Comment by monocasa
7 hours ago
Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
You're talking about "Wi-Fi 6" not "6 GHz Wi-Fi".
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
Not so much of an issue when neighbors with paper thin walls see that 6ghz as a -87 signal
That said, in the US it is 1200MHz aka 5.925 GHz to 7.125 GHz.
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
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MU-MIMO is very nice.
The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.
Oh goody! I hope some of it can be used for DRM encrypted TV broadcasts too.
Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.
Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.