There is no doubt in my mind that Wi-Fi 6E is a cool new technology that has the potential to help us deal with resource exhaustion and make the tech world a better, easier place to live for the future. There’s also zero doubt in my mind that we’ve been in this exact same place before with game-changing technology and we’ve spent almost 30 years trying to prove the value of IPv6 in the face of even more resource exhaustion and even less concern for how to make it work.
Wi-Fi isn’t network-addressing. Support for the new standard is going to come. But when you look at the hardware challenges we face, the growing amount of complexity that it takes to manage entirely different networks with different properties, and even the likelihood that something like 5G will siphon a part of the user base for the technology, you have to wonder if this isn’t history repeating itself all over again.
In this episode of Tomversations, we examine Wi-Fi 6E and how the challenges it faces could spell the same fate as the network-addressing protocol we’ve needed for over 20 years and yet still haven’t been able to drive to full adoption.
