Really good article but nobody has mentioned the elephant in the room. Range, range, range. Will we need an AP in every room or line of sight because the signal can barely go through a sheet of paper? Sure we'll get 4x the speed at the edge but what is that edge?
Yes, the question about the range for Wi-Fi 6 is a good one.
The 2nd elephant in the room: increased speeds/channels/per-user bandwidth is a great improvement, so long as your users are only using that for LAN traffic (I.e. in your house, intra-office data, etc.)...but once the traffic starts connecting outside of your LAN to the outside world, then you're going to run up against a big speed bump with your ISP connection.
And yes, I know: there are providers out there that will provide
home users with a 1Gbps or even faster connection (note that businesses have had access to those kind of connections for much, much longer, & generally large businesses would need much more bandwidth for day-to-day operations), but a) not everyone is willing to pay for it (for example, I pay $65/month for my 100Mbps connection; there's the possibility of bumping it up to 420Mbps for no charge, or up to 900+Mbps for another $40/month, but I suspect those are only available to customers wanting to add TV and/or phone service on. Either way, with only my wife & myself in our household, & generally maybe 2 or 3 devices tops connecting at the same time, we really don't need to pay extra for the faster connection), b) not everyone has it available (Google Fiber, for example, is still limited to only so many cities in the US), & c) there is not a single country whose
average connection speed comes even close to maxing out a Wi-Fi 4 connection's bandwidth (let alone 5 or 6).
Although the last data I could find was for 1st Quarter 2017, I highly doubt that the average connections have gotten that much faster:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-connection-speed-in-the-us/ : average USA connection speed is only 18.7Mbps.
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/9/15768598/states-fastest-slowest-internet-speeds : The "fastest" state/province in the US (District of Columbia) still didn't reach 30Mbps. Only 17 of the states had faster/equal average speeds compared to the US average.
https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php : Looking at the entire world doesn't show a much better picture either. Japan, supposedly home of the superfast Internet connections for all, only averaged 20.2Mbps (maybe 10% faster than the US). The worldwide winner, South Korea, blew the US away...at an average of
28.6Mbps: much faster (about 55% faster), but still a speed at which a Wi-Fi 4 router would sneer at. The worldwide average is pretty bad at 7.2Mbps...which is enough to run a
single device (I.e. streaming from a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick, playing online from your PC/console, etc.), but woefully inadequate for more than basic email/surfing if multiple devices are connected.
I get that tech advances, & boundaries are pushed as much as possible. But let's face it: aside from perhaps Wi-Fi hotspots in coffee shops, malls, other public places with "free" Wi-Fi, or at corporate offices that (for whatever reason) are ditching more-secure hardwired connections for Wi-Fi connections, a Wi-Fi 6 router is pretty much
unnecessary, & nothing more than an expensive toy to brag about.
