In this week’s episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, I asked Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab to come on to talk to us about mesh routers and why we might care about WiFi 6E. In order to get to that though, I asked him to lay out some groundwork.
Remember when we used to talk about 802.11a then b then g then n and ac. All of us geeks memorized the speed of those different IEEE standards. And then one day the numbering scheme changed completely. I asked Dave to explain what happened and what the new numbers mean. From there Dave refreshed our memory on how mesh routers work, and how backhaul is the communication between the mesh access points.
It took some work keeping the numbers and terminology straight but by the time we were done he had explained why WiFi 6E on the backhaul matters, even though we very likely don’t have any WiFi 6E devices.
You can find Dave Hamilton on Twitter @davehamilton and @macgeekgab and on Mastodon at @[email protected].