Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) subsidiary Aruba this week revealed what it claims to be the first WiFi 6E access points for enterprises.

The Aruba 630 Series access points include support for up to seven 160-megahertz channels in the 6 GHz band and tri-band filtering, which is designed to aggregate a maximum bandwidth rate of 3.9 Gb/s and minimize interference across the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands, according to the vendor.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last year allocated 1,200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6 GHz band for unlicensed WiFi use, the largest swath of spectrum approved for WiFi since 1989. WiFi 6, the next version of WiFi technology, is starting to appear in routers and silicon. Devices and equipment that operate in the 6 GHz band are referenced as WiFi 6E.

“The Aruba 630 Series campus access points are the first enterprise-grade WiFi 6E access points to be introduced by any of the main enterprise networking providers,” Gayle Levin, marketing manager at Aruba, wrote in response to questions. 

Increased bandwidth support, advanced security protocols like WPA3, and tri-band filtering are especially relevant in an enterprise environment, Levin explained, adding that many currently available WiFi 6E routers don’t meet those requirements for business applications.

The additional capacity and wider channels can support emerging enterprise applications, including high-definition video and mixed reality, and meet density requirements on academic or business campuses, according to Levin.

“We’re seeing the most interest from large public venues, such as airports, stadiums, and lecture halls, as well as healthy interest from health care and higher education,” she said. 

Chapman University, which is currently moving to WiFi as its primary network connection instead of Ethernet, expects the adoption of Aruba’s WiFi 6E access points to “extend the lifecycle of this network deployment by 50%,” Mike Ferguson, the university’s network manager and enterprise architect, said in a statement.

Aruba is also framing the new WiFi 6E access points as “an important element of Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP)” because the equipment will sit at the edge of the network, Levin added. “By virtue of their position and role within the network, access points are vital in collecting edge data from client devices and IoT that feeds back into Aruba ESP.”

The vendor entered the edge market with the cloud-native platform last year to target campuses, data centers, branches, and remote workers, but it only works with Aruba’s access points, switches, and SD-WAN gateways.  The new access points will begin shipping this summer.