Wi-Fi connects the world

With 19.5 billion Wi-Fi devices in use¹ carrying the majority of wireless network data traffic² and more than 20 years of standards development — Wi-Fi is one of the technology’s greatest success stories. Constantly evolving to support new use cases and devices, it has permeated all aspects of our lives to become an essential connectivity means at home, at work and in public across the globe and beyond. 

Qualcomm Technologies was amongst a group of technology leaders recognizing the importance of unlicensed spectrum to fuel continued growth for Wi-Fi and championing the ultimate U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision in April 2020 to open up the 6 gigahertz (GHz) band with 1200 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum for license-exempt uses. 

Global 6GHz momentum

In the years since this milestone ruling, regulators and policy makers around the world have followed quickly in opening up 6GHz spectrum for unlicensed use.

While rules vary country-by-country, many leading tech nations have allocated the full 1200MHz of 6GHz spectrum, with others choosing to allocate a smaller swath of 500MHz initially. 

A rapidly growing Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem

A rapidly growing and diverse ecosystem has gained quick traction in the marketplace, with Wi-Fi 6E and now Wi-Fi 7 devices unlocking high-throughput, real-time immersive experiences enabled by the new spectrum. This momentum is particularly remarkable for high performance devices, such as smartphones and mobile personal computers, where in the next five years it’s forecasted¹ that more than 50% of these Wi-Fi-enabled devices will ship with Wi-Fi 6E or 7.

While it’s expected that most Wi-Fi 7 devices enable tri-band support in regions with 6GHz spectrum, in other regions, Wi-Fi 7 offers nonetheless tremendous performance benefits thanks to its capability to aggregate multiple channels in the 5GHz band using High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link. 

6GHz Wi-Fi deployments

To underscore the benefits that 6GHz Wi-Fi has brought in all segments of our society, we have invited a panel of industry experts to share their views on why the 6GHz spectrum is a critical component to address the increased demand for high-speed connectivity and serve as a catalyst for innovative applications in the home, for enterprise connectivity, and service providers.

6GHz Wi-Fi in the home

For eero, an Amazon company, a pioneer of in-home mesh Wi-Fi, customer experiences are increasingly defined by a rise in bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications such as video conferencing, cloud gaming or high-resolution 4K or 8K streaming — plus the ever-growing density and variety of devices in the home. 6GHz Wi-Fi plays a critical role in delivering these new use cases to consumers.  

With the eero Pro 6E, eero’s tri-band Wi-Fi 6E system, residential customers benefit from access to the 6 GHz band and 160 MHz-wide channels, which helps minimize the risk of interference and congestion, while supporting gigabit+ speeds in the home. 

To help maximize performance even as the Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 device landscape grows, eero’s TrueMesh actively evaluates each connected device’s connection to the network (and available uplink bands) and picks the ideal mesh backhaul radio band dynamically per connected device, whether they are 6 GHz capable or not, to optimize performance. 

Alap Modi, Principal Solutions Architect at eero, says,

6GHz Wi-Fi for service providers 

For Bell, Canada’s largest telco, Wi-Fi 6E and fiber to the home (FTTH) represent the two foundational pillars needed to deliver multi-gigabit speeds to the home. With up to eight gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband access services available to their residential customers, it’s critical that Wi-Fi does not become a bottleneck.  

The 6GHz spectrum plays a central role in ensuring that the network’s full potential can propagate through the home all the way to the end devices. Even as passive optical network (PON) access technologies continue to evolve, with 6GHz spectrum, Wi-Fi remains poised to match fiber speeds for generations to come and ensure in-home experiences.

Alan Mcnaughtan, Director - Footprint, Internet Products and Hardware at Bell adds, 

6GHz Wi-Fi for the enterprise 

Cisco’s broad portfolio of Wi-Fi 6E access points allows you to network your way with reliable, flexible and secure connectivity through an intuitive centralized platform that offers on-premises or cloud management for a range of enterprise use cases. 

In higher education, immersive hybrid learning delivered via Wi-Fi has become a critical element to support modern learning environments that retain and attract students. These are bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications for which excellent performance in a high-density campus environment depends on the availability of 6GHz spectrum. 

In healthcare, networks demand very careful planning due to the challenging spectrum environment, with everything from telemedicine consoles, guest devices, health care equipment and IoT relying on wireless connections. There, customers are rapidly adopting Wi-Fi 6E to alleviate the challenge of Wi-Fi interference. 

Large and mid-market enterprises are also quickly adopting Wi-Fi 6E to future proof their networks and provide the best performance to the growing ecosystem of 6GHz capable client devices. 

Looking ahead, digital immersion will become a major enterprise use case as we move collaboration, development tools and many of our day-to-day activities to AR/VR. For AR/VR endpoints, low latency enabled by the 6 GHz spectrum is the most important factor to ensure truly immersive experiences. 

Jayanthi Srinivasan, Senior Director, Product Management at Cisco says,

1. IDC Worldwide Wi-Fi Technology Forecast, 2023-2027, #USS0019923, March 2023

2.Sherrington, S. et. al.  (June 5, 2023). Wireless network data traffic: Worldwide trends and forecasts 2022-2028.  Analysys Mason. 

3. Population & GDP based on data from The World Bank, Indicators | Data (worldbank.org).