No mention of roaming, which seems to be the biggest hurdle to stability and reliability.
Transitioning from one station to another, or worse back to call service, seems to consistently causes stability and reliability problems.
Worse still, the ability to spread connections across multiple spectrums is likely to make the roaming problem worse. 6Ghz will usually drop before 5Ghz, and that before 2.4Ghz, which has the best wall penetration. How will that impact reliability as people walk through buildings?
> Transitioning from one station to another, or worse back to call service
The former is clearly in scope for Wi-Fi protocols. The latter is clearly out of scope for Wi-Fi protocols, as it really involves work at the IP layer (or higher even).
If you have a device that can use cellular and wifi, it has to figure out when it should be sending packets over wifi, or when it should give up and send packets over cellular.
MPTCP isn't mature or a good approach for this yet (and may never be), but it could present a way to smoothly roam between wifi and cellular. Imagine walking across a big campus, and having your device keep a network connection up seamlessly as you lose wifi between buildings.
Whether solved via overlay networks, or a clientside protocol like MPTCP-- this is a service networks should provide. Unfortunately, we've got no way to roam except within a single network (wifi roaming; satellite handoff; cellular handoff).
See u/mlyle's answer. There is no way that 802.11X can address this because the cell network and Wi-Fi APs are fundamentally different link layers, with very different access protocols. Even if they were the same, roaming within an administrative unit (e.g., an office) is very different from roaming between networks administered by different entities, and will require different protocols.
It seems like most clients will stay associated with an AP until times are truly truly desperate/signal is near totally hosed. As far as I know, the only open source option to bandhsteering/ap-steering clients is Dawn, which is quite new (relatively speaking). I've been running it on my nighthawk's for a while, and it's... Ok. Clients sometimes ping pong around, or get sent to a suboptimal band or AP. But it's a huge improvement over nothing! https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn
The Wifi infrastructure needs to send out the appropriate frames (e.g. neighbour reports), and the client has to use them to make reasonable decisions.
Is it? It seems like a solved problem, at least when using hardware supporting the right 802.11 extensions.
I've had Skype calls on Wi-Fi walking all around campus (on a Cisco-based network) on an old Symbian smartphone back in 2011 without any audible glitches, and that was with 802.1X/WPA Enterprise/WPA-EAP which makes things more complicated.
Android couldn't do the same for the next several years though, and my Linux laptop also used to cling to the worst possible access point for dear life while sitting directly under a closer and less-loaded one, so there were clearly network and client side elements to that feature.
It's true, I still run relatively old Unifi nanoHD APs (3x) and considered their newer U6 Pro AP for my house. However, the small benefits that would result from this are not worth the price to me, especially since everything works great with the older gear. We also don't have that many wifi6 clients in the family yet, so I discarded the idea.
I got a U6 Enterprise the other day, Mac Studio 12 feet away with one partial wall in between tries and stays on 6GHz for awhile but then falls back to 5GHz pretty quickly.
I am always supportive of newer tech. But I am a bit surprised by the evolution of standards for both 5G and WiFi over the last few years. Compared with the adoption of hardwire ethernet standards - which have been seemingly stuck at 1/2.5/10GbE for a while now.
I know there are a ton more benefits of these newer standards, but setting those aside for now, are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5?
I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps.
On a few ocassions where I am transferring huge files to / from my NAS, I reach for a ethernet adapter.
It's going to cost a lot to upgrade my network, so I've been debating whether it's actually worth it or just marketing hype.
The current state of Ethernet in 2023 in consumer devices is quite sad. I mean, most TVs and players (and usually not the cheap ones, yes, I'm looking at you, Sony) come with 10/100 Mbit ethernet adapters. I'd expect gigabit to be standard everywhere by now.
I can see a point in no longer producing 10mb wired chips anymore, just to take the burden off of production. I cannot picture a situation where you cannot upgrade to 100mb, maybe at the cost of a 48-port 100mb switch, which is essentially free these days. at some point it (must) cost more to produce antiquated technology, even if your equipment (say, a peanut butter factory) doesn't need GigE or 100mb bandwidth..
There's no business case. Even a full blu-ray 4k rip is only ~60ish Mbit/sec encoded as HEVC. Netflix and co have been pushing streaming bitrates down to sub 10 mbit.
4k uhd blu-ray peak bandwidth is somewhere around 150 mbps. Discs can be encoded in different codecs, but h.265 is common.
Maybe you can buffer it, but a lot of players lack the memory to buffer enough to average out a longer scene with intense encoding (such as the parade with confetti in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny).
Maybe you can reencode, and AV1 might help a bit, but you're likely going to drop some detail in order to fit in 100 mbps ethernet.
The only reason a disc is authored at that bitrate is to make bit perfect Blu-ray rips impracticably large. There is no visual quality reason to be that high. There is a reason Netflix’s top quality is a fraction of that bitrate and looks excellent.
Netflix at ~10mbps average, 20mbps peak is sometimes a little insufficient, but enough to make most people happy. But it seems like ~30mbps average, 40mbps peak would be really, really good.
The truth is, you need a fairly powerful client (PC, game console, flagship smart phone) to ever (occasionally) need more than 100mbps Ethernet. There just aren’t use cases for that much bandwidth.
HD YouTube is still in the extremely low single digit mbps. Same for TikTok. Netflix 4K HDR with Atmos easily fits within 100mbps. Even 8k streaming will be under 100mbps.
These boxes often couldn’t decode 200mbit of content if they tried, and realistically AV1 support is more important than if it supports gigabit or not. It’s just good economics to use a part that already works fine over one that’s overspecced for the use case.
What are you getting out of it? Faster app and update downloads? Those are frills.
I think for us, the interest in using Wi-Fi 7 has more to do with WPA3. Honestly, I've spent the last few months learning WiFi Hacking about the 4 way handshake and about DeAuth signals and everything and must say that i'm concerned we're in an arms race with GPU's getting faster and faster along with it hashcat is speeding up and honestly its about to get crazy fast.
I bought the recently released top of the line Fire TV 4k Max (2nd gen) streaming stick on black friday sale and was surprised to discover the external USB port is USB 2.0 speed micro-USB. My fault I guess for not even looking closely before ordering but I assume these days any brand new, top of the line device with a tiny USB port will be USB-C.
Anyway, after disabling the Amazon bloatware and side-loading vanilla android apps, even with a fast USB3-capable ethernet adapter connected to a 1Gbps RJ-45, standard streaming apps wouldn't even stream 4k because the ethernet was too slow. I tested the adapter and connection on my laptop and got >200mbps which is more than sufficient.
So I was forced to use 5Ghz wifi for the stick to stream 4k, thus further clogging up and adding to wifi congestion. BTW, I found the same thing to be true with my other streaming stick, a Google TV, despite it having a USB-C port. It could do 4k streams through an ethernet dongle but it was kind of on the edge enough to not always do 4k dependably. But that device was >18mo old.
Anyway, it's super annoying that these newish devices are making wifi congestion worse by not properly enabling reasonable wired streaming (yes, I know there are lots of no-name Android TV streaming boxes from Shenzen which have USB-C ports with at least USB3.0 support but this new Fire TV stick actually has a pretty performant CPU and is otherwise well-implemented).
Yes, you're correct but I was actually just referring to streaming Netflix and/or Prime Video 4k content within the official Netflix/Prime apps. These streams have much lower sustained bit rate requirements than UHD BD remuxes but were auto-falling back to HD due to insufficient bit rate (as reported by the official streaming service app's own network diagnostics).
I was surprised and disappointed because this is such a low bar to clear. The issue may not be entirely due to the USB 2.0 interface since, in theory, that's 480 Mbps which should translate to peak throughput close to 40 MBps but according to the network speed test in the official Amazon Prime app their own brand new flagship 4k streaming stick couldn't sustain 30 MBps for 4k HDR10 and would thus fall back to HD. I suspect Amazon didn't bother optimizing the USB driver stack to maximize the bandwidth available from the hardware. Maybe they just assume that no one uses 'old fashioned' 1 gigabit ethernet anymore (sigh).
It's double annoying because my home theater gear is all neatly rack mounted in a metal frame that just happens to be a pretty good EM shield. So I have to hang the damn stick out of the rack on a USB extension cable so it can get decent 5Ghz wifi throughput. All when I have a perfectly capable gigabit switch plumbed right into the rack.
Excuse me while I step outside to yell at some clouds....
That suggests to me connectivity issues up the stack.
I’d at least confirm the Ethernet drop is known working and your ISP isn’t doing any funny business.
Thanks for the suggestions. I did already check that the ethernet drop is not the problem by trying another device on it. Also, checked the USB->Ethernet adapter on another device as well as checking with a local speed test running on my home server.
I love the idea of Wifi 7 and I'm looking forward to upgrading from 5/6/6E, for a couple of reasons:
- Yes, I actually do feel limited by the speed of 5 and 6 (not 6E), not least of which because it gets worse with distance. The 6GHz network works great but doesn't get nearly enough range, and I'd love to supplement that by simultaneously talking on 5GHz and 2.4GHz, while using as much 6GHz bandwidth as is getting through from a given location. And I don't want to have to change which network I'm connected to, or even if it's the same ESSID I don't want my device to have to "switch" networks.
- No more dealing with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz vs 6GHz channels, or worrying which channels are clear, or which devices should be on which frequency. The premise of WiFi 7 seems to be to use all the bandwidth that nothing else is using, while avoiding anything that another device is interfering with. "What channel is your router using?" "Yes."
I feel limited by the latency AND bandwidth of wifi.
Latency interferes with use cases like wireless video streaming which is nice for things like Steam Decks or VR. We’re not even close to being able to decode even gigabit bitrates using hardware decoders though, so bandwidth isn’t important here. A nice coincidence is that Wifi7 coincided with the release of hardware av1 encoders/decoders, so I think we're going to see these SOCs that support both, and I think that's going to marginally improve the viability of computing remotely from the edge (Cloud gaming) or home servers (steam link) and cause those to be used more heavily.
Bandwidth interferes with large sequential file transfers, and WANs are starting to have more bandwidth than wifi, so this is starting to cramp things like large downloads of movie content or .iso’s or cloud backups. It also bottlenecks 2.5gbe LANs which are economical given they run on cat5e networks.
I think wifi7 is going to explode as ISPs bundle wifi7 modems with their higher bandwidth plans, so it’s going to be pushed because the ISPs need it more than because most customers need it. I only expect certain pros, gamers, and large scale commercial installers to invest in wifi7 themselves.
To add to that: throughput isn’t just about bandwidth, but also latency (BDP) but more importantly (in the case of WiFi) jitter and packet loss.
Even if your WiFi supports 1Gbit most of the time, tcp will throttle back to slow start (IIRC - the linear one) upon packet loss. And time to recovery depends on RTT. When I measure I always get inconsistent results on WiFi, whereas ethernet+fiber is butter smooth.
My understanding was that 5G isn’t just a speed improvement, it’s latency etc as well. But, no, I don’t feel limited by my cellphone being on LTE. That being said 5G opens a lot of doors: my home internet connection is 5G now, I pull around 500Mbps with not particularly awful/noticeable latency.
One important factor is that the efficiency gains of each new mobile radio generation increase total usable throughput per MHz, which matters a lot in times of heavy simultaneous use.
A lot of the gains with each new generation come from increased spectral usage per device (more MHz, more spatial streams etc, i.e. making each device use more of a given pipe), but some of the improvements are also usually making better use of each MHz (better modulation schemes, MU-MIMO, less overhead etc.)
I have three 5/AC access points in my house. All broadcast the same two SSIDs: 2.4Ghz+5Ghz and 5Ghz only). I have 802.11r Fast Transition enabled in OpenWRT to improve roaming, but have never quantified a benefit. Each AP is set on different channels to minimize overlap.
In the enterprise it’s a combination of 802.11k 802.11v and 802.11r.[0] All APs have the same ssid, clients initiate transferring between APs in the background based on signal strength, silently re-authenticating to the new ap.
Many (most?) off-the-shelf home wifi mesh systems dont implement 802.11r so you may have a brief interruption during transfer, though it still happens without user input. Some older/embedded devices may have issues connecting with 802.11r enabled networks as well.
Off-the-shelf home mesh systems typically have one mesh node with all the functions and webui of a normal SoHo router, and then other nodes are in AP mode only with either wired or wireless backhaul to the main node. Enterprise setups instead will have a separate controller for the APs. Also typically all APs in an enterprise will be bridged to the same L2 networks whereas some home mesh systems will use a separate broadcast domain for each AP.
> Many (most?) off-the-shelf home wifi mesh systems dont implement 802.11r so you may have a brief interruption during transfer, though it still happens without user input.
802.11r is only a huge win in enterprise environments with slower RADIUS authentication. Associating with a new access point with a PSK is not so bad.
WiFi is used in places other than homes, and many parts of the newer standards are focused on those situations. Hotels, trains, conference centers, stadiums, offices, apartment buildings, etc. all need to be able to handle large numbers of users. If what you have is working for your case, there’s no reason to upgrade.
> are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5?
4G LTE IMHO, is fine for mobile use, but wouldn't really be enough for a household fixed wireless connection; 5G is much better for that. Occasionaly I run into what seems to be congested towers, and denser encoding should help with that (unless the problem is the backhaul). Of course, additional spectrum allocations is likely the most useful part of 5g, although that didn't have to be tied.
Also IMHO, WiFi 5 is limited by running only on 5 GHz, which doesn't go far enough. I'm holding out for now, but I'm fairly sure I'll have significiantly better experiences with wifi 6 than wifi 5/4. Being able to run the newest encoding on 2.4Ghz will be great for me... but I live in the middle of the woods and don't see a lot of outside APs. I'm hoping to find APs that are cheap and let me enhance roaming.
Wifi 4 (802.11n) did support both 2.4 and 5 GHz, only 5 (802.11ac) was 5 GHz only for some reason.
Yes, there are tons of reason to avoid 2.4 GHz and it makes for a terrible default (if a device supports only one band), but outright not specifying it always seemed strange to me.
800 Gb/s is available using more fibre pairs; 1600 Gb/s / 1.6 Tb/s is estimated for 2026 (802.3dj). If you're talking about twisted pairs, then 40 Gb/s is available (802.3bq):
So I'm not quite sure that you're talking about when you say "stuck". Lots of folks are clamouring for more bandwidth, and the optics folks and IEEE are giving them new options on a regular basis.
> I know there are a ton more benefits of these newer standards, but setting those aside for now, are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5?
They feel limited by the limited number of channels in 5 GHz, especially in high-density areas (especially with neighbours, and not just their own APs), which is the primary problem that Wifi 6E (802.11ax) and 7 (be) are trying to solve: not enough non-overlapping channels.
And the higher the speed of the connection, the quicker data can be transmitted so that one client can stop transmitting and free up the medium for another client.
>I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps.
I think you've answered your own question there. If you need to set up 6 APs as a mesh network to get good performance, the technology can be improved.
We were running a single AP, as most consumers do, and getting closer to 50Mbps with occasional dropouts at the other end of the house.
Serviceable, but far from the ideal of "set and forget".
Well the technology isn't getting all that much better for a single access point deployment unless you're sitting relatively close to it. Mesh networking setups at least dramatically cut deployment costs for multi-AP setups.
> Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision.
If there is a factory that allows a worker to step in front of a robot and depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety, something is very very wrong.
Discarding ideas out of hand is easy & cheap. Why do you think this so absolutely unacceptable an idea?
A factory seems like a big space where there could perhaps be a predictable well known radio spectrum, and where that spectrum could reliably be monitored for stability. Unlike most spaces, there's a lot of possibilities for controlling the environment well, if you wanted; no end-user devices allowed, nothing but known systems.
This feels like you could very quickly get to some kind of known state. "We will be able to send priority signals within under 2ms." Or some such quality metric. Keep a signal analyzer going: any time this isn't met, everything goes into an independent failsafe shutdown mode until the issue is debugged and started up again.
Our instincts to judge & discard ideas & possibilities is so dangerous, is such a deep human peril. Your instinct feels like it comes from a good place, feels correct, but ultimately, this is acting in fear uncertainty & doubt, & your execution rests on no contentions other than it's own self certainty.
I think we must be much more thorough in our thinking & arguing, must not leap to discard ideas so quickly totally & casually; FUD must be rooted out deep within ourselves & challenged. Let not progress be onstructed by meek wills.
I think it is easy to dismiss because you should always keep squishy humans away from the unthinking machines. If they are always separated during routine operation, you have eliminated potential failure modes that could result in a fatal injury.
Sure, engineer the machines to immediately halt if a human is detected, but also design the system so that close physical proximity is never required.
Have you done anything other than restate the initial FUD?
I think I have gone through efforts to elaborate why I think high reliability is achievable over wireless systems. It seems irrational to me to hate wireless so.
If I were a squishy human in a factory, I feel like I would far far far prefer some highly reliable central systems with near godlike omniscience of the factory floor watch things, & use well quantified known wireless channels (albeit no WiFi that exists today, without a lot of other promises) to communicate, than rely on individual robots relying on embodied knowledge. You all sound like cranks to me, given how incredibly fantastically super seriously I would want the former, not the latter.
> Why do you think this so absolutely unacceptable an idea?
Because industry standard safety practices are there for a reason and taken very seriously. The parent poster said:
> allows a worker to step in front of a robot
and
> depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety
But industry standard safety practices would ensure at least one of those is not true. What the person you are replying to is suggesting is that you can have robots with wireless safety mechanisms or you can have robots which people can walk in front of (which have wired safety mechanisms), you just do not want both. That is a pretty mild claim you are responding to.
I am a robotics engineer and we are very aware of the risks robots pose to human beings. Furthermore business management is very aware of the liability concerns these risks pose to the business.
It isn't FUD to say that we would not put humans in the path of a robot which had wireless safety systems. That's just a fact of standard practices.
Of course the standards could be changed, or other standards could be adopted. But you really went on a pretty long rant about open mindedness in reply to a person who was making a factual and industry-standard statement about robots in factories.
In the airline industry they say the safety rules are written in blood, because after someone is killed they do a detailed investigation and update safety rules accordingly. I suspect that it is similar in robotics as industrial robots kill people all the time. Safety rules could be changed, but it's a perfectly normal thing for a person to say "you are unlikely to encounter said scenario because it violates the normal rules for doing the thing". If a person said "you are unlikely to see a new passenger car sold without seatbelts" that is not cause to chastise them about open mindedness, that is a boring normal statement that is factual and makes sense.
> The drives have enough smarts to move safely around humans, communicate with nearby robots so they do not collide, and report any problems like spills or obstructions back to the controller.
The robots are clearly designed to fail safe if they cannot communicate with the central controller. It would be an extremely poor design to have them operate in an unsafe mode in the event of interference in an unlicensed spectrum (or even a licensed spectrum, for that matter).
> If there is a factory that allows a worker to step in front of a robot and depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety, something is very very wrong.
All of those robots leave enough threshold to avoid collisions with other robots should they need to stop suddenly. The robots do on device calculations and report back their status to the central server to help other robots route around "damage" (stopped robots, for example). Instead, they give the robots general path instructions with enough buffer area to allow the robots to not trigger their own on device collision sensing. In the links that you gave, it's very clear that the robots do not depend on communicating with a central server if a worker steps in front of a robot.
By the way, in warehouses without such advanced protection, humans are _absolutely_ banned from the floor and it's treated like any other large industrial scale operation, including fail safes on gates (if gate is open, do not allow restart and human presence sensing (often through a badge of some sort).
Failure of this sort would lead to massive liabilities to the warehouse and robot owners. They are heavily incentivized to do things the right way. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's actually quite advanced and safe.
So, perhaps I didn't word my reply as well as I should have.
I am very much aware that robots have fail safes and all sorts of graceful failure modes.
What I was trying to communicate is that wireless communications is very much used for safety (positioning, allstop type commands, etc). The fail safes are there as a last resort (e.g. someone walking in front of it).
Still not sure I'm using the right words to describe my thoughts, so maybe I'm just tired. I appreciate all the feedback, though.
What? Of course you should wire everything up if possible, but some devices just don't allow that. I once used the USB to Ethernet adapter that came with my Fire TV, only to discover that it runs at 100 Mbit and that the USB controller is a bottleneck. In addition, the connection kept dropping out, so I switched back to WiFi for that specific device.
This sounds like a good direction: even very infrequent, very brief stutters can be a dealbreaker for hardcore gamers, and make them chose wired over wifi.
My only gripe is that for whatever goddamn reason Android isn't able to detect what specific subset of WPA2 Enterprise config the AP actually wants/supports and the UI seems to constantly change around over the years, a common annoyance in large campus networks where the admins don't stay on top.
Yes: I still don't have an easy way to authenticate the network I'm joining. All I have is an SSID name but no public key or fingerprint thereof with which to authenticate the network. When I go to someone's home it'd be nice if they could post a QR code for their guest Wi-Fi network and all I'd have to do is scan it to join it. Plus a QR code could elide the need for a password.
> Yes: I still don't have an easy way to authenticate the network I'm joining.
PSK authentication works both ways. If the network does not know your entered passphrase, your device won't connect to it.
The same is true for some (but not all) WPA enterprise EAP authentication methods (EAP-PWD uses it, for example); others do use public key certificates (like anything based on EAP-TTLS/EAP-PEAP). In case of EAP-PEAP-MPSCHAPv2 you even get both.
> I still don't have an easy way to authenticate the network I'm joining.
If you're using WPA-Enterprise, yes you can - you need to roll out your own SSL PKI though, and almost no consumer-grade APs support it.
> When I go to someone's home it'd be nice if they could post a QR code for their guest Wi-Fi network and all I'd have to do is scan it to join it. Plus a QR code could elide the need for a password.
That has been a thing for years [1], if you need a generator you can use [2].
Wi-Fi 7 access point firmware vendors could choose to implement optional per-client passphrases, VLANs and device identity for access and traffic control. OSS reference code is available from https://github.com/spr-networks/super.
Wi-Fi 7 Sensing (802.11bf) of humans can measure breathing rate, keystroke typing, position and motion, from outside the walls of homes and business. What's the relationship between human biometric recognition and security?
Industry, please please please take your time and get the feature set right and stick to calling it simply WiFi 7 - or just leave the marginal stuff for WiFi 8. I don’t want to see a 7E.
Wi-Fi 7 probably signals that the 5 megabyte kernel module for Wi-Fi you're using in your embedded system (whose kernel image is "only" 12 megabytes) is going to grow to 7 megabytes.
I think my primary distaste for Wi-Fi tends to be generations of obtuse binary blobs, and driver support that's scattershot and years coming.
TBH, I'd love to see Wi-Fi presented as a bridge device rather than a direct NIC-- the host PC sees an Ethernet chipset that has drivers that work on anything from MS-DOS 3.3 onward, and when first booted, you connect to a simulated network containing a REST endpoint/web page which lets you configure the WLAN side.
98 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadTransitioning from one station to another, or worse back to call service, seems to consistently causes stability and reliability problems.
Worse still, the ability to spread connections across multiple spectrums is likely to make the roaming problem worse. 6Ghz will usually drop before 5Ghz, and that before 2.4Ghz, which has the best wall penetration. How will that impact reliability as people walk through buildings?
But you and me are probably more tech savvy than the average person.
It doesn’t work for homes for 98% of users who don’t have the know-how to implement this.
The former is clearly in scope for Wi-Fi protocols. The latter is clearly out of scope for Wi-Fi protocols, as it really involves work at the IP layer (or higher even).
Then you need to decide what links to send frames over (and how). MPTCP is one approach to this.
If you have a device that can use cellular and wifi, it has to figure out when it should be sending packets over wifi, or when it should give up and send packets over cellular.
MPTCP isn't mature or a good approach for this yet (and may never be), but it could present a way to smoothly roam between wifi and cellular. Imagine walking across a big campus, and having your device keep a network connection up seamlessly as you lose wifi between buildings.
Whether solved via overlay networks, or a clientside protocol like MPTCP-- this is a service networks should provide. Unfortunately, we've got no way to roam except within a single network (wifi roaming; satellite handoff; cellular handoff).
† Of course most middleware boxes (NATs) don't support / block it, so take-up is basically non-existent.
It seems like most clients will stay associated with an AP until times are truly truly desperate/signal is near totally hosed. As far as I know, the only open source option to bandhsteering/ap-steering clients is Dawn, which is quite new (relatively speaking). I've been running it on my nighthawk's for a while, and it's... Ok. Clients sometimes ping pong around, or get sent to a suboptimal band or AP. But it's a huge improvement over nothing! https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn
"IEEE 802 11kvr | Perry Correll | WLPC Phoenix 2019"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_K9xHxFM8Y
"Effects of 802.11k/r/v | Andrew McHale | WLPC Prague 2019"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ua2lI6HBhE
"The Challenges of Modern Wi-Fi Roaming Including in 6 GHz | Wes Purvis | Prague 2023"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAG5jXZCd_8
"Wi-Fi Roaming Revealed"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ahOnG76HvQ
The Wifi infrastructure needs to send out the appropriate frames (e.g. neighbour reports), and the client has to use them to make reasonable decisions.
I've had Skype calls on Wi-Fi walking all around campus (on a Cisco-based network) on an old Symbian smartphone back in 2011 without any audible glitches, and that was with 802.1X/WPA Enterprise/WPA-EAP which makes things more complicated.
Android couldn't do the same for the next several years though, and my Linux laptop also used to cling to the worst possible access point for dear life while sitting directly under a closer and less-loaded one, so there were clearly network and client side elements to that feature.
I know there are a ton more benefits of these newer standards, but setting those aside for now, are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5?
I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps.
On a few ocassions where I am transferring huge files to / from my NAS, I reach for a ethernet adapter.
It's going to cost a lot to upgrade my network, so I've been debating whether it's actually worth it or just marketing hype.
There's no business case. Even a full blu-ray 4k rip is only ~60ish Mbit/sec encoded as HEVC. Netflix and co have been pushing streaming bitrates down to sub 10 mbit.
Maybe you can buffer it, but a lot of players lack the memory to buffer enough to average out a longer scene with intense encoding (such as the parade with confetti in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny).
Maybe you can reencode, and AV1 might help a bit, but you're likely going to drop some detail in order to fit in 100 mbps ethernet.
HD YouTube is still in the extremely low single digit mbps. Same for TikTok. Netflix 4K HDR with Atmos easily fits within 100mbps. Even 8k streaming will be under 100mbps.
What are you getting out of it? Faster app and update downloads? Those are frills.
Anyway, after disabling the Amazon bloatware and side-loading vanilla android apps, even with a fast USB3-capable ethernet adapter connected to a 1Gbps RJ-45, standard streaming apps wouldn't even stream 4k because the ethernet was too slow. I tested the adapter and connection on my laptop and got >200mbps which is more than sufficient.
So I was forced to use 5Ghz wifi for the stick to stream 4k, thus further clogging up and adding to wifi congestion. BTW, I found the same thing to be true with my other streaming stick, a Google TV, despite it having a USB-C port. It could do 4k streams through an ethernet dongle but it was kind of on the edge enough to not always do 4k dependably. But that device was >18mo old.
Anyway, it's super annoying that these newish devices are making wifi congestion worse by not properly enabling reasonable wired streaming (yes, I know there are lots of no-name Android TV streaming boxes from Shenzen which have USB-C ports with at least USB3.0 support but this new Fire TV stick actually has a pretty performant CPU and is otherwise well-implemented).
I was surprised and disappointed because this is such a low bar to clear. The issue may not be entirely due to the USB 2.0 interface since, in theory, that's 480 Mbps which should translate to peak throughput close to 40 MBps but according to the network speed test in the official Amazon Prime app their own brand new flagship 4k streaming stick couldn't sustain 30 MBps for 4k HDR10 and would thus fall back to HD. I suspect Amazon didn't bother optimizing the USB driver stack to maximize the bandwidth available from the hardware. Maybe they just assume that no one uses 'old fashioned' 1 gigabit ethernet anymore (sigh).
It's double annoying because my home theater gear is all neatly rack mounted in a metal frame that just happens to be a pretty good EM shield. So I have to hang the damn stick out of the rack on a USB extension cable so it can get decent 5Ghz wifi throughput. All when I have a perfectly capable gigabit switch plumbed right into the rack.
Excuse me while I step outside to yell at some clouds....
- Yes, I actually do feel limited by the speed of 5 and 6 (not 6E), not least of which because it gets worse with distance. The 6GHz network works great but doesn't get nearly enough range, and I'd love to supplement that by simultaneously talking on 5GHz and 2.4GHz, while using as much 6GHz bandwidth as is getting through from a given location. And I don't want to have to change which network I'm connected to, or even if it's the same ESSID I don't want my device to have to "switch" networks.
- No more dealing with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz vs 6GHz channels, or worrying which channels are clear, or which devices should be on which frequency. The premise of WiFi 7 seems to be to use all the bandwidth that nothing else is using, while avoiding anything that another device is interfering with. "What channel is your router using?" "Yes."
Latency interferes with use cases like wireless video streaming which is nice for things like Steam Decks or VR. We’re not even close to being able to decode even gigabit bitrates using hardware decoders though, so bandwidth isn’t important here. A nice coincidence is that Wifi7 coincided with the release of hardware av1 encoders/decoders, so I think we're going to see these SOCs that support both, and I think that's going to marginally improve the viability of computing remotely from the edge (Cloud gaming) or home servers (steam link) and cause those to be used more heavily.
Bandwidth interferes with large sequential file transfers, and WANs are starting to have more bandwidth than wifi, so this is starting to cramp things like large downloads of movie content or .iso’s or cloud backups. It also bottlenecks 2.5gbe LANs which are economical given they run on cat5e networks.
I think wifi7 is going to explode as ISPs bundle wifi7 modems with their higher bandwidth plans, so it’s going to be pushed because the ISPs need it more than because most customers need it. I only expect certain pros, gamers, and large scale commercial installers to invest in wifi7 themselves.
Even if your WiFi supports 1Gbit most of the time, tcp will throttle back to slow start (IIRC - the linear one) upon packet loss. And time to recovery depends on RTT. When I measure I always get inconsistent results on WiFi, whereas ethernet+fiber is butter smooth.
A lot of the gains with each new generation come from increased spectral usage per device (more MHz, more spatial streams etc, i.e. making each device use more of a given pipe), but some of the improvements are also usually making better use of each MHz (better modulation schemes, MU-MIMO, less overhead etc.)
How does that work? Are they components of a mesh network bundle? Do they have same SSID? Are they aware of each other?
After I got the newer NanoHDs, I just kept the older AC Pros around for 2.4Ghz devices and exterior coverage.
Same SSID and they are all hooked up the same controller etc, so clients can roam.
Many (most?) off-the-shelf home wifi mesh systems dont implement 802.11r so you may have a brief interruption during transfer, though it still happens without user input. Some older/embedded devices may have issues connecting with 802.11r enabled networks as well.
Off-the-shelf home mesh systems typically have one mesh node with all the functions and webui of a normal SoHo router, and then other nodes are in AP mode only with either wired or wireless backhaul to the main node. Enterprise setups instead will have a separate controller for the APs. Also typically all APs in an enterprise will be bridged to the same L2 networks whereas some home mesh systems will use a separate broadcast domain for each AP.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...
802.11r is only a huge win in enterprise environments with slower RADIUS authentication. Associating with a new access point with a PSK is not so bad.
4G LTE IMHO, is fine for mobile use, but wouldn't really be enough for a household fixed wireless connection; 5G is much better for that. Occasionaly I run into what seems to be congested towers, and denser encoding should help with that (unless the problem is the backhaul). Of course, additional spectrum allocations is likely the most useful part of 5g, although that didn't have to be tied.
Also IMHO, WiFi 5 is limited by running only on 5 GHz, which doesn't go far enough. I'm holding out for now, but I'm fairly sure I'll have significiantly better experiences with wifi 6 than wifi 5/4. Being able to run the newest encoding on 2.4Ghz will be great for me... but I live in the middle of the woods and don't see a lot of outside APs. I'm hoping to find APs that are cheap and let me enhance roaming.
Yes, there are tons of reason to avoid 2.4 GHz and it makes for a terrible default (if a device supports only one band), but outright not specifying it always seemed strange to me.
Wired connections can do 400 Gb/s over a single pair of fibres at distances of 80km(+) (-ZR(+)):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet
800 Gb/s is available using more fibre pairs; 1600 Gb/s / 1.6 Tb/s is estimated for 2026 (802.3dj). If you're talking about twisted pairs, then 40 Gb/s is available (802.3bq):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair
So I'm not quite sure that you're talking about when you say "stuck". Lots of folks are clamouring for more bandwidth, and the optics folks and IEEE are giving them new options on a regular basis.
> I know there are a ton more benefits of these newer standards, but setting those aside for now, are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5?
They feel limited by the limited number of channels in 5 GHz, especially in high-density areas (especially with neighbours, and not just their own APs), which is the primary problem that Wifi 6E (802.11ax) and 7 (be) are trying to solve: not enough non-overlapping channels.
And the higher the speed of the connection, the quicker data can be transmitted so that one client can stop transmitting and free up the medium for another client.
I think you've answered your own question there. If you need to set up 6 APs as a mesh network to get good performance, the technology can be improved.
We were running a single AP, as most consumers do, and getting closer to 50Mbps with occasional dropouts at the other end of the house.
Serviceable, but far from the ideal of "set and forget".
The keyword here is office, or any location where you have many devices connecting to it. I am just waiting for 5G and WiFi 7 to mature.
If there is a factory that allows a worker to step in front of a robot and depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety, something is very very wrong.
A factory seems like a big space where there could perhaps be a predictable well known radio spectrum, and where that spectrum could reliably be monitored for stability. Unlike most spaces, there's a lot of possibilities for controlling the environment well, if you wanted; no end-user devices allowed, nothing but known systems.
This feels like you could very quickly get to some kind of known state. "We will be able to send priority signals within under 2ms." Or some such quality metric. Keep a signal analyzer going: any time this isn't met, everything goes into an independent failsafe shutdown mode until the issue is debugged and started up again.
Our instincts to judge & discard ideas & possibilities is so dangerous, is such a deep human peril. Your instinct feels like it comes from a good place, feels correct, but ultimately, this is acting in fear uncertainty & doubt, & your execution rests on no contentions other than it's own self certainty.
I think we must be much more thorough in our thinking & arguing, must not leap to discard ideas so quickly totally & casually; FUD must be rooted out deep within ourselves & challenged. Let not progress be onstructed by meek wills.
Sure, engineer the machines to immediately halt if a human is detected, but also design the system so that close physical proximity is never required.
I think I have gone through efforts to elaborate why I think high reliability is achievable over wireless systems. It seems irrational to me to hate wireless so.
If I were a squishy human in a factory, I feel like I would far far far prefer some highly reliable central systems with near godlike omniscience of the factory floor watch things, & use well quantified known wireless channels (albeit no WiFi that exists today, without a lot of other promises) to communicate, than rely on individual robots relying on embodied knowledge. You all sound like cranks to me, given how incredibly fantastically super seriously I would want the former, not the latter.
Because industry standard safety practices are there for a reason and taken very seriously. The parent poster said:
> allows a worker to step in front of a robot
and
> depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety
But industry standard safety practices would ensure at least one of those is not true. What the person you are replying to is suggesting is that you can have robots with wireless safety mechanisms or you can have robots which people can walk in front of (which have wired safety mechanisms), you just do not want both. That is a pretty mild claim you are responding to.
I am a robotics engineer and we are very aware of the risks robots pose to human beings. Furthermore business management is very aware of the liability concerns these risks pose to the business.
It isn't FUD to say that we would not put humans in the path of a robot which had wireless safety systems. That's just a fact of standard practices.
https://webstore.ansi.org/industry/robotics/safety
https://www.osha.gov/robotics/standards
Of course the standards could be changed, or other standards could be adopted. But you really went on a pretty long rant about open mindedness in reply to a person who was making a factual and industry-standard statement about robots in factories.
In the airline industry they say the safety rules are written in blood, because after someone is killed they do a detailed investigation and update safety rules accordingly. I suspect that it is similar in robotics as industrial robots kill people all the time. Safety rules could be changed, but it's a perfectly normal thing for a person to say "you are unlikely to encounter said scenario because it violates the normal rules for doing the thing". If a person said "you are unlikely to see a new passenger car sold without seatbelts" that is not cause to chastise them about open mindedness, that is a boring normal statement that is factual and makes sense.
There are hundreds of those things moving around, often with heavy loads (enough to injure if not enough to kill).
And it has been that way for years. [0]
[0] - https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-robots/
EDIT : Adding Amazon’s page on robots that also talks about safety: https://www.amazon.science/latest-news/amazon-robotics-auton...
> The drives have enough smarts to move safely around humans, communicate with nearby robots so they do not collide, and report any problems like spills or obstructions back to the controller.
The robots are clearly designed to fail safe if they cannot communicate with the central controller. It would be an extremely poor design to have them operate in an unsafe mode in the event of interference in an unlicensed spectrum (or even a licensed spectrum, for that matter).
All of those robots leave enough threshold to avoid collisions with other robots should they need to stop suddenly. The robots do on device calculations and report back their status to the central server to help other robots route around "damage" (stopped robots, for example). Instead, they give the robots general path instructions with enough buffer area to allow the robots to not trigger their own on device collision sensing. In the links that you gave, it's very clear that the robots do not depend on communicating with a central server if a worker steps in front of a robot.
By the way, in warehouses without such advanced protection, humans are _absolutely_ banned from the floor and it's treated like any other large industrial scale operation, including fail safes on gates (if gate is open, do not allow restart and human presence sensing (often through a badge of some sort).
Failure of this sort would lead to massive liabilities to the warehouse and robot owners. They are heavily incentivized to do things the right way. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's actually quite advanced and safe.
And it has been that way for years.
I am very much aware that robots have fail safes and all sorts of graceful failure modes.
What I was trying to communicate is that wireless communications is very much used for safety (positioning, allstop type commands, etc). The fail safes are there as a last resort (e.g. someone walking in front of it).
Still not sure I'm using the right words to describe my thoughts, so maybe I'm just tired. I appreciate all the feedback, though.
Nite.
Uh, Wi-Fi security still sucks. Can we fix that?
My only gripe is that for whatever goddamn reason Android isn't able to detect what specific subset of WPA2 Enterprise config the AP actually wants/supports and the UI seems to constantly change around over the years, a common annoyance in large campus networks where the admins don't stay on top.
PSK authentication works both ways. If the network does not know your entered passphrase, your device won't connect to it.
The same is true for some (but not all) WPA enterprise EAP authentication methods (EAP-PWD uses it, for example); others do use public key certificates (like anything based on EAP-TTLS/EAP-PEAP). In case of EAP-PEAP-MPSCHAPv2 you even get both.
Yes, but the PSK is shared so...
> others do use public key certificates
What's needed is a mechanism for learning those. That's where the QR code thing comes in.
If you're using WPA-Enterprise, yes you can - you need to roll out your own SSL PKI though, and almost no consumer-grade APs support it.
> When I go to someone's home it'd be nice if they could post a QR code for their guest Wi-Fi network and all I'd have to do is scan it to join it. Plus a QR code could elide the need for a password.
That has been a thing for years [1], if you need a generator you can use [2].
[1] https://github.com/zxing/zxing/wiki/Barcode-Contents#wi-fi-n...
[2] https://qifi.org/
Wi-Fi 7 Sensing (802.11bf) of humans can measure breathing rate, keystroke typing, position and motion, from outside the walls of homes and business. What's the relationship between human biometric recognition and security?
Biometrics are great for identification, not so much for authentication.
* https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/data-privacy-and...
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/112/materials/slides-11...
TBH, I'd love to see Wi-Fi presented as a bridge device rather than a direct NIC-- the host PC sees an Ethernet chipset that has drivers that work on anything from MS-DOS 3.3 onward, and when first booted, you connect to a simulated network containing a REST endpoint/web page which lets you configure the WLAN side.