Wi-Fi Alliance: Wi-Fi 6 and 6E have been "rapidly adopted"

By 2025, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E are expected to exceed 80% market share.

The Wi-Fi Alliance certified the sixth generation of Wi-Fi in 2019, followed by Wi-Fi 6E in 2021. Since then, Wi-Fi 6 has seen "rapid adoption," the alliance said, with Wi-Fi 6 exceeding 50% market share. Three areas are driving the Wi-Fi 6 and 6E market: products, deployment, and regulation.

product

According to data from the Wi-Fi Alliance, more than 2.3 billion Wi-Fi 6 products and 350 million Wi-Fi 6E products are expected to enter the market in 2022, and Wi-Fi 6E will account for more than 15% of all Wi-Fi 6 shipments this year.

In a press statement, Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance, said that more than 400 Wi-Fi 6E devices have been certified, a category that includes more than 70 laptop models, dozens of consumer and enterprise access points, smartphones, and smart TVs. By 2025, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E are expected to exceed 80% market share, dominating the smartphone market.

In addition, Broadcom has shipped more than 1 billion Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6 E chips, and Extreme Networks said in an earnings call that Wi-Fi 6E accounts for 10% of its bookings.

deploy

The benefits of Wi-Fi 6E, which brings the capabilities of Wi-Fi 6 to the 6 GHz band, have been demonstrated in multiple verticals, including healthcare and education. For example, the University of Michigan installed more than 15,000 Aruba AP-635 indoor model Wi-Fi 6E access points across its campus. The project took eight months and cost $11 million and was completed in April this year.

“People are downloading at speeds of 300 to 400 megabits per second, which has enabled us to reduce the number of wired ports on campus and reduce the number of switches in all of our cabinets,” commented Ravi Pendse, the university’s vice president of IT and chief information officer. “That’s nearly 80,000 wired ports to remove or reduce. That saves us thousands of switches.”

Regulation

The United States was the first country to open the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi; however, more than 60 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific have already or are considering doing so. Countries such as Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates have already used the upper and lower 6 GHz bands (5925-7125 MHz) for Wi-Fi 6E, while other countries such as Saudi Arabia want to use the entire 1200 MHz spectrum in the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi, a position that the alliance "appreciates."