Technology moves fast, and for those who purchased a wireless router compliant with the Wi-Fi 6 standard (otherwise known as 802.11ax) last year, it may be hard to accept that router makers have already introduced models compliant with the new Wi-Fi 6E standard. Netgear was one of the first to announce a Wi-Fi 6E model, the Nighthawk RAXE500.

Wi-Fi 6E is essentially an extension of Wi-Fi 6, supporting all the same features and technologies. The most important of these is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which divides the channel into smaller frequency blocks called resource units (RUs). By splitting the spectrum, Wi-Fi 6 and now Wi-Fi 6E routers are better equipped to handle traffic from multiple devices connected simultaneously. This is because everything is interconnected these days, including PCs, game consoles, TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smart speakers.

"Wi-Fi 6E features a third 6 GHz band in addition to 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz.

"The proliferation of Wi-Fi over the past few decades first stressed the 2.4 GHz band and eventually the 5 GHz band with Wi-Fi 4, 5, and 6," says Phil Solis, research director at IDC. As regulators around the world open up the 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi 6E networks will provide enabled devices with the luxury of using larger channels with higher average data rates and lower latency, even in dense, congested areas."

Last April, the FCC opened up 1,200 MHz of the 6 GHz bandwidth for Wi-Fi use, essentially enabling the Wi-Fi 6E standard. By shifting some of the connected devices to the 6 GHz band, users may benefit from reduced congestion. However, this assumes that there is client hardware that supports Wi-Fi 6E.

In anticipation of this transition, Intel quietly began rolling out the first Wi-Fi 6E adapters last November.

Returning to Netgear's latest Nighthawk model, the RAXE500 is a triband router, offering 12 streams evenly distributed across the 6GHz, 5GHz, and 2.4GHz frequency bands. 2.4GHz has a top speed of 1.2Gbps, for a total of 10.8Gbps. The maximum speed in the 2.4 GHz band is 1.2 Gbps.

This allows Netgear to advertise the RAXE500 as an AXE11000 router as well, but it should be noted that the bands cannot actually be combined to provide a single 10.8 Gbps connection. Still, it is common for router manufacturers to combine bandwidth and advertise combined throughput. [It also has four LAN ports for wired connections, including one 2.5Gbps LAN port and three 1Gbps LAN ports (two of which support link aggregation), and two USB 3.0 ports for sharing external storage or printers over the network (although recently (although most printers nowadays support wireless connectivity).

According to Netgear, the Nighthawk RAXE500 will be available in February.