Time to Upgrade

I'm currently considering upgrading the household Wi-Fi setup. Currently, I have an ADSL modem connected to a Hauwai EchoLife HG8245A router. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

The modem is currently available on Tokopedia and other Indonesian online stores for between A$12 and A$24. It makes use of Wi-Fi 4, a protocol released in 2009. However, it's now November of 2021 and Wi-Fi 6 has been in use for the past two years:

Wi-Fi 6 is the next-generation wireless standard that’s faster than 802.11ac. More than speed, it will provide better performance in congested areas, from stadiums to your own device-packed home. 

Wi-Fi 6 officially arrived in late 2019, and Wi-Fi 6-enabled hardware was released throughout 2020.

Wi-Fi now has version numbers. Those old confusing Wi-Fi standard names like “802.11ac” have been renamed to user-friendly names like “Wi-Fi 5.” Here are the versions of Wi-Fi you’ll  be seeing:

• Wi-Fi 4 is 802.11n, released in 2009. 

• Wi-Fi 5 is 802.11ac, released in 2014. 

• Wi-Fi 6 is the new version, also known as 802.11ax. It was released in 2019. 

As usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds. If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5.

Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work.

This new standard even increases speeds on 2.4GHz networks. While the industry has shifted to 5GHz Wi-Fi for less interference, 2.4GHz is still better at penetrating solid objects. And there shouldn’t be as much interference for 2.4GHz as old cordless telephones and wireless baby monitors are retired. Source: How-To Geek.

Figure 2 shows the current Internet speeds I'm achieving using the current Wi-Fi 4.

Figure 2: source

Interestingly, using a cabled connection from a WiFi repeater to my laptop, I achieved a faster ping, a slower download speed and a faster upload speed. See Figure 3.

Figure 3: source

The results of these tests are fairly variable. For example, a subsequent test of the Wi-Fi, without a cabled connection, gave the figures shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4: source

For a more reliable estimate, tests would need to carried out over a 24 hour period and an average taken. Nonetheless, the figures above provide a rough reference point and it's clear that the speeds fall in the slow category, given that a good internet speed is 25 Mbps for download and 10 Mbps for upload (source).

Just to complicate matters, we learn from How-To Geek that:

There’s now also a “Wi-Fi 6E” that refers to Wi-Fi 6 over 6 GHz rather than the typical 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. Wi-Fi 6E hardware will arrive after Wi-Fi 6 hardware.

Figure 5 shows a comparison chart of data transfer rates for the various Wi-Fi formats.

Figure 5: source

Figure 5 makes it apparent that the most important factor is Internet speed because even Wi-Fi 3 offers data transfer rates of 54 Mbps, far in excess of the approximate 10 Mbps download speed of my current Internet connection. This has led me to explore the plans offered by my local Internet provider. Figure 6 shows the Internet and phone packages available.

Figure 6: source

Clearly I'm currently on the cheapest package with promised speeds of "up to" 20 Mbps that translate to half that in practice. It would seem that the "up to" 50 Mbps option would be acceptable, promising real life speeds of around the acceptable 25 Mbps. I think this combined with a Wi-Fi 6 or 6E router would offer a big improvement over current performance.