It’s finally here. The vaunted day when the newest iPhone model has Wi-Fi 6E. You’d be forgiven for missing it. It wasn’t mentioned as a flagship feature in the keynote. I had to unearth it in the tech specs page linked above. The trumpets didn’t sound heralding the coming of a new paradigm shift. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that even cares in the long run. Even the rumor mill had moved on before the iPhone 15 was even released. If this is the technological innovation we’ve all been waiting for, why does it sound like no one cares?

Newer Is Better

I might be overselling the importance of Wi-Fi 6E just a bit, but that’s because I talk to a lot of wireless engineers. More than a couple of them had said they weren’t even going to bother upgrading to the new USB-C wonder phone unless it had Wi-Fi 6E. Of course, I didn’t do a survey to find out how many of them had 6E-capable access points at home, either. I’d bet the number was 100%. I’d be willing to be the survey of people outside of that sphere looking to buy an iPhone 15 Pro that can tell me if they have a 6E-capable chipset at home is much, much lower.

The newest flagship device has cool stuff. Better cameras, faster processor, more RAM, and even titanium! The reasons to upgrade are legion depending on how old your device is. Are you really ready to sink it all because of a wireless chipset design? There are already a number of folks saying they won’t upgrade their amazing watch because Apple didn’t make it black this year. Are the minor technical achievements really deal breakers in the long run?

The fact of the matter is that the community of IT pros outside of the wireless space don’t actually care about the wireless chipset in their phone. Maybe it’s faster. Maybe it’s cooler. It could even be more about bragging rights than anything else. However, just like the M1 MacBook Wi-Fi, the real-world results are going to be a big pile of “it depends”. That’s because organizations don’t make buying decisions based on consumer tech.

Sure, the enterprise may have been pushed in certain directions in the past due to the adoption of smart phones. Go into any big box store and see how the employees are using phones instead of traditional scanners for inventory management. Go into your average bank or hospital and ask the CIO what their plans are to upgrade the wireless infrastructure to support Wi-Fi 6E now that Apple supports it across the board on their newest devices. I bet you get a very terse answer.

Gen Minus One

The buying patterns for enterprise IT don’t support bleeding edge technology. That’s because most enterprises don’t run on the bleeding edge. Their buying decisions are informed by the installation base of their users, not on their projected purchases. Enterprises aren’t going to take a risk on buying something that isn’t going to provide benefit for the investment. Trying to provide that benefit for a small number of users is even more suspect. Why spend big bucks for a new access point that a tenth of my workforce can properly use?

Buying decisions and deployment methodology follow a timeline that was decided upon months ago, even for projects that come up out of the blue. If you interview your average CIO with a good support team they can tell you how old their devices are, what order they are planned to be replaced, and roughly how much that will cost today. They have a plan ready to plug in when the executive team decides there is budget to spend. Strike while the funding iron is hot!

To upend the whole plan because some new device came out is not an easy sell to the team. Especially if it means reducing the number of devices that can be purchased because the newer ones cost more. If anything it will encourage the teams to hold on to that particular budget until the prices of those cutting edge devices falls to a point where they are more cost effective for a user base that has refreshed devices and has a need for faster connectivity.

Wi-Fi 6E suffers from a problem common to IT across the board. It’s not exciting enough to be important. The current generation of devices can utilize the connectivity it provides efficiently. The airspace in an enterprise is certainly crowded enough to need new bands for high performance devices to move into. But does the performance of Wi-Fi 6E create such a gap as to make it a “must have” in the budget? What would you be willing to sacrifice to get it? And would your average user notice the difference? If you can’t say for certain that incremental improvement will make that much of a difference for the non-wireless savvy person then you’re going to find yourself waiting for the next revision of the standard. Which, sadly, as the benefit of having a higher number. Which means it’s obviously better, right?

Tom’s Take

I like shiny new things. I didn’t upgrade my phone this year because my older one is good enough for my use case. If I were to rank all the reasons why I wanted to upgrade I’d put Wi-Fi 6E near the bottom of the list. It’s neat. I like the technology behind it. For the average CIO it doesn’t move the needle. It doesn’t have an impressive pie chart or cost savings associated with it. If you upgraded everyone to Wi-Fi 6E overnight no one would notice. And even if they did they’d be asking when Wi-Fi 7 was coming out because that one is really cool, even if they know zero about what it does. Wi-Fi 6E on a mobile device won’t matter in the long run because the technology isn’t cool enough to be noticed by people that aren’t looking for it.