Nest Wifi Pro brings 6E network, removes Assistant and backwards compatibility

Expand / The four Nest Wifi Pro colors you can buy for your bird's-egg-style connectivity. From left to right: Flax, Snow, Fog, Lemongrass. Google

Google's Nest Wifi Pro system, already seen at the Federal Communications Commission and in accidental retail listings, has been made official. The system extends the wireless powers of a Nest mesh system and adds support for Thread and Matter, but it cannot work with older Nest Wifi hardware.

The big upgrade to the Pro system is Wi-Fi 6E, which uses new spectral space in the 6-7 GHz band, as well as the common 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. For those living in a congested Wi-Fi environment, 6E could mean better and faster connections, but at reduced range and with less wall and floor penetration than 2.4GHz. If you have brand new devices that work with Wi-Fi 6E, you will immediately see the change. For most of us today, 6E is more scalable than signal boosting, although every device that uses the new standard takes some load off the network.

Google claims the Nest Wifi Pro router unit ($199) can cover up to 2,200 square feet per room, which is a dubious 200 feet more than the Eero Pro 6E and has a theoretical maximum speed of 5 .4 Gbps. Notably, each Wifi Pro part comes with two 1 Gbps Ethernet ports, not just the router, allowing both a wired link between multiple units and the connection of certain devices via Ethernet (probably with the addition of a network switch) . This is an improvement over the older Wi-Fi 5-based Nest Wifi, which otherwise performed quite well in our benchmark tests.

Enlarge / The back of a Nest Wifi Pro unit. Unlike previous Nest Wifi units, each Nest Wifi Pro is the same hardware, with two 1Gbps Ethernet ports. Whatever unit you plug into your internet source becomes the router. Google

If you have that decent-coverage Nest Wifi and want to use its access points with just one new Nest Wifi Pro router, you're out of luck. Nest Wifi Pro is not backwards compatible with Nest Wifi or the Google Wifi that preceded it. You also lose a feature of Nest Wifi: the Google Assistant microphones and speakers built into each unit. While some might miss having an always-on microphone and a $30 Bluetooth-level speaker at every access point, it's odd to see Google miss a chance to extend the reach of its Assistant.

There's something new in the Nest Wifi Pro besides the 6E, though: Thread and Matter support. Each Wifi Pro unit can act as a Thread edge router, creating and extending a mesh network of connectivity for low-power devices around your home. And each hub also supports Matter and can act as a Matter hub, allowing easier setup and management of Nest Wifi outside of Google's own apps and opening other Matter devices for you - when Matter launches on the market. fall (apparently already here) of 2022.

In terms of software, Nest claims that the Wifi Pro system...