6-GHz Bands ( Wi-Fi 6E)

6-GHz Bands ( Wi-Fi 6E)

The 6-GHz Band (Wi-Fi 6E) On April 23, 2020, the FCC adopted new rules that made 1200 MHz of spectrum in the 6-GHz band (5.925–7.125 GHz) available for unlicensed use. Once adopted, this implementation will support an additional 59 nonoverlapping 20-MHz wide channels available for Wi-Fi. It is important to note that all the frequency bands for Wi-Fi, such as 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and now 6 GHz, are designated as unlicensed.

This means that although Wi-Fi operates on these bands, other technologies do so as well without license. Note that because of existing commitments, the EU permits the use of only the first 500 MHz, as the remaining spectrum of 6 GHz is already allocated for use. A client must discover an AP before it can connect to it. There are two methods for AP discovery—passive scanning and active scanning.

For passive scanning, the client waits and listens for beacon frames advertised by an AP. An AP advertises a beacon frame describing the WLAN and its capabilities every 1024 microseconds or 102.4 milliseconds. Active scanning requires the client to send a probe request to discover nearby APs. The client can direct the probe request toward a specific service set identifier (SSID) or use a wildcard to attempt to discover all nearby APs that respond. At 6 GHz, there are too many channels for a client to effectively scan all of them.

Preferred Scanning Channels (PSCs) are a subset of channels that clients can scan. By default, Juniper Mist uses 80-MHz wide bonded channels for 6 GHz and these PSCs line up as the channels a client will scan for when making a connectivity or roaming decision. If you decide to use smaller channels or a channel plan that does not align with the PSCs, clients can fall back to using 802.11k reduced neighbor reports (RNRs). This would be most common in Europe, which is limited to the first 500 MHz of the spectrum, or high-density deployments.

6-GHz Channel Plans in Juniper Mist

One last time, the below figure shows a portion of an RF template in Juniper Mist, but this time for the 6-GHz channel settings. On the left, we set the Country to United States, and on the right, to France.