Question WiFi 6 at slower internet speed

[feca1020]

Hey!

Im looking into getting a new router because it has been acting up lately and I was wandering, is it worth to get a WiFi 6 router if my internet speeds are on the lower side (around 50Mbps right now and up to a 100Mbps plan)?

There is no provider around here that provides higher speeds and I dont see it happening for a while still.

 

[piechockidocent9]

Even though you migh not need full transfer speed 6 offers I'd still go with it. Wifi 5 was for instance created in 5ghz in mind, it supported 2,4ghz still but as a form of backwards compatibility. 6 is more of a multifunctional, upgraded version of 5.

 

[feca1020]

Even though you migh not need full transfer speed 6 offers I'd still go with it. Wifi 5 was for instance created in 5ghz in mind, it supported 2,4ghz still but as a form of backwards compatibility. 6 is more of a multifunctional, upgraded version of 5.

Alright.

Thanks for the help

 

[bill001g]

Wifi6 never lived up to the hype. The largest issue is many end devices do not support the use of 160mhz radio channels. So even if you purchased a router that does if you do not have end devices that support they will only use 80mhz which is the same as wifi5. The 160mhz radio channel width is the main thing that makes wifi6 faster.

There are major issues conforming to rules related to interference when using 160mhz. They have for example detect weather radar and stop using the radio channels if they detect it. Lots of end devices did not want to support that so they just limited it so 80mhz.

If you want something better buy wifi6e. It uses 6ghz radios and there is lots of bandwidth. BUT you must also have end devices that support wifi6e. The cost of wifi6e has dropped a lot since wifi7 was announced it might be worth buying even if you do not currently have wifi6e devices. The extra cost over a wifi5 router is not a real lot.

Do not buy wifi7. It is very expensive and not a lot of end devices support it and the ones that do not not support all the features yet.

 

[dwd999]

It depends on how congested your neighborhood is. In my neighborhood there are over 40 neighbors who use the 5Ghz band and some of them have strong signals because the cable company provides them with routers from that French company. So I switched to wifi 6E and I'm the only one on the 6.135Ghz band so I can get better response.

 

[BFG-9000]

It can be worth it if you use local devices on your network that can be accessed with higher bandwidth than your ISP, such as a NAS--and your clients also support the higher speed. Also keep in mind that the less time it takes to send data, the more battery life your portable devices will have. Congestion also results in reduced battery life as your devices must wake up to see if any traffic is actually intended for them. If your clients can use 6GHz then very few detectable neighbors should be seen.

If you are staying on 5GHz, then you might choose to limit things to 80MHz wide or even 40MHz anyway since those can work well with 3dBm and 6dBm less signal, respectively than 160MHz--meaning actual performance improvement may be nil.

It also depends on the age of your present Wifi5 router--many of the ARM ones from 11 years ago just went EOL this summer, so drivers and firmware should still be relatively current. However most of the MIPS ones went EOL 5 years ago (MIPS Technologies themselves went bankrupt and discontinued MIPS architecture licensing) so the last drivers are around that old and may have increasing numbers of security vulnerabilities that will never be fixed. Even though third-party firmware continues patching kernel vulnerabilities and updating software packages, they can't do anything about old proprietary drivers.