As far as I know, this is the first Apple hardware to support Wifi 6E, which is something I've been waiting on for what feels like forever.
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.
I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.
"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*
"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*
I've never once noticed slowness in connecting as bothering me at all. Are you connecting to new Wi-Fi networks hundreds of times a day or something? My iPad just... stays connected to the networks it knows.
And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?
In fairness, I do notice the time to connect to my home network much more when waking my Macbook Pro from sleep than my iPad. But it is still noticeable on the iPad.
The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.
This is the only thing I’ve missed over the years after switching to Apple. The androids I owned would keep the hotspot enabled all day, apparently without killing the battery.
I notice it all the time. The delay is really annoy when you go in an elevator (so no cell signal) and wait for it to reconnect to your wifi when you step out.
Last time I looked into this, I seem to remember that the Wifi protocol actually had ridiculous hard-coded wait times, e.g, broadcast, listen for 500 ms, then move to next step if nothing heard. I remember being baffled and never understood how that it could possibly be really how it worked, so I definitely might have been misinterpreting.
> The main purpose of scan is to update/confirm the
available WiFi SSID list around the user’s device. There are
two types of scan: active scan and passive scan [3]. The
active scan is triggered periodically: the mobile device first
broadcasts the probe requests, and surrounding APs after
hearing the probe requests will reply probe response packets,
containing information such as the supporting physical rate.
The mobile device will add the SSID of the AP into the
candidate list, if it finds that the AP is compatible. In the
passive scan, the list of available SSIDs can be updated by
beacon packets broadcasted by APs periodically, e.g., every
100ms [4].
In any case, a good protocol would have random wait times that are still (in expectation) of order the rate at which bits are communicated, not some human timescale.
Relatedly: When I turn off a network by pulling the plug on a router, it takes many seconds for this to be reflected in the list of available networks on my Macbook. I don't think there's a good reason for it to be like this.
Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.
On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.
Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.
Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.
If they're configured correctly, multiple APs on a given network can actually lead to lower congestion, because they can each lower their signal strength to only cover a small area... but it sounds like that isn't what happened here.
8 in a single small home is absurdly excessive. My home is more than twice that size and I only have a single AP (although I have been considering adding 1-2 more.)
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.