I don't think the Openreach ONT is going away for BT FTTP customers any time soon, so for now you are free to just plug whatever router you want into your ONT.
Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
> Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
If you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use any other VoIP provider of your choice.
Is that different from the landline service they offer directly from the ONT? My Openreach ONT has a telephone jack as well as the RJ45. I've never actually used the telephone jack, but I'd imagine I would get a voip-backed fake dial tone if I did?
I used to have BT Broadband FTTP in a previous house, which had a bidirectional fibre into a box of some sort, which was battery powered, and went into another box which emerged as a telephone jack, and an RJ45.
This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power and service for a landline in a power cut.
My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client, username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old password ("BTSux" for example)
Emotive language such as "eccentrically" is strange considering the decline in landline subscribers, and even less usage of an actual landline.
If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider?
> If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider?
So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute.
I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of choice means you don't have to worry separately about battery backup because regulations usually require they provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
Yes Daviey, those of use using a telephone in the traditional way are a diminishing number. Hence passively becoming eccentric... Not as much as the person riding a penny farthing but slowly heading that way.
To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...
> If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp.
I find the need to configure a router or VoIP adapter to be a strange, over-engineered concept when it comes to replacing POTS. We're already authenticated by virtue of being physically connected. The exchange should be able to pass through the identity of the connecting line and no authentication or manual configuration is a fundamental requirement. In PPP, authentication is optional, but BT/OpenReach require it and complicate everything for consumers for no good reason. Since nearly every line has only one provider, they should keep track of that at their end, and then routers wouldn't need PPP configuration in the common case. Everything could be negotiated automatically, and the protocol already supports this!
We do have TR069 but that adds even more unnecessary complexity.
The same goes for a POTS replacement. Authentication is not fundamentally necessary. They could autodiscover, and then the identity of your physical line could be passed through. There isn't an obvious protocol here, but it's trivial to achieve technically as long as it isn't overengineered (see for example uPnP IGD vs. NAT-PMP). If this is a real problem, it can be addressed.
I don't think it's part of most consumer's threat models that it matters if their line identity is intercepted and used by an adversary, since we all use higher level protocols to establish higher level authentication anyway. But if it were, then TOFU together with an out-of-band update mechanism (eg. "call customer service to activate your new phone and/or router" or just "scan the QR code on the side of your phone and/orrouter with our app to activate it") would be all that's needed to deal with that. Client side authentication still wouldn't be needed, and can't address that threat model directly anyway.
For FTTP (or indeed FTTC) my ISP will sell a voip bundle for £3 a month or something on top. You just plug in a phone, maybe stick it on it's own VLAN if you want. There's plenty of other voip providers too.
> Wi-Fi 6's comparable maximum rate is 9.6Gbps. There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.
iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust and overall latency possibly reduced.
>Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust
Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things:
Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor and are are therefore less robust
Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less robust
I was more thinking if there is some frame collision and have a lot of data to send then overall robustness latency should be reduced? Similar like in a bus even if they travel at the same speed if you miss your bus or bus is full you have to wait. On the other hand if the bus is bigger with more sits or bus scheduled more frequent it's less likely you will have to wait. Also if bus breaks there is another one not far away behind to pickup passengers from broken bus.
I think I read this somewhere but I am struggling to recall where, so hopefully I didn't dream this: I believe the larger channels are much, much larger and include adaptive techniques to dynamically exclude noisy regions within channel. It can afford to entirely sacrifice bands in this way because the channels are much larger.
What you're writing isn't really correct either, this partly stems from the difficulty of what we mean by "robust".
To increase throughput (i.e. bitrate ) we can either increase the channel bandwidth or the SNR (and use that SNR for higher modulation formats). Increasing the channel bandwidth does increase the noise power (assuming matched filtering) but we typically also assume that the psd of the signal stays the same => signal power increases and SNR stays the same.
If we mean by "robust" that the signal is not as susceptible to fluctuations of the noise, than increasing the bandwidth could help. Assuming we want the same bitrate, we could use the larger bandwidth to reduce the modulation format and thus the required SNR while keeping the bitrate the same. However a larger bandwidth typically also increases probabilities of impairments (interferers, filtering...) but this is typically still a win, because capacity throughput is linearly proportional to bandwidth but only logarithmically to SNR.
I'm honestly struggling to come up with a use case for a single iPhone to need more than 300 megabytes per second (2.4Gbps) of bandwidth at any given time. (Noting that 8K video, in fairly un-optimized scenarios, appears to need about 96Mbps—just 12 megabytes per second, or 4% of that "low" bandwidth.)
What are you doing, streaming raw, uncompressed video from multiple sources to a single iPhone? If you've got that many devices you need to stream from...it seems to me that it makes sense to invest in some dedicated hardware to handle that, rather than expect to do everything with just an iPhone.
for iPhones maybe not but for drones or AR devices if you want to stream 4k at 60fps or 120fps then there is a lot of data to send. You could use iPhone as Drone payload for doing some site/construction inspection etc. Same with drones - they can fly very fast so would be nice to stream at 4k@120fps. Drones or iphones can/have many camera including lidar, depthmap (trudepth)
That is only the case if you wanted to stream uncompressed data (which for drones is defeinitely not needed), so VR/AR maybe, anything else it would be a waste.
That is only the case if you wanted to stream uncompressed data (which for drones is definitely not needed), so VR/AR maybe, anything else it would be a waste.
compressing big video frames (4k) takes time. If your application is latency critical (and drones moving at 100km/h is) and you are streaming at 120fps you have only 8ms for video frame processing. Sometimes you also want uncompressed data (lidar, depthmap) not for human but for machine computer vision / processing.
that 9.6Gbps speed mentioned in the article doesn't apply for most consumer devices because they have only 2 antennas. Only expensive routers have many antennas to reach such speed. Not sure if we can have 8 antennas in smartphones
Faster link speed allows the Wi-Fi radio to finish transmission faster and go to sleep prolonging battery life.
TCP throughput is about half of the link rate. iPhones before the 15 Pro maxed out at 1200 Mbps link rate because they are 2x2 MIMO with 80 MHz max channel banwdidth.
According to a quick DuckDuckGo search, RE Village's download size varies between about 26GB and 29GB depending on what platform it's for—let's just round to 30GB for convenience.
At that size, and the speed I mentioned above, it would take less than 2 minutes (100 seconds, to be precise) to download the entirety of the game. I don't know about you, but I think expecting that a game like that download in less time than that—an operation you only have to do once, when you first install it—seems pretty excessive.
Streaming raw video to VR headset is probably only situation when it makes sense for consumers. For near every single other thing it's a massive overkill
There's no qos or control over the radio channels. A 120gbit, 120fps, 8k stream is lovely, until you have network interference of 10ms and you drop a frame.
another example: Apple added camera continuity for latest tvOS, you might want make video call with 4k at 60fps - sure you probably want to compress it but still you want to reduce latency.
Also with smartphones that have 1 TB of storage would be nice to use it as fast wireless hard drive
The 2.4Gbps phy rate is nowhere close to usable bandwidth. With wide channels, good reception, not too much interference, and no really old hardware interfering with your connection, you can get over 1gbps on it, but the theoretical maximum is irrelevant to most use cases.
In practice, most people don't have their routers set up for 160MHz bands (because older devices don't support it and will fall back to the much slower 2.4GHz otherwise) and in some areas near radars you can't even use those bands in the first place. However, with modern equipment, you can definitely get plenty of bandwidth over WiFi 6.
The 50Gbps number stated also assumes very wide channels and even more recent devices, if WiFi 6 isn't doing it for you today, WiFi 7 won't be that much better.
What annoys me is this:
I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul.
Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs.
Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps.
The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array around it. I'm about two blocks away.
Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire house between us.
But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.
It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would get better speeds).
>But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.
I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not going to be a best case test scenario.
Getting too close takes you out of the "far field" and into the "near field"[1] where the device just won't work at all. It's probably actually connecting via reflections from the walls if stuck right on top of the router. You need to be at least 7.5cm away from a 5Ghz router with 15cm antennas to be in the far field, and anything within about 4.5cm will be entirely inside the reactive near field (and have very poor coupling with standard antennas designed for far field use).
My apologies, I was trying to make a bit of a joke of the context of the distance and items between the 5G signal vs the router, below the cause is explained well.
I think pretty much all wifi devices lie about the speed they can obtain. A lot that claim gigabit combine the speeds of 2.4GHz & 5GHz to get to 1 Gbps. Few devices out there legitimately offered the speed they advertise. At least that's what I saw when I looked a couple years ago.
> What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps.
I have an iPhone 12 talking to a Sagemcom 5689E that gets about the same.
Want faster? Get gear that's designed to go faster, i.e./e.g., both ends support 802.11ax (Wifi 6E).
If I upgraded to an iPhone 15 I'd be able to use the 6 GHz signal and probably get higher bandwidth.
650 Mbps is a very good result for Wi-Fi 6. 2x2 MIMO and 80 MHz channel yields a link rate of 1200 Mbps. Throughput of half the link rate is typical. iPhones don't support 4x4 MIMO or 160 MHz wide channels needed to go significantly faster (2400 Mbps with one enabled or 4800 Mbps with both features).
There is some loss but you shouldn't be getting anything near 4 unless something is very wrong with your wireless environment. Even a flat half is pretty bad. In a hospital environment our managed clients (i.e. laptops, phones, wireless desktops) in the 5 GHz space would reach more near ~80% theoretical.
With the iPad and MacBook Apple added 160 MHz support for 6E only (not on 5 GHz still, which makes sense). Did they really not do that with the new iPhone 15 Pro as well? A bit disappointing really.
2400Mbps = 300 MB (megabytes)/s x2 = 600MB/s which is pretty close to the number the OP was stating. So to get over 1GB/s you need more than 2x2, right?
I supposed that depends if you interpret GBPS as someone holding shift or someone really meaning to express network speeds in bytes and just happens to capitalize the rest too. But yeah, to get over 1 GB/s (or 8 Gbps) you'd need more than a 2x2 setup even with the massive 320 MHz channels Wi-Fi 7 is going to bring.
That sounds rather low, the Eero Pro 6 should support 4x4 MU-MIMO in the upper 5.8GHz band. You'll never get the advertised 2400mbps even on that band, but the 650mbps figure you state comes closer to the 2x2 rate of the lower 5.2GHz band.
Maybe you need to check your APs' settings, because these numbers sound off.
Edit: never mind, iPhones use 2x2 antennae. A little strange to not put in more in such a high-end device, but I guess it saves a bit of power. They do use 4x4 on the 5G chip, though? Very peculiar.
It’s more the provisioning of the network in your area than the actual link tech. t-mobile speeds outside my house have been going down from 10mbps down to around one as they’ve rolled out 5G upgrades (or maybe merged in sprints network).
OP here, few findings from here:
1. My iPhone only supports 2x2, makes sense now.
2. My M1 14 inch macbook pro only supports 2X2 as well. That is interesting: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/macbook-pro-wi-fi...
3. The phone next to the router was a bit of a joke, but yeah, still same performance.
4. TMobile is not messing around I guess.
For wall penetration/distance, it's because 5G has better spectrum allocation and allowed transmit power than WiFi. For speed, it ultimately boils down to that massive, expensive antenna array (up to 256 antennas) enabling a higher practical spatial stream count than the 2-4 antennas typical WiFi base stations use to talk to client devices.
(2x2 is effectively the standard for WiFi clients; a 4-antenna access point can theoretically talk to two 2x2 devices at once, with lots of caveats. So even your Eero is likely to dedicate its 4x4 radio to backhaul and use its 2x2 radios for talking to clients. Which then means users are less likely to see any benefit from 4x4 in clients, so no one makes them, so access points keep optimizing for 2x2 clients, and on and on...)
The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2] or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, with competition at OSI Layer 3. I think at this point 100Mbps would be the minimum, with diminishing returns once you start getting above 1Gbps (but available with XG(S)-PON(G.98(0)7)/NG-PON2(G.989)/HSP(G.9804) and 802.3ca).
It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy does not mean other types of application could not be created if more bandwidth was available for upload.
If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
> The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy
Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming, which requires low latency bidirectionally.
I think ten minutes of 4K video probably uses more bandwidth than a multi-hour gaming session: game coders are probably very efficient about what they send over the wire.
and, even if the coders were incredibly inefficient, it probably wouldn't make much difference at all, because 4k is literally multiple orders of magnitude more data than just sending coordinates of players and bullets, which even Doom was doing back in the day with reasonable (playable) latency over dial-up.
As you point out, for most types of online games, most limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
That's not "the internet", that's last hop of the internet and mostly due to technical limitations (if you got X bandwidth giving most of it to upload makes sense). FTH makes it easier to give symmetrical access
Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre connection in their current location).
Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less.
This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream.
Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)
I got 500Mb/s symmetrical fibre installed last month. Not seeing much faster transfer rates from individual servers, I'm guessing most do some traffic shaping.
> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up).
Interestingly, there are a lot of places near me in northern New England where I genuinely am surprised to find electricity (or plumbing, for that matter) in a house.
IMHO, if you can string a copper wire for power (and POTS) you can string a fibre. It's just a matter of us deciding to wire things up like was done in the 20th century.
> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
Wiring up some places for electricity is really hard. I live in a huge country (Brazil) with a sprawling integrated electricity network, but there are still over a hundred small localities (source: https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R...) which are not yet connected to that network. Most of them are deep within the Amazon forest, a few are in a state (Roraima) which is separated from the rest by the Amazon forest (though that state used to have a connection to Venezuela's electricity network), and one is on an island (Fernando de Noronha) which is far enough from the continent that a submarine cable would not be easy.
Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city. That is, you can operate an independent network, but what you want is to network with the rest of the world; and even if doing it with optical fiber is as easy as connecting to the country's main electric network, there are places where connecting to that electric network is already hard.
> Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city.
The context of this thread is: if you could technically string power and POTS lines, why can't you string fibre?
Note what you, yourself quote: the same with fibre. It pre-supposes the other infrastructure was setup.
There were never any technical difficulties with it. It was / is always about cost. And anything government lead will comes with politics.
We also have 5G Home Station in many places and those are fast becoming part of the broadband solution especially in rural area. ( So much about 5G being useless on HN )
Meanwhile, out here in rural Canada, farms here now have two fibre lines running to them. About a decade ago the local (co-op) telco dropped fibre lines to all the farms. Then, the government decided that rural areas didn’t have internet access so they put up funding and now another ISP has used that to built another fibre network.
Generally I disagree with this sentiment. Do not wait to make a pipe bigger because it is full. We had this issue with phone lines and then CAT5 and CAT still sucks because commercial equipment is so expensive. How can the world innovate in-home technology when it's not cheap and ubiquitous.
I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not just for me but for other adopters.
I agree with you that we shouldn't wait to upgrade until after we are facing constraints, but the current state of home networking is so robust that we're absolutely nowhere close to the pipe being full. I am in no way opposed to the development and deployment of Wi-Fi 7, but I do have a problem with it being marketed as a major upgrade for consumers, when the average consumer is more likely to be adversely affected by worsening radio coverage than benefit from the increased maximum speed.
Ethernet is how I see the full ~1Gig for up and down at home. I trust the security of ethernet over wifi more too, although at home I am less concerned on wifi.
When I built my house in 2014, they told us we got 2 phone jacks that were cat5e that we could convert to ethernet if we wanted. That was the default they provided, we upgraded to 24 ports throughout the house, but I can't imagine this is common.
Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house, we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade, probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
20 years ago when we renovated an old house, while the electrician was digging chases into the walls i asked him to add an extra empty pipe for ethernet next to each cable pipe. it barely cost any extra work, and later i ran the ethernet cable myself with the help of a friend.
i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't worth the cost.
in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up multiple wifi access points, but that's it.
My prediction of future bandwidth growth is that to get super high speed wi-fi you'll need line of sight to an access point that has fast enough (ie. wired) backhaul. Even today you can get considerable speedup by doing that. So I think power and network cabling (or just PoE) to eg. every area of ceiling or wall is still worth it and reasonably future-proof since that'd typically be enough for up to 10G per area.
My house is new construction (although I had no input to the construction) and it wasn't wired for ethernet which is crazy to me. Although it is at least wired with coax so I just bought 2 pairs of MoCA adapters and now I have wired connections where I want them.
The majority of consumer devices in a home are tablets, phones, TV sticks, etc that will never have an Ethernet connection, so there’s not really a strong demand for wired connections. It’s not worth wiring a new construction as it’s just not a selling point.
Most houses do have coax, which works great with MoCa if you want something wired.
The only thing that Wi-Fi 7 might solve right now is powerful local and ad-hoc data transfers. 48gbps would allow for SSD-like speeds over the air. On a home network, you could back up your entire laptop in a few minutes to a NAS. With ad-hoc you could film in raw 8K, and back up everything to a battery powered storage device in a backpack in real time, without needing to be tethered.
It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better reliability, not more speed.
Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously, allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective signal strength and quality.
WiFi adhoc speed increases are why most people don't complain about iPhones still using USB2 wire speeds. I wonder what the AirDrop speeds would be for a WiFi 7 enabled iPhone.
I'd imagine the priority for the service provider is new product lines built around wifi sensing rather than the marketing about bandwidth. It is /really/ hard to come up with new applications that require so much bandwidth constrained to a one room, especially given we aren't even remotely tapped out on compression fanciness for visual media in mass deployment (see e.g. the recent obscenely low bit rate videoconferencing codec work from Nvidia)
In the UK supposedly they are switching off Landlines in 2025, so anyone that still wants a "landline phone" (as opposed to mobile) is going to have to do VOIP
Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers are just a load of crap that crash all the time.
This article is completely inept. I'm nowhere near an expert in WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over the past several years, it's easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation.
> Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox.
Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,
- 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells
- 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better
- 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients
- 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective
- Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions
- Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful
WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better.
It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load,
- Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission)
- Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ))
- Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA
- Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime
- Implicit channel sounding
- Support of direct links, managed by an access point
> There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.
WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.
> The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed.
Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition.
If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway.
> It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too.
And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances ...
Unsurprising but also sadly, WiFi 7 is like 5G, misunderstood and judging from this HN thread, most are commenting it is useless. They dont want to understand it, they dont read the spec either. I am not sure when did HN start becoming like this.
CPU, Wireless ( Wifi / 5G ), USB?, possibly every single hardware topic is the same.
Wifi 5 and 6 had several "waves" of half-baked, broken implementations of MU-MIMO and OFDMA with many consumer routers and such missing features. I'm not surprised people are skeptical.
> it's easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation.
I don't think it said otherwise, in fact he acknowledged it
He is railing against the ISP imposing QoS on your network via WiFi. (How that happens is not clear - but the Qualcomm marketing he quotes seems to imply they will do it with WiFi 7.)
QoS which can be thought of the reverse of net neutrality and it's being done inside your home to boot. Handing over QoS inside your home to your ISP does sound scary. What happens next - they sell favoured access to your WiFi speeds to people like Google and Amazon?
Like you said he brings up all sorts of arguments, one being we have so much bandwidth now we don't need it. That one didn't make a lot of sense, given his favoured solution was to let the customers handle their own QoS (somehow).
To be honest it all sounded a bit far fetched to me. But back to your point - it wasn't a rail against WiFi 7.
Maybe slightly off topic but does anyone know what's happening with powerline?
It seems to have stalled out development in about 2015. G.Hn has came along but doesn't seem to offer speeds that are any better. I can get about 150mbit/sec on AV1200 adaptors and maybe double that on 300mbit/sec.
It seems to me that if "WiFi 7" esque modulation techniques were used with powerline we could get far better speeds on it. For example 8x8 MIMO (AV2000 uses 2x2), with perhaps a larger frequency band would enable multigigabit over powerline?
I don't think you can do MIMO with wired stuff. Isn't it using multiple paths/polarizations to get more bandwidth? You can't do that with wired unless you run more wires.
Anyways there's a lot more differences between how a wired protocol works and how a wireless protocol works. Mostly not interchangeable.
Powerline causes a lot of radio interference and is generally discouraged as much as possible. It should only be used as a last resort if nothing else works, including WiFi.
It’s much better to use MoCa over coax and setup WiFi APs.
EE user in the UK here. Instead of working for Wifi 7 could you please remove roaming charges in the EU, that EE suddenly reintroduced after brexit? You're telling us our future will have Wifi 7 but also roaming charges when I travel to the EU?
Wifi 7 consumer routers are already available. This is just Qualcomm partnering with a service provider where they typically less well known on wireline broadband side.
All of this was pretty much Broadcom business previously.
123 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadIf you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use any other VoIP provider of your choice.
This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power and service for a landline in a power cut.
My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client, username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old password ("BTSux" for example)
If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider?
This is a good summary of the decline: https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/
So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute.
I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of choice means you don't have to worry separately about battery backup because regulations usually require they provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...
I find the need to configure a router or VoIP adapter to be a strange, over-engineered concept when it comes to replacing POTS. We're already authenticated by virtue of being physically connected. The exchange should be able to pass through the identity of the connecting line and no authentication or manual configuration is a fundamental requirement. In PPP, authentication is optional, but BT/OpenReach require it and complicate everything for consumers for no good reason. Since nearly every line has only one provider, they should keep track of that at their end, and then routers wouldn't need PPP configuration in the common case. Everything could be negotiated automatically, and the protocol already supports this!
We do have TR069 but that adds even more unnecessary complexity.
The same goes for a POTS replacement. Authentication is not fundamentally necessary. They could autodiscover, and then the identity of your physical line could be passed through. There isn't an obvious protocol here, but it's trivial to achieve technically as long as it isn't overengineered (see for example uPnP IGD vs. NAT-PMP). If this is a real problem, it can be addressed.
I don't think it's part of most consumer's threat models that it matters if their line identity is intercepted and used by an adversary, since we all use higher level protocols to establish higher level authentication anyway. But if it were, then TOFU together with an out-of-band update mechanism (eg. "call customer service to activate your new phone and/or router" or just "scan the QR code on the side of your phone and/orrouter with our app to activate it") would be all that's needed to deal with that. Client side authentication still wouldn't be needed, and can't address that threat model directly anyway.
iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust and overall latency possibly reduced.
I'm definitely looking forward for WiFi 7
Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things:
Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor and are are therefore less robust
Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less robust
To increase throughput (i.e. bitrate ) we can either increase the channel bandwidth or the SNR (and use that SNR for higher modulation formats). Increasing the channel bandwidth does increase the noise power (assuming matched filtering) but we typically also assume that the psd of the signal stays the same => signal power increases and SNR stays the same.
If we mean by "robust" that the signal is not as susceptible to fluctuations of the noise, than increasing the bandwidth could help. Assuming we want the same bitrate, we could use the larger bandwidth to reduce the modulation format and thus the required SNR while keeping the bitrate the same. However a larger bandwidth typically also increases probabilities of impairments (interferers, filtering...) but this is typically still a win, because capacity throughput is linearly proportional to bandwidth but only logarithmically to SNR.
What are you doing, streaming raw, uncompressed video from multiple sources to a single iPhone? If you've got that many devices you need to stream from...it seems to me that it makes sense to invest in some dedicated hardware to handle that, rather than expect to do everything with just an iPhone.
TCP throughput is about half of the link rate. iPhones before the 15 Pro maxed out at 1200 Mbps link rate because they are 2x2 MIMO with 80 MHz max channel banwdidth.
At that size, and the speed I mentioned above, it would take less than 2 minutes (100 seconds, to be precise) to download the entirety of the game. I don't know about you, but I think expecting that a game like that download in less time than that—an operation you only have to do once, when you first install it—seems pretty excessive.
Also with smartphones that have 1 TB of storage would be nice to use it as fast wireless hard drive
In practice, most people don't have their routers set up for 160MHz bands (because older devices don't support it and will fall back to the much slower 2.4GHz otherwise) and in some areas near radars you can't even use those bands in the first place. However, with modern equipment, you can definitely get plenty of bandwidth over WiFi 6.
The 50Gbps number stated also assumes very wide channels and even more recent devices, if WiFi 6 isn't doing it for you today, WiFi 7 won't be that much better.
The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array around it. I'm about two blocks away.
Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire house between us.
But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.
It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would get better speeds).
I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not going to be a best case test scenario.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field
That is, is the problem with your Wifi connection the Wifi, or your ISP or service plan?
I have an iPhone 12 talking to a Sagemcom 5689E that gets about the same.
Want faster? Get gear that's designed to go faster, i.e./e.g., both ends support 802.11ax (Wifi 6E).
If I upgraded to an iPhone 15 I'd be able to use the 6 GHz signal and probably get higher bandwidth.
I don't think any new MCSes were added for 6E. Though, AFAICT, there will be for 802.11be/Wifi 7, 12-15:
* https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/premiumdo...
The only way you’ll get > 1 GBPS on WiFi is on a device with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo WiFi.
2x2 is used because it’s less power intensive and takes up less physical space in the device.
At 160 MHz 802.11ax (5 GHz) should be able to get 1200 Mbps at the PHY layer with a single spatial stream:
* https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/so/ReferenceGuide_80211...
Two streams gets you 2400 Mbps (PHY).
1200 is for 2x2 at 80MHz which is the max theoretical an Iphone can get.
Also other comment is wrong about dividing by 4, usually can expect 0.66 of max phy rate. So just under 1Gbps.
Maybe you need to check your APs' settings, because these numbers sound off.
Edit: never mind, iPhones use 2x2 antennae. A little strange to not put in more in such a high-end device, but I guess it saves a bit of power. They do use 4x4 on the 5G chip, though? Very peculiar.
(2x2 is effectively the standard for WiFi clients; a 4-antenna access point can theoretically talk to two 2x2 devices at once, with lots of caveats. So even your Eero is likely to dedicate its 4x4 radio to backhaul and use its 2x2 radios for talking to clients. Which then means users are less likely to see any benefit from 4x4 in clients, so no one makes them, so access points keep optimizing for 2x2 clients, and on and on...)
Best thing I ever did. Put in a Linksys Deco X55 mesh system with WiFi 6 system.
Have four of them strategically placed throughout the 2,500 square foot house and have perfect coverage on a single SSID.
My iPhone 13 gets a bidirectional 360 Mbps just about anywhere in the house (the limit of my $39 per month FIOS line).
It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming, which requires low latency bidirectionally.
As you point out, for most types of online games, most limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less.
This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream.
Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)
Edit: mistyped G instead of M.
I assume you're using some WDM to split the carrier into multiple 100G nics at each end? Doesn't sound cheap.
What's the onward capacity, I assume your link is directly into a major peering centre.
France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up).
You were probably not surprised that the dwelling you were in had electricity. I think at some point having fibre should also be as unsurprising.
Some places are just that hard to get to.
For the first few decades it was not mainstream. The US passed (under FDR) a law in 1936:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
How long did it take after that point? I'm curious in how quickly conscious policy choices can be made into reality.
Wiring up some places for electricity is really hard. I live in a huge country (Brazil) with a sprawling integrated electricity network, but there are still over a hundred small localities (source: https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R...) which are not yet connected to that network. Most of them are deep within the Amazon forest, a few are in a state (Roraima) which is separated from the rest by the Amazon forest (though that state used to have a connection to Venezuela's electricity network), and one is on an island (Fernando de Noronha) which is far enough from the continent that a submarine cable would not be easy.
The context of this thread is: if you could technically string power and POTS lines, why can't you string fibre?
Note what you, yourself quote: the same with fibre. It pre-supposes the other infrastructure was setup.
We also have 5G Home Station in many places and those are fast becoming part of the broadband solution especially in rural area. ( So much about 5G being useless on HN )
I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not just for me but for other adopters.
Most diy shops will sell baseboards with precut pockets for cable routing.
For any reasonably hands on technical person it's a 1 or 2 day job ripping baseboards and installing new ones with CAT6 cabling behind.
Of course it's definitely the sort of thing you can only get away with if you own the house.
Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house, we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade, probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't worth the cost.
in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up multiple wifi access points, but that's it.
Most houses do have coax, which works great with MoCa if you want something wired.
It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better reliability, not more speed.
Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously, allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective signal strength and quality.
Honestly, 640kbps should be enough for anyone, if you ask me.
Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers are just a load of crap that crash all the time.
edit: source: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...
> Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox.
Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,
WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better.It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load,
> There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.
> The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed.
Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition.
If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway.
> It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too.
And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances ...
CPU, Wireless ( Wifi / 5G ), USB?, possibly every single hardware topic is the same.
I don't think it said otherwise, in fact he acknowledged it
He is railing against the ISP imposing QoS on your network via WiFi. (How that happens is not clear - but the Qualcomm marketing he quotes seems to imply they will do it with WiFi 7.)
QoS which can be thought of the reverse of net neutrality and it's being done inside your home to boot. Handing over QoS inside your home to your ISP does sound scary. What happens next - they sell favoured access to your WiFi speeds to people like Google and Amazon?
Like you said he brings up all sorts of arguments, one being we have so much bandwidth now we don't need it. That one didn't make a lot of sense, given his favoured solution was to let the customers handle their own QoS (somehow).
To be honest it all sounded a bit far fetched to me. But back to your point - it wasn't a rail against WiFi 7.
Their branding is a bit of a mess at the moment.
It seems to have stalled out development in about 2015. G.Hn has came along but doesn't seem to offer speeds that are any better. I can get about 150mbit/sec on AV1200 adaptors and maybe double that on 300mbit/sec.
It seems to me that if "WiFi 7" esque modulation techniques were used with powerline we could get far better speeds on it. For example 8x8 MIMO (AV2000 uses 2x2), with perhaps a larger frequency band would enable multigigabit over powerline?
Anyways there's a lot more differences between how a wired protocol works and how a wireless protocol works. Mostly not interchangeable.
It’s much better to use MoCa over coax and setup WiFi APs.
All of this was pretty much Broadcom business previously.