You may not know this but WiFi 6 may be slower than WiFi 5 in certain conditions. I will talk about why and how you can fix these issues in this article.
In laboratory tests and overall throughput testing, WiFi 6 is much faster than WiFi 5. There’s no doubt about that. However, those are under controlled testing conditions and are not indicative of real-world usage.
Distance Matters
Many of you probably think, as most others do, that WiFi 6 is overall better in every aspect than the older WiFi 5 technology. This isn’t actually true.
I won’t get into the technical babble with frequency bands, data rates, and so forth. I’d like to keep things simple so that all of you can easily understand.
Yes, WiFi 6 gives you faster speeds than WiFi 5, but the farther you are from the router, the faster your data rates drop. Let’s put this another way. If you’re in the same room with the WiFi router, you will get much faster speeds on WiFi 6 versus WiFi 5. This is, of course, assuming your device is WiFi 6 compatible.
Now, let’s say you’re in another room where there is a wall between you and the router. The difference in speeds between WiFi 6 and WiFi 5 may not be so different now. WiFi 6 may still be faster than WiFi 5 at this point, but not as fast as if you were in the same room as the router.
Moving farther away, let’s say you are on the other side of the house with two walls between you and the router. You may not even have connectivity with the WiFi 6 router but you’ll have a connection with the WiFi 5 router even though it may be a bit slower.
So, in essence, WiFi 5 has better connectivity further out than WiFi 6.
How To Fix WiFi 6 Slow Connection
If you’ve replaced your single WiFi 5 router with another single WiFi 6 router, this may be the cause of your slow connection, especially if you are further away from the router.
My suggestion to my family and friends lately has been to go with a mesh router WiFi system. A mesh router WiFi system is basically having multiple WiFi points throughout your house. This way, no matter where you are in your house, you will always be close to a WiFi access point and will consistently have a good connection.
There are only a few brands that offer mesh WiFi 6 systems. One of them that we recommend is the Amazon eero 6 mesh systems.
No matter how big or small your place is, if you also have a lot of devices that connect to WiFi in the house, having a mesh system will improve your connectivity and speeds.