For most countries outside of the US and Canada, the rules surrounding outdoor 6GHz are pretty picky to say the least. A good example of this can be found in the brand new U7 Pro Outdoor, which according to Ubiquiti when speaking at UWC - has some interesting hardware differences in the UK and Europe, when compared to the models available in North America.

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For the US and Canada versions of the U7 Pro Outdoor, it has support for 6GHz use outdoors. However in the UK and Europe, it does not. Now you might assume that the hardware is identical, but the 6GHz radios have been turned off - but this isn't the case.

According to Ubiquiti when speaking at UWC London, a device that has a 6GHz radio physically in place is not allowed to be sold in the UK and EU - even if the radio has been disabled via software. This rule specifically stipulates that an outdoor weather rated device cannot use 6GHz outdoor, which also affects the E7 Audience.

This means that anyone purchasing the U7 Pro Outdoor in the UK and EU will not have access to 6GHz, even if and when the regulators start to allow it to be used outdoors. Ubiquiti said that the option was to remove all weather rating from the device, but they would rather make a device that can be used outdoors with the benefit of WiFi 7, which has many improvements over WiFi 6 - even for 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

U7 Pro Outdoor vs U7 Outdoor

This comparison gets a bit murky when we look at comparing the U7 Pro Outdoor to the existing U7 Outdoor.

The U7 Outdoor comes in at £190.80, whereas the Pro is £264, so a difference of £74. For that extra cost you get an articulating pole mount, two extra spatial streams (4 vs 6) and the external antennas on the Pro have double the gain for 5GHz, 4dBi vs 8dBi.

There are some small differences, but not a huge amount to justify the cost. However the articulating mount could be useful in certain scenarios when targeting small areas.

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