On Thursday, March 31st Advantage Technology held our first Advantage Lunch in the Frederick, Maryland area. We invited our friends at Extreme Networks to explain the giant leap forward that is Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi 6E is the biggest change to Wi-Fi in the last 30 years! But what it all means to businesses takes a little unpacking, which makes it a perfect topic for an Advantage Lunch.
After the presentation Joe Justice spoke with Amy Pontius, Executive Director of techfrederick to discuss the event and what her organization is bring to the area. techfrederick has been formed to identify, highlight, support, foster awareness of, advocate for, and develop Frederick’s growing high tech community through community education and human resource development, entrepreneurship training programs and seminars, and related events. Advantage Technology is thrilled to be able to help them in their mission.
Check out the recap and let us know what thought of the event.
Have you been on a Zoom call and suddenly got kicked off? Been in the middle of a video stream that became unwatchable due to buffering? Or had intolerable lag with a cloud service? What gives? You pay a lot of money for high speed Internet access, why are you having all of these problems?
You’re probably a victim of spectrum congestion.
This is frustrating on your home network, but downright costly at your office. Fortunately, there is a solution; Wi-Fi 6E. And on March 31st, our friends at Extreme Networks are traveling to the Dutch’s Daughter to explain it all over a delightful lunch provided to you free by Advantage Technology.
What is Wi-Fi 6E?
In the early days of Wi-Fi, most people had a laptop. A business network might need to accommodate three or four laptops but that’s about all. That early technology could easily accommodate those numbers. But today we live in a much different world.
Today you have multiple laptops, tablets, phones, watches, refrigerators, microwaves, lightbulbs, speakers, camera, doorbells and the list goes on and on! The networks are far more congested than anyone could have imagined and devices are all vying for the space that one laptop used to use. They’ve made lots of adjustments and tweaks to Wi-Fi over the years, but it wasn’t until the FCC voted in April 2020 to open up the 6GHz band that they actually realized revolutionary changes in the form of Wi-Fi 6E.
The opening of the 6GHz band is the biggest spectrum addition to Wi-Fi since 1989. The leap from 5GHz to 6GHz might not sound like much, but it essentially quadruples the amount of airwaves–14 additional 80MHz channels, and seven additional 160MHz channels–available for routers and smart devices.
What does all of that mean?
Gigabit speeds, extremely low latency and high capacity are just some benefits Wi-Fi 6E will bring to your network. No more dropped Zoom calls, no more buffering, no more lag!
We know it’s a lot to take in and not really all that easy to understand, and that’s why we invited Extreme Networks to explain it all at our Advantage Lunch.
What is the Advantage Lunch?
For years Advantage Technology has held our Advantage Lunch events, where we invite members of the business community to enjoy lunch while we present to them the latest IT tools, trends and news. The best part? It’s 100% free, provided as a community service by Advantage Technology.
