Labo – Où est passée la bande de 6 GHz du Deco XE75, le système mesh wifi 6E de TP-Link ?

Currently in testing, TP-Link’s 6E Deco XE75 mesh Wi-Fi system has three frequency bands: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz. It is the presence of, among other things, this 6 GHz band that allows that the Deco XE75 supports the Wi-Fi 6E standard. However, after its installation and configuration, it remains invisible to our devices, which are compatible with the standard.
You have to go to the wifi options of the Deco app to find out where the Deco XE75’s 6 GHz frequency band has gone. In the options, the 6 GHz band is defaulted to “Dedicated Backhaul”. Which means that TP-Link has reserved it for the exclusive communication between the modules of its mesh system, which is invisible to our compatible devices.

As a reminder, the backhaul, or “backhaul network” to our Canadian friends, is an intermediate network that allows communication between modules. It can be in the same Wi-Fi frequency band, in this case the available bandwidth for the devices is reduced by half when they connect to the satellite modules. By cable (Ethernet backhaul), all modules are connected with an Ethernet cable, thus freeing the Wi-Fi bandwidth for connected devices or through a dedicated Wi-Fi band as in high-end tri- or quad-band mesh kits, for example . on the Netgear Orbi RBKE963 that we were able to test.

In the case of the Deco XE75, TP-Link offers the possibility of backhauling the modules with the 6 GHz band or making the 6 GHz band available to the devices, but, in this case, each of the bands performs its function. backhaul itself and thus theoretically halve the bandwidth available to devices. Therefore, there are two possibilities for the user: either keep the original settings, especially if you do not have Wi-Fi 6E compatible devices, or activate the 6 GHz band if you have Wi-Fi 6E devices and your environment is saturated with 5 GHz Wi-Fi.

Therefore, depending on the choice of backhaul type, performance may vary on so-called “satellite” modules. Regarding the Deco XE75, when the backhaul is provided by a Gigabit cable link, we reached an average speed of 865 Mb/s download and 775 Mb/s upload during our file transfer. In this case, it is not uncommon to reach the practical limit of Gigabit with 114 Mb/s peak, that is, 912 Mb/s. If the backhaul is exclusively provided by the 6 GHz frequency band, the module of our satellite reaches 826Mb/s s in download and 547 Mb/s in upload. Finally, if we remove the 6 GHz frequency band for backhaul, satellite speeds are 539 Mb/s download and 509 Mb/s upload. The logic is thus respected, the Ethernet cable backhaul proves to be faster and more stable. The 6 GHz frequency band ensures, but offers lower speeds than cable. And, unsurprisingly, without dedicated backhaul, performance drops by almost half, well almost, as the Gigabit port is limiting in the case of Ethernet backhaul, as we’ll explain in the full test.

Very soon you will be able to find on the site the complete test of the TP-Link 6E Deco XE75 mesh wifi system.