Netgear reveals the world’s first quad-band Wi-Fi 6E router

It's all about the backhaul.
  • Wes Davis (PC World)
  • 13 October, 2021 02:54

Netgear in the U.S. has announced the first quad-band WiFi 6E router, in the form of the Orbi Quad-Band Mesh WiFi 6E System AXE11000 (RBKE960). Historically, high-performing, hot-rod routers have been tri-band, meaning they have an extra WiFi 5 band to cover the higher channels and offer more throughput for 160 MHz-capable devices. In contrast, every WiFi 6E router broadcasts on the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz frequency bands, hence they are all necessarily tri-band. Unfortunately, this means that you lose that second, higher-throughput 5 GHz band in exchange for a band that very few devices currently use. This doesn't generally matter in any practical sense, but it's worth acknowledging.