Wi-Fi 6, 6E, Or 7? Understanding Your Phone’s Wi-Fi Support

Understanding Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac)

Wi-Fi 5, in more technical terms, is referred to as 802.11ac. You might see that on some spec sheets and even budget phones will support this standard. The thing is, you need to know what this gives you as a consumer to be able to appreciate it and newer standards even better.

First off, the theoretical speed limit that you can get over Wi-Fi 5 is 1.3 Gbps. That comes to about 162.5 megabytes of data every second. Of course, this is a theoretical limit, so things are hardly ever going to get that fast on Wi-Fi 5.

It only operates on the 5GHz frequency band. The advantage to using the 5GHz band is that it is less congested than 2.4GHz which means that you’re going to get more stable internet, especially in urban spots with a lot of networks buzzing around.

Understanding Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)

Wi-Fi 6, which came out in 2019, is also known as 802.11ax and most midrange and flagship smartphones will have some variant of Wi-Fi 6. Compared to Wi-Fi 5, it is so much better, especially starting with the fact that it can hit max speeds (in theory) of 10 Gbps, which comes to 1,250 megabytes each second. That’s more than a gigabyte a second, so needless to say, that’s fast. It makes streaming 4K content a lot more practical.

It supports two frequency bands: both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, so you can technically get the best of both worlds when you need either one. You also get the perks of lower latency, and better battery life, and routers with Wi-Fi 6 support are able to handle transmitting data wirelessly to multiple devices more easily.

Wi-Fi 6E

Think of Wi-Fi 6E as building on the great work of Wi-Fi 6. The major upgrade is that it adds the entirely new 6GHz band, and since this frequency is basically uncongested, you’re getting the most stable frequency option. It’s like having even more lanes of traffic than Wi-Fi 6 can provide. It has the same theoretical speed limit as Wi-Fi 6, but less congestion means you tend to get better actual speeds and lower latency.

If you live in a home with ten or more smart devices constantly connected to the internet, Wi-Fi 6E is one of the best options you can go for if you don’t want device traffic to have a significant effect on your network speeds.

Understanding Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be)

And of course, there’s Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11, which is the newest standard that you can get at the moment. You can find a few phones with support for this, though there really aren’t too many of them and they tend to be $1,000+ flagships like the S24 Ultra or the Sony Xperia 1 VI.

Wi-Fi 7 pushes the theoretical speed limit even further, and more than quadruples Wi-Fi 6’s by offering up to 46Gbps, which is 5,750 megabytes every second. That’s nearly 6 gigabytes of data transmitted in the blink of an eye. This makes it perfect for streaming, online gaming, and both augmented and virtual reality.

You get three frequency bands here, just like Wi-Fi 6E: 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz, and with Multi-Link Operation (MLO), it can actually use different bands at the same time. That’s a huge upgrade and it means faster speeds and less latency. However, this feature needs to be enabled on both your smartphone and your router to take advantage of it.