Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s).
Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app.
And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.
Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had.
I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything.
We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences.
The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
PM 2.5 may be in the range of a couple micrograms/m³ in one room (with air purification) and 100× that in the other adjacent room, so it makes sense to have sensors everywhere.
Still very far from 50, though.
Lightbulbs not so much.
