What’s the Difference Between WiFi 6E and WiFi 6?

Recently, the NETGEAR Nighthawk RAXE500 Tri-band WiFi 6E router became available for purchase exclusively on the NETGEAR Store. While the improvement of the latest WiFi standard is gaining lots of buzz and excitement from tech enthusiasts and early adopters alike, the significance of WiFi expanding to the new 6GHz band might not be as clear to some. After all, the introduction of WiFi 6 is still recent news. Here, we’ll dive into both WiFi 6 & WiFi 6E and point out the main differences between the two.

What is WiFi 6?

WiFi 6 (802.11ax) was introduced in 2018, and mainstream adoption of this standard soon followed with the support of many end devices – iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, PlayStation 5, laptops, smart TVs, and more. As the latest wireless standard, WiFi 6 represents improvements from the previous WiFi standard, 802.11ac. Key benefits of WiFi 6 over previous standards like WiFi 5 (802.11ac) include 4x connected capacity, increased data throughput, and faster speeds, resulting in improved performance. This makes WiFi 6 ideal for supporting smart homes with multiple connected devices, 4K and 8K streaming content, large file downloads and uploads, and gigabit internet speed tiers, delivering a more enjoyable WiFi experience.