[SOLVED] What's the benefit of upgrading computers' wireless adapters from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6?

[GregL65]

I just upgraded our home's wireless router from an ASUS RT-AC68U to an RT-AX86U. In our house with 3 teenagers, we have more internet devices than you can shake a stick at, and two of the computers were being bumped off every several minutes. I tried the WiFi 6 router on the principle that WiFi 6 is better at handling large numbers of connections, and with the new router that problem with those two computers went away. All is well now.

So I'm curious if it makes sense to upgrade the computers' wifi adapters to WiFi 6 too. For example, upgrading from the Dell 1550 802.11ac card to the MPE-AX3000H 802.11ax card. What are the benefits of that upgrade?

 

[bill001g]

You only "think" it was fixed because of wifi6.

If you did not upgrade the end clients also your new router is actually running wifi5. It can not use the extra features of wifi6 unless the end devices also support it.

What likely happened is the new router selected different radio channels to run on and before you were using channels that had more interference. I guess it could be the old router was some how defective.

Wifi6 in general provides almost no benefit for most people. Most end devices do not support 160mhz radio channels and QAM1024 only works well close to the router. Most people see little if any speed increase because of this. The 5g band is massively over used which also makes it harder for wifi6 to get it potential speeds.
The so called support of more devices is by using what is called MU-OFDMA. Again everything must be wifi6 to use this and very few wifi6 end devices support this. It also reduces the maximum transfer rate even more on top of the 160mhz and qam1024 issue.

Maybe wifi6e will work better because there is more radio bandwidth on 6g so less contention between neighbors. Unfortunately you have to buy all new hardware to support this and it is just starting to show up on end devices

 

[gggplaya]

Maybe wifi6e will work better because there is more radio bandwidth on 6g so less contention between neighbors. Unfortunately you have to buy all new hardware to support this and it is just starting to show up on end devices

For most laptops and desktops, the wifi 6E cards aren't expensive. About $30 for an Intel AX210 laptop card and $45 for a desktop pcie card.

Unfortunately for some thin and light laptops, they have their wifi soldered to the mainboard and are not upgradeable.

The major expense is the router. 6E is mainly reserved for high end gaming routers from the major brands.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Another thing to consider is that if everyone is on the same frequency, the slowest talking computer may impact network performance since only one device can talk over Wi-Fi at a time.

However, I think this is best figured out by doing a network stress test (if you have a media server or something that can act like one, having everyone watch a 4K video should suffice)