We tested Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 to see if there is a big difference

MyBroadband tested Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 on a Wi-Fi 6 network with a typical home setup and did not find a significant difference in speed.

Wi-Fi 6 promises faster speeds and better performance, especially when multiple devices use a network.

We tested the performance using a Wi-Fi 6 AX1800 network on a Netgear Orbi Pro Mini in a typical home setup.

The network has a 200/100 Mbps fibre line for internet connectivity and ten other devices simultaneously connected to the network.

We used four devices for testing:

• Samsung Galaxy S22+ – Wi-Fi 6
• Huawei P40 Pro – Wi-Fi 6
• Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro – Wi-Fi 5
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro – Wi-Fi 5

The testing was done in a room adjacent to the router, separated by a concrete wall.

We first performed speed tests on all devices to confirm that they had good connections and reached near-perfect 200/100 Mbps speeds when the network was not busy.

We set up an FTP server on a computer connected to the router with gigabit ethernet hosting a 10GB binary file to create network traffic.

One mobile device would download the file from the server during testing to keep the network busy, while the other device with the same Wi-Fi capabilities would perform five tests on the MyBroadband Speedtest app.

We performed two tests with each pair, translating into twenty speed tests and 4 FTP transfers.

We looked at each speed test and the average download speed from the FTP server to see how these operations affected one another.

The Wi-Fi 6 pair performed better than the Wi-Fi 5 pair, but not by a significant enough margin that most consumers would notice.

The Wi-Fi 6 devices had an average download speed of 177 Mbps, while the average transfer speed from the FTP server was just over 400 Mbps.

The Wi-Fi 5 devices lost a bit more on the busy network, averaging 146 Mbps with an FTP transfer speed of just over 370 Mbps

While this is a measurable difference, few consumers would notice it during everyday use.

The most noticeable difference was the change in latency. The Wi-Fi 5 pair’s average latency was 48 ms, while the Wi-Fi 6 pair averaged 20 ms.

All devices measured around 10ms on the network without much traffic.

It should also be noted that newer devices supporting Wi-Fi 6 typically have better Wi-Fi modems on board, which skews the results in their favour.

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