WiFi 6 routers are still expensive which means a lot of people are still buying them, and it seems that lots of people are still writing and reading articles about WiFi 6 these days. If you are considering a new router to keep up, I'm going to try and break things down for less technical people.
First: Do You Have Enough Upstream Bandwidth?
If you are like most people, you are suddenly placing more strain on your local network with video conferencing, and your network is straining to keep up. That's probably why you're reading about WiFi 6 in the first place.
The first thing to check is whether or not you have enough upstream bandwidth. If you don't, then upgrading your router isn't going to accomplish anything. Most ISPs offer more downstream bandwidth than upstream bandwidth, and up until recently, you probably didn't have reason to care about upstream bandwidth.
Each simultaneous video conference call is going to use up to 3 Mbps (gigabits per second) of upstream bandwidth depending on resolution and codec (the specific math used to compress and decompress the video streams). Further, most security cameras these days constantly upload video footage to servers outside your home, and that will add up to 4 Mbps per security camera to your Internet bandwidth needs. You'll want to leave yourself a little wriggle room above that for unexpected spikes (or if some piece of software on a mobile device or computer suddenly decides to download an update at an inconvenient time.
According to CableLabs, most people have at least 20 Mbps, which should be plenty for two simultaneous video conferences and two or three security cameras. If necessary, reduce the resolution of your security cameras, reduce the resolution of video conference calls, or pay your ISP for more upstream bandwidth.
Here in America, the vast majority of ISPs are providing 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) or less in downstream bandwidth. Getting more than 1 Gbps requires more exotic forms of ethernet.
What is WiFi 6?
There are two kinds of speed when we are talking about networks: latency and throughput. Latency (also called "ping time") measures how long it takes for a signal to go from one computer to another and back again, generally measured in milliseconds. Among home users, only gamers care about latency.
The other is throughput, as discussed above. Once a connection is established, how many bits per second can fit through the pipe?
Above, we were discussing the throughput between your modem and your ISP. Now we're talking about WiFi speeds, which is the speed between your wireless devices and your wireless router.
Unless you have a file server or network-attached storage (NAS), or stream video from a mobile device to a monitor or TV using something like Samsung DeX, then almost all of your network traffic is between various devices in your house and things outside your house on the Internet. If you have purely local network traffic (such as if you have digitized your DVD collection and keep it on a NAS device), then there is a real benefit to having more local bandwidth than Internet bandwidth. Otherwise, any local bandwidth above your ISP bandwidth won't be noticed by most of your household.
Depending on which band and signal strength, your old WiFi 4 router is probably getting anywhere from 3 to 450 Mbps, while a WiFi 5 router is probably getting you from 150 Mbps to 1 Gbps. WiFi 5 can theoretically get up to 1.7 Gbps, well above what most ISPs are capable of providing.
WiFi 6 has a theoretical maximum throughput of 9.6 Gbps, well above what any ethernet cable in my house is capable of saturating. So why care about WiFi 6 at all if it provides bandwidth you'll never use? The real advantage of WiFi 6 is not in throughput but in the number of simultaneous devices that it can provide connections to. This means a more stable connection, fewer dropped connections, etc., but to gain these benefits, all of your devices need to be using WiFi 6, as well as having a WiFi 6 router.
Mesh Routers
Mesh routers help things not only by providing multiple access points (which can help if your home has dead spots), but it also segments your WiFi network so that each "node" in your mesh is handling fewer WiFi client devices, which helps get around the limitations of WiFi 5.
If you have a reasonably new phone or laptop or tablet, chances are good that they use WiFi 6, but your smart home devices, security cameras, smart TV, etc, are probably still using WiFi 5. If all of your client devices were WiFi 6, then you might not need mesh routers at all because the fancy new features of WiFi 6 would make your router capable of supporting many more devices than WiFi 5 can.
In my opinion, WiFi 6 mesh routers are kind of a waste, at least for now, but it never hurts for future-proofing.
If you are in the market for mesh routers, look for the phrase "dedicated backhaul," in which the communication between router nodes has its own dedicated channel. Mesh routers without this (such as the Netgear Nighthawk MK63 and MK62), your maximum possible bandwidth gets cut in half because each piece of data becomes two separate pieces of network traffic (one from your mobile device to the node, then from the node to whichever node is connected to your modem).
Alternately, you can use a cheaper mesh router, and pay an electrician to run an ethernet cable between the mesh router nodes. Getting this done may be cheaper than you think, and the more data you can move to ethernet, the less congestion you'll have on your WiFi network.
Ethernet
Ethernet is the thing most people don't consider, but it can really improve a WiFi network. As mentioned above, the more traffic you can put on ethernet, the less traffic you'll have on your WiFi network, and ethernet connections are much better at handling collisions (two devices requesting network access at the same time) than WiFi.
Chances are good that your smart TV and game console have ethernet ports. Your AV receiver and/or soundbar may have ethernet ports. Your satellite or cable set-top box probably has ethernet ports.
If you can run an ethernet cable from your WiFi router to your TV area, you can connect a switch/hub (technically, a "switched hub," but whatever) and connect a lot of your entertainment devices via ethernet, and remove an awful lot of WiFi network traffic in one fell swoop.
Most ethernet is either 100 base-T (100 Mbps) or 1000 base-T (1 Gbps). Speeds greater than 1 Gbps will require more exotic cables, hubs, etc. If you decide to make your own cables, make absolutely certain you test the cables before running them through the walls. If you use substandard parts or mess up making the cables, you could be stuck with one-tenth as much speed, and these days you probably have more than 100 Mbps from your ISP.
If you are using mesh routers, an ethernet backhaul is the absolute best way to connect them to each other, but not all mesh routers support ethernet backhaul. Make sure you check before buying.
If you are playing games over the Internet, then ethernet also has the advantage of much lower latency.
WiFi 6e: What's the Frequency, Kenneth?
Long, long ago, WiFi only used one frequency band: 2.4 GHz. This frequency band is essentially unregulated, so any WiFi device using this frequency has to compete with baby monitors, toy walkie-talkies, and all kinds of other stuff.
When the 5 GHz band was introduced to the WiFi standard, people assumed everyone would move to 5 GHz and the 2.4 GHz band would be abandoned entirely. If you've been paying attention, you will note that modern WiFi routers still use the 2.4 GHz band. Why is this?
The advantage of lower frequency is that it is better at penetrating physical objects without suffering as much signal loss, and it uses less energy (important for things like smartphones, tablets, smart home devices, etc.), but the downside is that it can support less total throughput.
The 5 GHz band is worse at penetrating physical objects like walls. This is why your 5 GHz band has more dead spots in your home than the 2.4 GHz band. If your 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands use different SSIDs, you will notice that the 2.4 GHz band gets more "bars" in many parts of your home. But the reverse of the above is also true: you get more bandwidth and consume more battery by connecting to the 5 GHz band instead of the 2.4 GHz band.
Why mention all of this? Because WiFi 6e introduces a new frequency band to the party: 6 GHz. As you can imagine, this new band will be capable of even greater speed than 5 GHz but will be even worse at penetrating walls and will burn even more battery. At the moment there are very few routers that can do WiFi 6e, and very few client devices (such as the Galaxy S21 series).
Over the course of 2021, we will see a lot more new routers and mesh routers that support WiFi 6e.
If you are in the market for mesh routers, you might want to consider waiting for a WiFi 6e mesh router that uses the new 6 GHz band for a backhaul. This means you won't be able to use the new band with your snazzy new phone, but as discussed above, you probably won't care about that. It is unlikely you will be doing anything on your phone that needs that much local speed, using it will burn your phone's battery faster, and the signal quality will degrade more quickly with distance in your home. If you're going to get a mesh router, then a backhaul is simply a better use for that snazzy new frequency band.