-MIMO to uploads, which can be beneficial during simultaneous Zoom phone calls or on-line gaming sessions.

Router makers also assert that telephones and laptops get greater battery lifetime while using Wi-Fi 6, although I’ve still to see any independent exams that quantify this. They help a much better from of network stability as well, but until all your gadgets assistance Wi-Fi 6, you won’t experience the benefits of that further safety.

Granted, some Wi-Fi 6 routers gain from more attributes that are not instantly connected to the common itself, this kind of as much better-created antennas or much more highly effective processors. (We have discovered, for instance, that TP-Link’s Archer AX50 Wi-Fi 6 router has superior performance and range than the Archer A7 with Wi-Fi 5.) Nonetheless, Wi-Fi 6 by itself does not ensure improved reception, and its pace gains won’t be noticeable for most internet use scenarios.

Wi-Fi 6E: Nonetheless early

Wi-Fi 6E is theoretically a massive deal since it adds a new frequency band to property routers for the to start with time in more than a ten years.

Today’s Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 routers supply two bands to reduce congestion, with the 2.4 GHz band supplying slower speeds at longer array, and the 5 GHz band supplying quicker speeds at considerably shorter variety. Your router might routinely divvy up connections between these two bands, or it could display screen them as separate networks, letting you manually assign products to every a single. (Just to increase far more confusion, 5 GHz bands are usually labeled as “5G” out of the box, irrespective of obtaining nothing at all to do with your phone’s 5G network.)

Wi-Fi 6E provides a 6 GHz band to the blend, further more minimizing congestion and allowing for for speeds that were being rarely attainable on the 5 GHz band. But there is just one main downside: Its range is even shorter than that of the 5 GHz band. This will possible make improvements to above time as a result of far better hardware and even more recent Wi-Fi standards, but for now checks by CNET observed no recognizable pace gains for Wi-Fi 6E at near assortment, and huge fall-offs at more distances.

Meanwhile, recent Wi-Fi 6E hardware is expensive—Netgear’s new Wi-Fi 6E mesh process expenses $1,500, and even TP-Link’s most standard Wi-Fi 6E router lists for $200, money that would be considerably improved spent on a mesh technique with Wi-Fi 5 or Wi-Fi 6.

Netgear

Other than, device help for Wi-Fi 6E is at the moment constrained to Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra and S22 Extremely, a handful of lesser-known telephones, and a smaller amount of laptops. (Rumors of Wi-Fi 6E in the Apple iphone 13 did not pan out.) Whilst other gadgets will still be capable to connect to Wi-Fi 6E routers, they just can't make use of the extra band which is costing you all that more revenue.

None of which implies that you should skimp on quality when changing an aged router—I’ve observed that previous or slash-fee routers tend of be the supply of most Wi-Fi problems—but make certain you’re investing in the features that actually subject, not the kinds that take pleasure in the most hoopla.

For extra tech suggestions like this, indicator up for my Advisorator publication, where by a version of this tale initial appeared.