This home Wi-Fi system has a killer feature, but it comes at a price
Sometimes I think Wi-Fi should have been called WTF-Fi. Or maybe, for the sake of not upsetting the public, perhaps one of the technical standards underpinning Wi-Fi should have been renamed instead.
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Summer trip? You could learn the language by the time school's out with Babbel.
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Our growing reliance on the internet means we need a stable, high-speed internet connection to do almost everything, from working to gaming. Although it's tempting to purchase the fastest internet plan possible, a lot more goes into a reliable internet connection than speed alone. The latest Wi-Fi standards are focused on reducing latency and making it easier to connect multiple devices to your router without compromising bandwidth. Wi-Fi 7 is the latest and fastest Wi-Fi standard, but plenty of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E routers and devices still circulate the market. Whether you're shopping for a new router or looking to future-proof your home, you'll have to decide whether to invest in Wi-Fi 6 or 6E technology or wait for Wi-Fi 7 to become more affordable. If you're considering a Wi-Fi 6E router, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more efficient router at a competitive price (that is, until Wi-Fi 7 becomes more affordable). 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The improvement is due to technologies like orthogonal frequency-division multiple access, or OFDMA, which allows for various users and devices to send data at once on the same frequency bands, and quadrature amplitude modulation, or QAM, which translates data over Wi-Fi. 'Anytime you either make broader channels or increase your QAM, you're inherently increasing the speed,' said Smith. Wi-Fi 6E includes those technologies and extends them to a third band, a feat that reduces channel congestion among the devices on your network and improves congestion among neighboring networks using the same channel spectrums. 'When you have a very large band, you can have multiple channels,' said Lili Hervieu, a principal architect of Wireless Access Technology at CableLabs. 'When in crowded environments where you have a lot of access points, they all work on the same channels, so it can be very congested.' Wi-Fi Alliance Like Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E is backward compatible. 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Buying a new router is a process we don't take lightly at CNET. If you have enough tech and bandwidth-hogging devices (or users), you should probably be updating your router every handful of years. It's definitely true that the Wi-Fi technology offered by Wi-Fi 7 outpaces Wi-Fi 6E, but until more Wi-Fi 7 devices become readily available and more affordable, a Wi-Fi 6E router is a sure step toward improving your Wi-Fi.
