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OPINION: FCC Spectrum Expansion Will Mean Better Internet

As more people add more connected devices to their residential and commercial networks, it begins to affect Internet performance. The addition of more spectrum gives Wi-Fi some breathing room.

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(TNS) — Last week, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to add another chunk of radio spectrum for use with Wi-Fi, an important decision for the future of wireless data.

It also means, as you may have guessed, that it will cost you some money if you want to take advantage of it.

The FCC gave the nod to unlicensed usage of the 6-GHz spectrum with an eye toward its use in Wi-Fi. Modern residential and commercial Wi-Fi routers send and receive data via the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands, and this decision adds 6 GHz to the mix. It's a huge swath of spectrum, effectively quadrupling the amount of frequency space allotted to Wi-Fi.

That's important because the Wi-Fi bands are getting crowded. As more people add more devices to their residential and commercial networks — I have a total of 20 devices connected to my home network as I write this, for example — it begins to affect performance. Adding more spectrum gives Wi-Fi some breathing room.

You can already see what overcrowding over radio spectrum looks like with the 2.4-GHz band, the first used for Wi-Fi. Not only do older Wi-Fi-capable devices connect to it, but so do baby monitors, microwave ovens and garage door openers, and so it’s prone to interference. Many new smarthome products - such as light bulbs, smart plugs and switches - use 2.4-GHz.

It’s one of the reasons why, if you have a device that can connect to the faster, less-cluttered 5-GHz band, you should do that for best performance.

But as more devices get added, even the 5-GHz band gets crowded. That’s particularly true when the connections are data-intensive ones. Streaming boxes, game consoles and modern personal computers all work best on the 5-GHz band. Adding the 6-GHz band will take the pressure off.

The Austin-based Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade group that certifies devices for Wi-Fi protocols, will be marketing this as Wi-Fi 6E. Currently, the most common Wi-Fi protocol is Wi-Fi 5, known technically as 802.11ac. Wi-Fi 6, which is the next-generation standard, is 802.11ax. (That's the type of router I recently bought when I upgraded to gigabit-speed Internet.)

Wi-Fi 6E will be considered an extension of Wi-Fi 6. The 6-GHz band has the same theoretical maximum speed of 9.6 gigabits a second as the 5-GHz band on the Wi-Fi 6 standard. But by adding lots more spectrum, routers and the devices that connect to them will have less interference and thus run faster because they're not crowding each other.

While new Wi-Fi protocols are birthed every few years, this one is different - and its timing is a little awkward.

Wi-Fi 5 is the prevalent version now, and it’s slowly being replaced by the current, two-radio configuration of Wi-Fi 6. There are lots of Wi-Fi 6 routers out there, but they’re still in the stage when they are pricey. And there are more and more devices that work with Wi-Fi 6, including the latest crop of Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

But as is almost always the case, you're going to need to spring for new hardware to take advantage of 6-GHz. Your current devices and your existing router won't be upgradable. New sets of chips that work with the new spectrum are in development, and you can expect to see the first Wi-Fi 6E hardware later this year, with a real push coming in 2021.

So that TP-Link Archer AX6000 router I wrote about buying a month ago? Yeah, that won’t work with Wi-Fi 6E. It will still be superfast on the original Wi-Fi 6, but the premium I paid for it just evaporated. By this time next year, it will be far from bleeding edge, though mercifully not obsolete.

Fortunately, the real benefits of Wi-Fi 6E will take a few years to really reveal themselves, and it will take a while for the updated standard to move into the mainstream. But once it does, Wi-Fi should become more reliable and perform better overall. As experts have pointed out, it's the biggest advance for Wi-Fi in 20 years, and that's not an exaggeration.

©2020 the Houston Chronicle, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.