Wifi 6E hotspot

[HeartTavern]

Hi,

I own a ZenFone 8 and ZenFone 10. I have verified that both allow me to scan the 6ghz Band and connect to networks. But I cannot use this band to make a hotspot, why not?

The specs of the ZenFone 10 say it supports Triband, so what I want is to do is connect to hotel wifis using the 2.4Ghz band and 5Ghz band (connect twice to the same network on 2 bands) and then share the internet using the 6E 6Ghz band.

The NetGear M6 Pro can hotspot a 6E network and does this with an SDX65 modem on 5G (thus has Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip = ZenFone 9 Asus phone) so that chipset can do this, but the Asus phone software doesn’t support, any reason why? Thanks!

[chickenandegg]

Many 6E clients can't start a 6 GHz hotspot due to how the wifi standard works. 6E clients often have a no initial radiation (no IR) flag in their internal list of supported bands which means they can connect to 6 GHz bands but they can't initiate a network in that range (ie start a hotspot). The Intel 6e adapter in my laptop has this limitation and I wouldn't be surprised if many other mobile devices have it too.

It could also be a regional setting or some kind of radar detection by the phone which for some reason the Netgear misses.

[HeartTavern]

Is it confirmed then confirmed that the Zenfone 8, Zenfone 9 and Zenfone 10 cannot do this technically beacause of the reason mentioned above or could it be enabled if Asus wanted?

[chickenandegg]

Would be nice to know though it's a very specific enquiry so I wouldn't expect an answer anytime soon.

There are three phones here that support triband 6E. Those are a Google Pixel 6, Samsung Galaxy S23 and the Zenfone 10. None of them can start a hotspot in 6 GHz. The choice is between 2.4 and 5 GHz only.

I don't see an immediate necessity for a 6 GHz hotspot. There's no bandwidth advantage on this frequency compared to 5 GHz because they're identical. On the road 5 GHz provided plenty of channels.

[HeartTavern]

The inquiry is not really about the frequency but more about the standard.

WiFi 6E is way faster compared to WiFi 6.

The big reason this would be helpful is not because of the internet as mobile internet is barely fast enough anywhere to max out old wifi standards. However, if you use the phone as kind of a mobile router to make a local travel network for your travel devices that uses Hotel Wifis and 5G as internet or a combination (which works very well on the asus phones due to the excellent “hyperfusion” stability), you could share files and connections between devices at way higher speed. For many people this may be important as a lot of stuff happens on the road nowadays also with larger files. I’m never the only one at the hotel carrying around a complete mobile office 🙂

Agree with your list, except for the Netgear M6 Pro as mentioned and that it seems from online that the OnePlus 11 (Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1) can make a wifi 6E hotspot/network but haven’t been able to confirm in person.