Makes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
It's nice to have the fastest Wi-Fi possible even if your upstream internet is slower. Sometimes you want to transfer files locally between devices, or run backups etc. Faster Wi-Fi here can make a huge difference to those tasks.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
The upgrade to 6E was a big jump in my network (Wifi7 Unifi Wall AP). On the same spot, the M3 MacBook (6E) has basically zero lag over VNC, while the M1 MacBook (6) has a noticeable lag. It’s a bit mind blowing how big the difference is.
That is likely because of AWDL and your WiFi card doing channel hopping to listen between packets.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
Not missing much. I feel like it's in many ways misguided. 6ghz ftw because 5ghz penetrates too much and causes noisy neighbor problems. Well, from my experience, 6ghz doesn't penetrate at -all-. So unless you live in a barndo or studio apartment, it's mostly an exercise in frustration.
Is 6 even ubiquitous for you? I bought my first WiFi 6E device this year, specifically because I want it to be future-proof and work well outside of the house (like on a conference), but all other phones, laptops, desktops, and access points are on 802.11ac. It's going to take a while to reap those benefits at home, and that's assuming we ever get FTTH and want to pay for a 1gbps uplink in the first place (on LAN with WiFi 5 I currently get several hundred mbps, almost regardless of distance until it drops off the network completely, and our uplink is 40mbps, the fastest we can get on VDSL here)
Makes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam.
I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
Legacy clients force APs to accomodate them. Be it by using slower speeds with worse airtime consumption or by just disabling features that (can) make old clients misbehave.
I was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs).
The problem is that the application of the rules is inherently usage-specific.
For example, with the 1% duty cycle limit it is totally fine to have a transmission take 30 seconds - provided you only send 1 transmission an hour. Want to send one transmission per minute? You'll have to get your transmission time down to 0.6 seconds. And your transmission speed is inherently linked to your data rate, and by extension your signal range.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution possible here. Either the user has to give it some information about their specific use case, or it'll have to stick to the absolute most pessimistic limits.
We have devices sending telemetry and occasional OTA updates without urgency (if it takes a few hours to get it over it’s not a problem).
If you need consistent MB range traffic for cameras I wouldn’t advise it but for low (5kbs) traffic it can be attractive. A few thousand bits can encode quite a bit of information. Don’t be fooled by the “kbs”.
The ETSI document actually does allow higher duty cycle if the radios take anti-interference measures. Some countries unfortunately have "harmonized" but skipped that part. Theoretically only a dumb transceiver (that can utilize only a single channel) has to limit duty cycle that low in those bands.
Dead outside the US unfortunately, worse range than regular wifi due to being strangled by lower channel width and ridicolously low power limits. The two HaLowLink routers are the only off the shelf support for it, it's nonexistent in any other device.
I was so excited when I discovered it a few months back after struggling for years to set up reliable wifi for outdoor robotics, only to realize we can't have nice things. The struggle continues.
Don’t know about the parent, but I found LoRa adequate for (tiny) payloads (sensor data and such) but OTA updates are a PITA without some alternative channel. Speeds are measured in bytes / sec.
No I mean the total frequency range is much smaller. The US has 26 MHz width, while EU/Africa/India only allocated 7 MHz total. The difference in actual frequency is minimal at ~30 MHz, you almost get more difference from using different channels in the US. What affects range even more is that in the US you can transmit at 1000 mW vs. 25 mW, so the end result is about ~5-10 km vs. 100-200 m. At that range 2.4 GHz is king and stomps it at over four times the allowed power to transfer hilariously more data.
> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam
The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better.
Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
How much money do you have? Nokia's Centralized RAN basically solves this by not choosing between AP1 and AP2. The device yells out a packet, both radios hear it, and the signals are combined in baseband processing. Wifi 8 doesn't quite do this, maybe 9's gonna have it. Or the patents run out and the telecom networks cooperate and everything gets a cell modem.
I'm no RF expert, and we're not a big company. I wear many hats, from DBA to local WiFi expert. And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.
> And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.
DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.
Often times the problem is that the client radios are much weaker than the APs radios.
Sometimes we forget that for the communication to be reliable, signal must flow both ways. Clients will happily connect to far away APs, but won't be reliably heard back.
Solution is to use more APs and lower their radio tx power. A lot of customers push back on the approach because they have only one gaming router monstrosity in their country home and it works perfectly, not understanding that their downtown office with 150 devices have nothing in common.
This has been a solved problem in the land mobile radio world for a number of decades.
You have a bunch base stations forming a logical channel with a single uplink frequency, and either a single downlink frequency on which every base station is precisely synchronised in frequency and time (simulcast), or multiple downlink frequencies (a multicast system).
A comparator selects, or votes, the highest quality signal from the base receivers based on either lowest noise or lowest BER, and then repeats that through all of the base transmitters simultaneously.
At the same time, in a multicast system, the mobile scans for and selects the base transmitter with either the highest RSSI or lowest BER.
I've had similar issues with clients (Blink camera sync modules) connecting to far-away APs instead of the much closer router. I could not force them to connect directly to the router no matter what.
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
In ubiquity gear you can “lock” devices to a specific endpoint. I suspect ultimately you would prefer to have failover available but at least for troubleshooting you can see how it connects to that specific AP. Similarly you could see the amount of clients connected to an AP on every frequency and WiFi version.
You can ban devices from all access points except one. That is not "locking" it to one, it's just preventing it from successfully connecting.
It will still try to roam, it will still cause issues.
A lot of the roaming logic is in the clients. Newer android and iOS versions have gotten better but there are tons of old and new devices with poor roaming logic and capabilities.
The issue is that Wifi offers no reliability guarantees and does not scale when number of nodes grows beyond a relatively low number. So when number of nodes is large and you want to perform critical tasks (e.g. control robots, machinery, etc remotely) Wifi does not work.
There's no good reason it can't handle even more nodes, especially since you can have over 50 separate channels. Central control of the frequencies helps somewhat with density but not that much. We can and should fix those flaws.
I don't think I trust 5G for sub-second critical tasks either...
LoRa is quite nice for this in the lower frequency bands, and the bandwidth should suffice for this sorta thing. And the tech is super cheap to build and maintain, both hardware and software is open source.
There are still landlines in use (although they mostly use VOIP instead of analog phone lines). All cheap cordless phones I know run DECT. It's more than enough speed for speech and more stable than wifi.
The AVM Fritz product line of consumer modem/routers all include a DECT modem for registering extra handsets for voice but they have their own proprietary handsets that support TCP/IP over DECT for things like audio streaming or sending extra media like a caller photo.
I've never really liked talking on cellphones and got a grandstream cordless DECT phone that runs over a voip line probably a decade ago. One of my favourite purchases.
Cordless phones have mostly disappeared but the Panasonic Link2Cell models - where the base station acts as a Bluetooth headset for up to two mobile phones - are still around and are absolutely marvelous for older adults. They can plug their mobile phone in to charge and walk around with one of the handsets (a base station can support up to six!) so that if they should fall, they have a phone on them to call for help.
I have a DECT headset and I would never go back to Bluetooth. The range, reliability and the quality of modern DECT is great. Just make sure you get one with ultra wide band or similar otherwise you end up with cordless phone quality.
Yeah you can run stuff through DECT I'm not sure what handheld suitable gateway you'd use and strap to the holster of the associated scanner, but otherwise...
That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.
I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.
The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.
You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.
Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.
Perhaps you can try DECT NR+ the new reincarnation of DECT and also backward compatible with the original DECT [1]. It can also do roaming.
It's under 5G standard but for non-cellular connectivity that means you can use it without base-station like Wi-Fi direct. It's geared toward IoT but its data rates are from 1 Mbps up to 1.3 Gbps depending on the operating frequency and the type of modulation being used [2].
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comnents):
Here's another one for you: today I found out that my dual-sim android phone has a single radio that is shared between the two sims. So when you are on a call, the 4G/5G doesn't work on the other sim, likewise, sometimes the the voice sim is unavailable while the other sim engaged with 4G/5G things... which is just stupid. Can't they just add two radios/chips (like many wifi AP's....)? So the whole setup on a consumer phone is actually quite unreliable because of reusing a single radio. I thought it was my buggy code, but nope, just the radio being shared and the mobile operator seeing the sim as offline. Crazy.
Yep, although (at least in my experience) it's not enabled by default. I also learnt about VoWiFi (also called "WiFi Calling") that allows you using WiFi for calling, including when you're abroad or you don't even have phone signal.
Support for VoWiFi is a bit weird. Some operators don't allow it outside of your region (for example, the EU), some others will allow it and even bill you as if it were a local call made from your country.
Also, although it's in theory made only for working through WiFi, seems like if you have a second SIM or eSIM with a data plan (for example, a travel SIM local for the country you're on vacations) and some combination of phone and/or operators, it can use the second SIM as the data provider for WiFi Calling.
For the major US carriers, since they shut down 3G, VoLTE is the only way calls work. Which meant that a non-VoLTE-but-4G-capable device can no longer make 911 calls.
I was using a Samsung S5 running LineageOS for a while with Google voice for calls, but the no 911 thing is one of the main reasons I finally moved to a different phone. The S5 supports VoLTE but only with stock firmware.
VoLTE was an advertising feature for a long time. Major carriers here were advertising it as active and available for at least a year before it was actually available.
Not for everyone in many places. Many carriers still only allow VoLTE for a limited alow-list of phone models. Any customers of those with less popular models still gets dropped to 3G calls.
I can't speak to your specific setup, but if the two SIMs use different carriers then they will often need to use different frequencies. A phone could in theory use twice as many radios, but the emitted power limits would be the same, so you'd have reduced range or throughout for each (plus additional size, weight and power for the second radio). Access points have different SWaP budgets than phones.
When I travel, I try to use an eSIM that uses a network my home provider partners with. This seems to improve the chance that voice and data over LTE or 5G NR work simultaneously.
Dumb question: If the limit is L, why do regulators care if I have one device with two radios each outputting L or if I have two devices each with one radio outputting L. Either way, total output is 2L.
What is the objective?
* To limit range? Then regulators shouldn't care about 2 radios in one device outputting L, as long as one radio doesn't output 2L.
* To avoid cooking nearby electronics and people? How do they account for the unpredictable, theoretically limitless number of devices in an area? What about someone working in a cell phone store or passengers on a Tokyo train at rush hour? Do regulators just set L low enough that any realstic number of devices together is safe?
Usually, the exposure limit is based on an active phone next to an ear. RF field strength falls off with the square of distance, so a phone on each side of your head is most dangerous to the respective ear and bits of your brain close to your skull; each phone is considered acceptably safe to the middle of your brain and the opposite ear.
An additional radio would raise the price of your phone for at least another 200 or 300 dollars. Try to enable VoLTE if available for your operator. That makes the phone use the LTE connection for voice and don't drop the Internet connection while you talk.
I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.
A non-linear cost for a small fraction of the phone. A slightly larger PCB with twice the layers is about twice the price for the PCB, more antennas is a couple dollars, a one lane PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC. And if it shrinks your battery 10% you save money on that part.
I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.
> PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC
perhaps you're more familiar with these options than I am, but I see 4 lane PCIe switches are 10x10 mm and maybe they are a few dollars but take more board space, new/larger power supplies, etc so it seems that the costs are more than just a few dollar PCIe switch chip. not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2 but definitely looking forward to learning more.
add to the antennas are likely based on best/cheapest efficiency for the available area, then additional antenna would reduce the area for each and require more effort/cost.
It won't, but the pre-made platform solution you pick and the prompt you send to Chinese ODM who do all the hard work must specify it has to be (DSDA|DSDV|DSDS|DSSS), or otherwise it'll default to DSDS.
It depends on the phone. The rule of thumb in the past for typical dual-SIM phones was nG on the first SIM, n-1G on the second. Then, after you encounter that for the first time, you make sure that your next phone has a baseband that supports nG on both SIMs, although with 5G it's become a bit blurred, typically 5+4 or 4+4, not that that makes any difference (5 vs 4 I mean).
How much data do the scanners really send backwards and forwards?
I feel like a lot of the problems people try to solve with wifi and dozens of access points could be better solved by a 450MHz-ish transceiver up on the roof with a downfire turnstile, and 9600bps radio modems in everything.
I'm going to embroider some red hats, going to put on them "MAKE SLOTTED ALOHA GREAT AGAIN".
> We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point
Those two are the same thing, though!
Literally nobody is hitting those insane theoretical transmission speeds. Heck, most access points don't even have the uplink for it. So why bother? Easy: because it provides you margin. A 10Gbps link degrading to 100Mbps due to poor signal quality is a lot better than a 1Gbps link degrading to 10Mbps when you are trying to achieve that 20Mbps connection. The expectation is that your signal will degrade, so it is all about starting with a good-enough spec that you'll still have a reasonably-usable connection left at the end.
It's a similar story for multi-client connectivity. A 10Gbps link might sound overkill for a 500Mbps residential internet connection, until you've got legacy and poor-signal-quality clients taking of 95% of the airtime for 5Mbps of data. Being able to still get enough data through that remaining 5% airtime to saturate your internet connection is incredibly useful.
And before you praise DECT too much: its 2020 revision allows for a 1.2 Gbit/s transfer rate, with all the fancy stuff like MIMO and beamforming you might know from Wifi. Quite excessive for a few simple phone calls, wouldn't you think?
I understand the question and the environment you're alluding to re RF noise and AP distance from clients, etc. in a warehouse environment.
By default clients will always try to connect at the highest wifi standard and link rate, regardless of that connection type's qos level.
I've not seen an AP setup where the wifi standard (a, b, g, N, 5, 7, ...), channel size (20 vs 40mhz), channel, and in some cases speed stepping, couldn't be forced at the AP.
If you force the APs to only broadcast G, each on a specific channel, (literally just an example for discussion) the clients will connect that way if the device radio supports it,while re-using existing auth credentials. No client-side changes are necessary here and thus easy to test. I've encountered device radios that are only 5GHz, but that'd be clear in your testing.
Regarding user's opinions, they may claim to need the latest and greatest but in real life if their network use only needs megabits and the connection type satisfies that, they don't notice.
I have already limited the "warehouse" SSID to 2.4GHz, 20MHz channel size and made an optimized channel plan that keeps the neighboring APs on channels manually chosen for minimum overlap. Anything else?
Speed stepping? Reducing the wifi standard looses features like roaming hints and stuff like that, no?
Yeah it sucks. But it will always be a dance. And the folks that make the clients will always choose “best effort”. Sadly, we can only reduce clients decision so far before things break
Your first paragraph is possible now with most enterprise 802.11ac equipment (Cisco, Aruba, Mist, Ruckus, etc) but it needs to be properly designed, placed, and configured.
DECT is a different frequency and is much less vulnerable to nearby metal, backscatter and so on.
You need to get someone in there who is competent at wi-fi design (I am only marginally so, but I’ve done a lot of learning by failing)
It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
It's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
Incidentally I ran cat6 to a few locations but its so thick and stiff I kinda regret it. The internet seems to think 5a is more than enough and 6 was a waste.
I did this five years ago, and it's been great. My wired access points are still Wi-Fi 6 and I've got no inclination to upgrade them yet, connectivity has been near-bulletproof.
Not theory, this is literally just how it works. Only one device can transmit on a WiFi channel at any given moment. A whole lot of the WiFi standard is just dealing with scheduling multiple clients wanting to transmit on the same channel at the same time.
The more clients you have on the same channel, the less bandwidth they all get (effectively). Using wires where you can will improve wireless for everyone else, including your neighbors.
Thinking of installing cameras and need power, so at least PoE seems like a proper reason to run Cat 6 in 2026. Otherwise, I'd just invent a 12/24/48V power protocol and still having to do per-device WiFi setup.
A few years ago, for some reason my ISP began to screw up my WiFi. Tech support could not help; I had at least two devices showing the same symptoms; at one point I even shut down my home connection out of frustration. I could only think of two possibilities: that there had been some kind of security event that tripped their security AI and was blocking my WiFi (and inexplicably leaving all Ethernet connections unhindered.) Second possibility: they were deliberately (but deniably) messing with my WiFi access at home so that I would use more mobile data. In fact a salesman told me that would be a logical move. Except it was affecting my Chromebook too.
So my only choice was to purchase a third-party router/WiFi. I did not want to make the network more complex, but if my ISP router couldn't provide WiFi, it would need to happen.
So now I have a working WiFi 7 router, and my ISP's device is permanently in Bridge Mode. I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of little cable staples, and I nailed up an Ethernet cable from the router to the bedroom. There are 3 desk positions in here that can be reached by Ethernet cable.
Unfortunately, if I am out on the balcony, I normally need to use WiFi, because I can't fully shut the door when a cable is snaking out of it. Also, I picked up a little USB-C-Ethernet dongle for my phone, if worse comes to worst. The bandwidth is great; besides, my downstream is only 100Mbps, so who needs overpowered LAN bandwidth?
I have a 10gbit LAN running over fiber with Mikrotik switches and cheapo Intel NICs. Works fine, and it makes remote disks quite a bit nicer than when they are over 1gbit.
It works, but kind of inconvenient for things that aren't desktops... or you need a switch with sfp to act as a media converter everywhere you have devices.
And I have cat5 in my walls that was installed 25 years ago (way before it was my house)... That gets me to 10g everywhere I tried, so no reason to pull anything else.
The switches are very cheap though. I put fibre in my house (simply because the cable is far far thinner and easier to retrofit under carpets etc).
I got a few 2.5Gbit switches which have 4 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 2 10Gbit SPF+, they cost around $30 off AliExpress.
I don't actually have any devices with 10gigE but it's not a huge amount more for 10gig ones (and no doubt will get a lot cheaper with the new lower power 10gige chips).
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
For a while I had wireless mesh networking in my new house, until I finally got around to pulling fiber to get a proper 10Gbps backbone. Upgrading from my UniFi WiFi6E AP to a WiFi 7 doubled my effective throughput as measured by SpeedTest. This in a 1930s house with solid brick construction.
I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.
> What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware
I think this is spot on. On a Banana Pi Pro 4E, the vendor supplied image which carries custom patches supports MLD/MLO, yet when I try the latest upstream OpenWRT it doesn't work. I've not had too much time to investigate the reason(s) why.
Its not really implemented yet. The various router vendors are still working on fully implementing the chipset and there is trickle of patches still coming from Filogic development on the chipset making there way into the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT.
There is also the issue few client devices implement at this point as well and certainly nothing that is mobile in nature on the sales pitch of "it costs power".
For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP.
Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.
(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought
Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
And how stably. Ours works amazing (many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver), but then it will die for a few minutes probably once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed :-)
Yeah I get occasional dropouts in the setup I installed at my mum's place too.
And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.
As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
It’s been around for quite some time. I assumed it would be known around here. The lowest level is 100 Mbps and I keep telling people on Reddit that 100 Mbps is plenty for so many use cases. I wouldn’t install it on a new plant, but if it’s there, use it.
Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless.
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
Interesting, I don't really have downtime with my OpenWRT setup. Probably because I don't really touch the setup once it's there, other than occasionally doing the firmware updates.
I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.
For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.
What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support).
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
Wouldn't it make more sense then to ask about high bandwidth channel support rather than frequency support? It's not the frequency that's important here.
Yes exactly. Also with MLO (bonding eg 5GHz and 6GHz) together on WiFi 7 you could get 480MHz of spectrum, which would allow many gigabits quite "easily".
Only problem is firmware support etc is somewhere between non existent and very poor in general for MLO, which is a shame as it's definitely a great feature in theory.
Well you can run any bandwidth at any frequency, I get that the WiFi specs define set bands which include both a center frequency and a bandwidth but it's a bit weird then to focus on the frequency when the bandwidth is what matters isn't it? I assume there are products which can operate on frequencies around 6GHz but which don't support the extreme wide band channels?
These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.
The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.
The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.
Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading
I feel like this is the same problem USB and bluetooth have, where there are so many optional extras, that it's so hard to truly compare devices since a standard is actually like 100 standards packaged together.
In typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7.
Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business.
Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors.
There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.
On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
Consistent latency is generally more important for gaming than low latency. If I had to pick between a baseline of 8ms but with enough spikes to > 200ms to bring the average to 30ms, or a consistent 90ms with no spikes or dips, I would certainly choose the latter.
Hey, that was a great comment about homoiconicity and {code} in C. It's nuts that it got killed, apparently because you said you used an LLM. HN (among others) is in the grip of hysteria on the issue.
Thanks, I did put a decent amount of time into that. I couldn't get any model to one shot a truly homoiconic C, it took some coaxing, even from SOTA models. Maybe I caught a length based flag or something too, since it was fairly long. Oh well, I tried.
>> But with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
With real devices I get something like 1.8GBit/s with less than 2 meters between the stuff. Which is far from maximum but who cares, it is still great.
Are we not yet at a point where we could have a truly global network that uses multiple technologies and mediums to keep a user always connected?
Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
It's possible using overlay networks but other than that there has been no progress on that front. The routing table updates would overwhelm the system. Ipv6 does nothing to address device roaming. There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it.
Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
There's a great hyper-sci-fi RPG setting called Numenera, set a billion years in the future, that has this cool little concept of a "datasphere", as in analogous to atmosphere, an omnipresent permanent connectivity network.
Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
Sacrificing bandwidth for range and reliability would be a welcome change, but I’ve far passed the point where all news about Wifi just strikes me as marketing bullshit.
Stop chasing everything. Stop and give me true open source repos for the Wi-Fi chips and drivers so the already well-established community can care for my router for the next 20 years. Force this into the spec.
Wifi is a weird one, consumer devices arrive very quickly (often times before the standard is finalized). You can expect devices as early as next year.
I don't change phones every 3 years though, and my current AP/router is 8 years old. The only reason I got a new one is that I didn't have one with a VDSL modem built in, which we needed in our new flat. If the first devices ship in 2027 then widespread adoption is probably more like 2033 for people that routinely upgrade for fun and 2038 (or 2³¹ unix time) for those who aren't into tech
Dumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)?
Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible.
Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers?
This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G standard (early 2030s per the article)?
It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
That's purely a software problem that stems from typical usecase. There's no technical reason preventing phone users from selecting the network to connect to. It's just that currently a SIM serves that purpose.
My semi educated guess is because different kinds of people sit on the two different standards boards, so you get siloed specs with the cross sharing of some good ideas. You could ask a similar question about HDMI vs thunderbolt.
The real reason why 5G and Wifi are separate is because one is licensed spectrum, and the other is unlicensed spectrum.
I'm not talking about legal differences- laws can always be changed- but rather how bandwidth is allocated. The biggest benefits of cellular comes from:
Verizon owns/controls channel
↓
gNB decides:
"You transmit here."
"You transmit here."
"You get 20 MHz."
"You get these time slots."
So at the end of the day, even if you take all the fancy expensive 5G hardware and software algos and shove them into the wifi standard, you still won't get the benefits of 5G.
And furthermore, the unlicensed spectrum problem is complex. "Anyone transmitting" includes Bluetooth devices, and Zigbee, and many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec.
>The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency
So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
My phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m)
The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious:
> .he on
> select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10;
reportId|c
123|227
> select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was
Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit exists
It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.
Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file).
If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.
> all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client
That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.
232 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadModern wifi is fast enough that using cables is often not required.
There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
I do kind of want to play with this.
Your old devices won’t magically get more reliable because WiFi 8 comes out. You will benefit from this after it comes out by migrating to WiFi 8.
Meanwhile, you can benefit from existing reliability enhancements by upgrading to WiFi 6.
If your response to that is ‘I can’t use WiFi 6’ then presumably the putative benefits of WiFi 8 are even more remote.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.
For example, with the 1% duty cycle limit it is totally fine to have a transmission take 30 seconds - provided you only send 1 transmission an hour. Want to send one transmission per minute? You'll have to get your transmission time down to 0.6 seconds. And your transmission speed is inherently linked to your data rate, and by extension your signal range.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution possible here. Either the user has to give it some information about their specific use case, or it'll have to stick to the absolute most pessimistic limits.
If you need consistent MB range traffic for cameras I wouldn’t advise it but for low (5kbs) traffic it can be attractive. A few thousand bits can encode quite a bit of information. Don’t be fooled by the “kbs”.
Really there should be a world wide 900-1000MHz ISM band.
I was so excited when I discovered it a few months back after struggling for years to set up reliable wifi for outdoor robotics, only to realize we can't have nice things. The struggle continues.
Seriously. Only rich nerds in SAN FRANCISCO are using it.
The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better.
Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
RF is a weird world.
DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.
Sometimes we forget that for the communication to be reliable, signal must flow both ways. Clients will happily connect to far away APs, but won't be reliably heard back.
Solution is to use more APs and lower their radio tx power. A lot of customers push back on the approach because they have only one gaming router monstrosity in their country home and it works perfectly, not understanding that their downtown office with 150 devices have nothing in common.
You have a bunch base stations forming a logical channel with a single uplink frequency, and either a single downlink frequency on which every base station is precisely synchronised in frequency and time (simulcast), or multiple downlink frequencies (a multicast system).
A comparator selects, or votes, the highest quality signal from the base receivers based on either lowest noise or lowest BER, and then repeats that through all of the base transmitters simultaneously.
At the same time, in a multicast system, the mobile scans for and selects the base transmitter with either the highest RSSI or lowest BER.
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
It will still try to roam, it will still cause issues.
A lot of the roaming logic is in the clients. Newer android and iOS versions have gotten better but there are tons of old and new devices with poor roaming logic and capabilities.
But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.
I don't think I trust 5G for sub-second critical tasks either...
The AVM Fritz product line of consumer modem/routers all include a DECT modem for registering extra handsets for voice but they have their own proprietary handsets that support TCP/IP over DECT for things like audio streaming or sending extra media like a caller photo.
That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.
I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.
The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.
You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.
Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.
It's under 5G standard but for non-cellular connectivity that means you can use it without base-station like Wi-Fi direct. It's geared toward IoT but its data rates are from 1 Mbps up to 1.3 Gbps depending on the operating frequency and the type of modulation being used [2].
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comnents):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644
[2] Technology: DECT NR+ [pdf]:
https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-...
Support for VoWiFi is a bit weird. Some operators don't allow it outside of your region (for example, the EU), some others will allow it and even bill you as if it were a local call made from your country.
Also, although it's in theory made only for working through WiFi, seems like if you have a second SIM or eSIM with a data plan (for example, a travel SIM local for the country you're on vacations) and some combination of phone and/or operators, it can use the second SIM as the data provider for WiFi Calling.
I was using a Samsung S5 running LineageOS for a while with Google voice for calls, but the no 911 thing is one of the main reasons I finally moved to a different phone. The S5 supports VoLTE but only with stock firmware.
When I travel, I try to use an eSIM that uses a network my home provider partners with. This seems to improve the chance that voice and data over LTE or 5G NR work simultaneously.
Dumb question: If the limit is L, why do regulators care if I have one device with two radios each outputting L or if I have two devices each with one radio outputting L. Either way, total output is 2L.
What is the objective?
* To limit range? Then regulators shouldn't care about 2 radios in one device outputting L, as long as one radio doesn't output 2L.
* To avoid cooking nearby electronics and people? How do they account for the unpredictable, theoretically limitless number of devices in an area? What about someone working in a cell phone store or passengers on a Tokyo train at rush hour? Do regulators just set L low enough that any realstic number of devices together is safe?
I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.
perhaps you're more familiar with these options than I am, but I see 4 lane PCIe switches are 10x10 mm and maybe they are a few dollars but take more board space, new/larger power supplies, etc so it seems that the costs are more than just a few dollar PCIe switch chip. not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2 but definitely looking forward to learning more.
[1] https://www.diodes.com/products/connectivity/pcie-packet-swi...
add to the antennas are likely based on best/cheapest efficiency for the available area, then additional antenna would reduce the area for each and require more effort/cost.
You are clearly out of your league. Get some 20 y/o flip Motorola, disassemble it and think, think hard.
No, 'PCIe switches' has nothing to do with the smartphones at all - so their PCB real estate do not indicate anything.
no. Too expensive.
I feel like a lot of the problems people try to solve with wifi and dozens of access points could be better solved by a 450MHz-ish transceiver up on the roof with a downfire turnstile, and 9600bps radio modems in everything.
I'm going to embroider some red hats, going to put on them "MAKE SLOTTED ALOHA GREAT AGAIN".
Those two are the same thing, though!
Literally nobody is hitting those insane theoretical transmission speeds. Heck, most access points don't even have the uplink for it. So why bother? Easy: because it provides you margin. A 10Gbps link degrading to 100Mbps due to poor signal quality is a lot better than a 1Gbps link degrading to 10Mbps when you are trying to achieve that 20Mbps connection. The expectation is that your signal will degrade, so it is all about starting with a good-enough spec that you'll still have a reasonably-usable connection left at the end.
It's a similar story for multi-client connectivity. A 10Gbps link might sound overkill for a 500Mbps residential internet connection, until you've got legacy and poor-signal-quality clients taking of 95% of the airtime for 5Mbps of data. Being able to still get enough data through that remaining 5% airtime to saturate your internet connection is incredibly useful.
And before you praise DECT too much: its 2020 revision allows for a 1.2 Gbit/s transfer rate, with all the fancy stuff like MIMO and beamforming you might know from Wifi. Quite excessive for a few simple phone calls, wouldn't you think?
By default clients will always try to connect at the highest wifi standard and link rate, regardless of that connection type's qos level.
I've not seen an AP setup where the wifi standard (a, b, g, N, 5, 7, ...), channel size (20 vs 40mhz), channel, and in some cases speed stepping, couldn't be forced at the AP.
If you force the APs to only broadcast G, each on a specific channel, (literally just an example for discussion) the clients will connect that way if the device radio supports it,while re-using existing auth credentials. No client-side changes are necessary here and thus easy to test. I've encountered device radios that are only 5GHz, but that'd be clear in your testing.
Regarding user's opinions, they may claim to need the latest and greatest but in real life if their network use only needs megabits and the connection type satisfies that, they don't notice.
DECT is a different frequency and is much less vulnerable to nearby metal, backscatter and so on.
You need to get someone in there who is competent at wi-fi design (I am only marginally so, but I’ve done a lot of learning by failing)
Wi-Fi: general-purpose, massively interoperable LAN radio → let the client make decisions.
DECT: purpose-built cordless mobility system → tightly specify the radio, handset/base-station behaviour and handover mechanisms.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS).
Works great!
Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
The more clients you have on the same channel, the less bandwidth they all get (effectively). Using wires where you can will improve wireless for everyone else, including your neighbors.
So my only choice was to purchase a third-party router/WiFi. I did not want to make the network more complex, but if my ISP router couldn't provide WiFi, it would need to happen.
So now I have a working WiFi 7 router, and my ISP's device is permanently in Bridge Mode. I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of little cable staples, and I nailed up an Ethernet cable from the router to the bedroom. There are 3 desk positions in here that can be reached by Ethernet cable.
Unfortunately, if I am out on the balcony, I normally need to use WiFi, because I can't fully shut the door when a cable is snaking out of it. Also, I picked up a little USB-C-Ethernet dongle for my phone, if worse comes to worst. The bandwidth is great; besides, my downstream is only 100Mbps, so who needs overpowered LAN bandwidth?
And I have cat5 in my walls that was installed 25 years ago (way before it was my house)... That gets me to 10g everywhere I tried, so no reason to pull anything else.
I got a few 2.5Gbit switches which have 4 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 2 10Gbit SPF+, they cost around $30 off AliExpress.
I don't actually have any devices with 10gigE but it's not a huge amount more for 10gig ones (and no doubt will get a lot cheaper with the new lower power 10gige chips).
Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
That's how I read it at least.
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
I think this is spot on. On a Banana Pi Pro 4E, the vendor supplied image which carries custom patches supports MLD/MLO, yet when I try the latest upstream OpenWRT it doesn't work. I've not had too much time to investigate the reason(s) why.
There is also the issue few client devices implement at this point as well and certainly nothing that is mobile in nature on the sales pitch of "it costs power".
A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.
Rock solid and reliable networking =)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
> MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
Only problem is firmware support etc is somewhere between non existent and very poor in general for MLO, which is a shame as it's definitely a great feature in theory.
These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.
The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.
The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.
Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading
I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?
Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi...
There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.
On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
IIRC siri uses it and iOS (maybe macOS too?) exposes it to app developers.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-multipath/
> Last updated 2026-08-13
What is "it" referring to? The speed? Or the upgrade?
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....
Atheros (now Qualcomm) released its firmware source: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
I have many, many these dongles :)
Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible.
Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers?
This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G standard (early 2030s per the article)?
It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
I'm not talking about legal differences- laws can always be changed- but rather how bandwidth is allocated. The biggest benefits of cellular comes from:
Wifi needs to follow listen-before-talk rules: So at the end of the day, even if you take all the fancy expensive 5G hardware and software algos and shove them into the wifi standard, you still won't get the benefits of 5G.Such as microwave ovens (although my microwave oven does indeed follow the 802.11 spec)
So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..
The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious:
Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit existsIf it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.