Eh, IoT devices typically use 2.4ghz, or even 933mhz...

Yeah IoT devices don't need bandwith, they need range (at low powers) and those lower frequencies get them that. 6ghz wifi has pretty small range and is awful for IoT stuff.

It's a bad band for cellular. It's short-range and shit at penetration.

It's really not even that good for wifi unless you're close or have a mesh network with APs all over the building.

I kinda meant for like future products when AR and VR combine with IoT products, but if those can work on lower ranges with those 6 Ghz devices, then great... but VR and AR will definitely need 6 GHz to be more useful.

mesh network

Or traditional network with Ethernet backhaul and lots of access points. I really wish mesh networks would die off honestly.

Next they are gonna take away amateur radio frequencies so it would be illegal to communicate outside of the internet.

Then its very easy to do censorship, just turn off power to ISPs and its information blackout.

Like anything else, they have their place. But they've been shoved into use cases they dont fit as well.

6GHz compatible devices are already being sold. If your phone is new-ish it likely supports it, and many routers already have it.

This isn’t a “next gen” problem, it’s a “current gen bleeding edge” problem.

The cell carriers don't need more bandwith. 5G is already quite fast with the existing allocations. The only times I've used 5G and thought it's too slow has been in rural areas where the issue is a lack of nearby cell towers, not a lack of bandwidth. The cell carriers already have loads of millimeter wave bandwidth available for use in densely packed, urban areas where the lower frequency bands are insufficient.

It's WiFi that should be getting more bandwidth. Home internet connections keep getting faster. Multi gigabit speeds are now common in areas with fiber.

WiFi is on all three bands. It's not so much what's newer vs older. Newer devices tend to support 2.4, 5, and 6 and switch between them based on quality of signal and support by the WiFi network. Higher frequencies like 5 and 6GHz are generally better because there's less interference.

Cheaper devices tend to only support 2.4GHz

Because of its shortcomings as a communication bandwidth, it's really, really good at cell-based positioning.

Sometimes re-wiring a house or building isn't as practical as setting up a mesh network that's good-enough.

This exactly. Wifi is damn near unusable in dense residential settings. It'll cut it for streaming and web browsing, but much more than that and you'll feel the pain of interference from all the other wifi APs in the area.

Especially with most of them defaulting to 80MHz on 5GHz and many of those defaulting away from UNII-2. which leaves 4 non-overlapping channels (with one of them giving trouble with a lot of devices). We're right back to where we were in 2.4. Even worse, I think, since wifi is more ubiquitous.

Mesh should be an option of last resort. It reduces the speed and increases the latency quite a bit. The only thing worse is power line networking, which has the side effect of turning your whole house into an RF jammer.

Rat Bastard Rafael Cruz

I mean, does anyone actually communicate on the ham bands? HF is for contesting and contesting only, 2 meters is for "checking in and out" on ragchew nets, 70cm is 2m again except half the range, 220 is hipster 2 meter, and I've never been given a reason to even think about 33cm and above. You're more likely to find discussion about Icom vs Yaesu's incompatible 2 meter digital things than high UHF.

Most actual communication is illegal on the ham bands one way or another so...I haven't renewed my license.

I have been using 6ghz for about a year or so now and I found it to be quite fast. MLO can be super weird sometimes and seems to get confused, but it works. (It's probably just a driver I haven't updated.)

Yep, just set your Wi-Fi routers to use 6GHD and trample all over the other people in the band until they figure out that they can't control it.

Nah wifi was actually originally on 5GHz spectrum, with 802.11a. It came out shortly before 802.11b, which used 2.4GHz, and was objectively better...but component shortages for 802.11a devices made the inferior 802.11b more successful on the market.

Then in 2009, after 802.11b and 802.11g came 802.11n, which used the 5GHz spectrum, and introduced dual-band routers to consumers.

Most recently, 6GHz got allocated with the advent of Wifi 6E and Wifi 7.