The Importance of Wi-Fi 6E

Find out if Wi-Fi 6E will truly be beneficial to your business in the future in our latest Network Computing editorial webinar. Here’s a glimpse of the event.

And here is a lightly edited transcript of this Wi-Fi 6E video. 

Why exactly is Wi-Fi 6E needed?

It's no surprise here. If you look at global data traffic, the portion of it over wired has remained relatively the same over the last five or so years. Cellular has picked up more, particularly as 5G services were offered. But traffic being carried over Wi-Fi has shown the biggest growth.

This is not a surprise. Within the enterprise, there's much more use of video these days. We have a lot of higher bandwidth applications in general. There's a lot of data being moved around in enterprises all the time. With everyone being a data-driven enterprise and using analytics, trying to make smarter decisions, data is flying everywhere.

On an anecdotal level, before the pandemic, I had an infinite number of conference calls and meetings, and I would say 90% to 95% of those were dial-up. Everything was on the phone. After the pandemic, I've not made a single phone call since we got back to normal work. Everything is Zoom, WebEx, and Teams meetings, no matter what, even if it could be done with a phone call. So, that's definitely contributing to this growth.

What was interesting is when we looked at in-office use, maybe this was part of the change in work habits brought on by the pandemic. With work from anywhere and hybrid work schedules, in-office meetings now no longer have everyone because there's always somebody out of the office. So, meetings in the past that didn't need a conference component now do.

These are all factors contributing to this growth in Wi-Fi traffic. And so, with that, how do you support all this extra traffic? Enter Wi-Fi 6E.

Related articles: