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CableLabs, a research laboratory established by US cable operators back in the 1980s, claims that the rapid growth in Wi-Fi usage could lead to the 6 GHz bandwidth approaching the «— depletion limit, resulting in a potential deterioration in the quality and speed of home wireless networking in the next 5 years.
The laboratory came to this conclusion after analyzing the use of the Wi-Fi network, which simulated traffic in a 12-story residential building with a dozen apartments on each floor.
The researchers used the full 6 GHz band, randomly assigning channels and bandwidth to each of the rooms (with the condition that the same channel is not used by neighboring apartments), and estimated how many devices the building could accommodate in the future and the peak traffic that could be achieved.
After that, the «testers looked» five years into the future and tried to predict the latency and packet loss «on each connected device in each apartment during periods when Wi-Fi activity would be highest».
As a result, approximately 30% of connections had one-way Wi-Fi latency of more than 10 milliseconds and packet loss of 2% or more. So in fact, based on CableLabs’ findings, in the future, some users in the hypothetical building could experience poor video call quality, streaming video playback, or even not be able to get a shot off in a video game in time to win.
The motive behind the CableLabs study is not entirely straightforward, as the organization has long called on lawmakers to ensure that additional unlicensed spectrum is available to keep Wi-Fi fast. In their publication, the researchers reiterated this call and asked US lawmakers to address the issue before slow Wi-Fi has an economic impact.
Wi-Fi 6 GHz is the frequency band used by Wi-Fi 6E, an extended version of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). Currently, this standard is authorized for use in the EU and most countries around the world, with the exception of some African countries. In October 2024, the NCCC proposed to the Ministry of Digital Transformation to introduce Wi-Fi 6E in Ukraine by adding the relevant frequencies to the Plan for the Allocation and Use of Radio Frequency Spectrum, but since then there has been no news of implementation.
Source: The Register, CableLabs