WIFI6e pain

Watched episode Sept 29, 2022. Wanted to share my experience with WIFI6e in my home/ home lab setting.

  • WIFI 6e requires WPA3 only
  • WPA3 is not backwards compatible with previous WPA standards including WPA2
  • Microsoft will not support WIFI6e on Windows 10. You must move to Windows 11.

I purchased a Ubiquiti Unifi6 Enterprise AP to make the switch. I also purchased an Intel AX210 wifi adapter to upgrade my Dell laptop.

The AP does not activate 6Ghz on installation by default. You must implicitly turn that on. When you do it disables all the other WPA2 options in the interface. I’m not 100% sure if that is a Ubiquiti implementation; but I believe it’s because of the standards themselves. So far the AP works fine, but is still in WIFI6 mode (not 6e). This is mostly because, as soon as I activated 6E options, every wireless device in my house was being forced to re-authenticate. But rather than using the stored credentials, I was going to have to go to every single device and re-pair them by entering in the wifi access code. That was a non-starter for now.

The laptop accepted the WIFI6e card just fine and worked no matter which AP configuration I set up. However the laptop is a dual boot 1) Ubuntu (primary) and 2) Windows 10. I noticed in Windows 10 I could not get WIFI6E to work, but WIFI5/6 did. Even with the latest drivers loaded it was a no go. On doing some research, it appears that Windows 11 is required to use WIFI6e/WPA3.

This was quite the eye opener for me as I naively believed I could just upgrade like I have done in the past. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

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