802.11 AC “wave 2” was a pretty important step up, using mu-mimo. Then nothing of interest happened with Wi-Fi 6. 6e just added 6ghz, which is good but you hit the problem of cost versus compatibility. There simply are not many 6ghz capable devices yet, so the argument is kind of a wash.
Wi-Fi 7 just dropped, again, with minimal changes.
Wi-Fi 8 I’m sure will be similar.
And all of the extra speed you could get from your fancy pants Wi-Fi 6/7/8/whatever router is pretty much negated by the early 802.11ac (or earlier) devices hanging out on your network, pulling the basic rate down as far as the router will allow so that the majority of the available airtime is spent sending broadcasts and beacons.
I work with technology for a living and honestly, the last two really exciting things I saw in wifi were mu-mimo and 6ghz being opened up. Everything else is iterative changes, and most of the speed advertisements are bullshit. It assumes perfect signal with the widest possible supported channel width with all radio chains engaged. Considering that most devices (mobile devices and laptops particularly) are either 1x1 or 2x2 for radio chains, you’ll never ever see the bandwidth advertised.
Really quickly, you need all the right things in place to get the advertised speed, 160 (or 320) MHz wide channels, good luck finding one that doesn’t have a nontrivial amount of interference on it… A sender and receiver with 3x3 or 4x4, and a clear channel with a low noise floor and no other networks or devices interfering with the signal.
Not only that, but the advertised speed is an aggregate of all of the radios at once, so rinse and repeat for each supported band.
You could go to a lot of effort to achieve all of this by basically turning your house into a Faraday cage, but even that’s not perfect and the stuff inside the house is still going to cause interference… Or you could settle for lower single link performance and just… Get a handful of access points so that the load is spread out and no single node is handling too much traffic.
I guess it has value for renters who can’t run wires. We’re probably just in a category of people who will hardwire something if bandwidth/latency matters
You see, people in rentals have more reason to want to run wires, because usually the wireless airspace in rentals is more saturated than other locations.
There’s more interfering devices and networks in an apartment buildings just simply due to the density of people. Everyone wants/needs their own Wi-Fi, and because of the relatively limited bandwidth available on all the bands, you’re very likely to be stomping on someone else or have them stomp on you.
I actually knew a guy who took the time to hack into all of his neighbors Wi-Fi networks to change everyone’s wireless channel settings so that he would have a clearer Wi-Fi channel for himself. This was back in the mid to late 2010s some time. That person has since relocated, and they never had any malicious intent for the people they “hacked” into. Either way, the fact that he felt like he needed to do it is the point. There’s a lot of networks and a lot of interference in those situations.
The irony is that if everyone put up a couple of access points at relatively low power each, then they would interfere less with their neighbors, and with their neighbors doing the same, they would be interfered with less, and everyone would have a better time with it. I don’t think I’ve met someone besides myself, who didn’t buy the biggest and most powerful Wi-Fi router they could, and crank the amplitude up to 11 just to push signal through walls and overpower the signals coming from their neighbors. With everyone doing this, is a race to see who has the most powerful Wi-Fi to drown out everyone else. These two ideas are in direct conflict with eachother.
I ran two wireless N access points when I lived in an apartment. I identified pretty early on that there was a wet wall in the middle of my unit, in the kitchen, which sat between the bedrooms and the living room. The washroom had a different wet wall, and that was in the corner of the unit, so no problems there. I basically placed one access point on each side of the wet wall, one in the living room, the other in the bedroom, and enabled all of the roaming features I possibly could. I didn’t really ever notice any trouble switching between access points on my phone while moving around the place, so the two acted as a single network, and I never had an issue with dead spots. The system I used also monitored channel usage, and would change the wifi channels if the channel got busy, so I didn’t really have any trouble with people interfering with me. It wasn’t the fastest, but neither was the Internet, we only got about 50mbps service there.
By all accounts, apartments should be the one place that needs alternatives the most, but I have yet to find any apartment that has Ethernet built in.
That’s fair. The Wi-Fi problem of everyone dogpiling everything onto it, needs to be solved for. We either need to make it easier for people to use alternatives, or we’re going to continue to see growing demand for more Wi-Fi spectrum allocations that will never quite be enough.
Powerline holds promise if they can get the technology to a functional level where each household can get setup with powerline in such a way that it works adequately, and is cheap/easy for end users. then the tech industry would need to basically build the standard into power supplies. Even power units for cellphones, tablets, laptops, etc, could have powerline integrated so you’re off Wi-Fi while charging, and the power brick would operate a bit like a USB connected charging dock…
But all of this is based on an easy to deploy, consumer friendly way to add powerline networking that doesn’t suck… So far, the companies making powerline adapters have not solved that problem.
802.11 AC “wave 2” was a pretty important step up, using mu-mimo. Then nothing of interest happened with Wi-Fi 6. 6e just added 6ghz, which is good but you hit the problem of cost versus compatibility. There simply are not many 6ghz capable devices yet, so the argument is kind of a wash.
Wi-Fi 7 just dropped, again, with minimal changes.
Wi-Fi 8 I’m sure will be similar.
And all of the extra speed you could get from your fancy pants Wi-Fi 6/7/8/whatever router is pretty much negated by the early 802.11ac (or earlier) devices hanging out on your network, pulling the basic rate down as far as the router will allow so that the majority of the available airtime is spent sending broadcasts and beacons.
I work with technology for a living and honestly, the last two really exciting things I saw in wifi were mu-mimo and 6ghz being opened up. Everything else is iterative changes, and most of the speed advertisements are bullshit. It assumes perfect signal with the widest possible supported channel width with all radio chains engaged. Considering that most devices (mobile devices and laptops particularly) are either 1x1 or 2x2 for radio chains, you’ll never ever see the bandwidth advertised.
Really quickly, you need all the right things in place to get the advertised speed, 160 (or 320) MHz wide channels, good luck finding one that doesn’t have a nontrivial amount of interference on it… A sender and receiver with 3x3 or 4x4, and a clear channel with a low noise floor and no other networks or devices interfering with the signal.
Not only that, but the advertised speed is an aggregate of all of the radios at once, so rinse and repeat for each supported band.
You could go to a lot of effort to achieve all of this by basically turning your house into a Faraday cage, but even that’s not perfect and the stuff inside the house is still going to cause interference… Or you could settle for lower single link performance and just… Get a handful of access points so that the load is spread out and no single node is handling too much traffic.
I’ve been working in tech too long.
I guess it has value for renters who can’t run wires. We’re probably just in a category of people who will hardwire something if bandwidth/latency matters
You see, people in rentals have more reason to want to run wires, because usually the wireless airspace in rentals is more saturated than other locations.
There’s more interfering devices and networks in an apartment buildings just simply due to the density of people. Everyone wants/needs their own Wi-Fi, and because of the relatively limited bandwidth available on all the bands, you’re very likely to be stomping on someone else or have them stomp on you.
I actually knew a guy who took the time to hack into all of his neighbors Wi-Fi networks to change everyone’s wireless channel settings so that he would have a clearer Wi-Fi channel for himself. This was back in the mid to late 2010s some time. That person has since relocated, and they never had any malicious intent for the people they “hacked” into. Either way, the fact that he felt like he needed to do it is the point. There’s a lot of networks and a lot of interference in those situations.
The irony is that if everyone put up a couple of access points at relatively low power each, then they would interfere less with their neighbors, and with their neighbors doing the same, they would be interfered with less, and everyone would have a better time with it. I don’t think I’ve met someone besides myself, who didn’t buy the biggest and most powerful Wi-Fi router they could, and crank the amplitude up to 11 just to push signal through walls and overpower the signals coming from their neighbors. With everyone doing this, is a race to see who has the most powerful Wi-Fi to drown out everyone else. These two ideas are in direct conflict with eachother.
I ran two wireless N access points when I lived in an apartment. I identified pretty early on that there was a wet wall in the middle of my unit, in the kitchen, which sat between the bedrooms and the living room. The washroom had a different wet wall, and that was in the corner of the unit, so no problems there. I basically placed one access point on each side of the wet wall, one in the living room, the other in the bedroom, and enabled all of the roaming features I possibly could. I didn’t really ever notice any trouble switching between access points on my phone while moving around the place, so the two acted as a single network, and I never had an issue with dead spots. The system I used also monitored channel usage, and would change the wifi channels if the channel got busy, so I didn’t really have any trouble with people interfering with me. It wasn’t the fastest, but neither was the Internet, we only got about 50mbps service there.
By all accounts, apartments should be the one place that needs alternatives the most, but I have yet to find any apartment that has Ethernet built in.
This is all true but I guess I was more thinking who would the market would be for faster short range speeds more than who would actually benefit
That’s fair. The Wi-Fi problem of everyone dogpiling everything onto it, needs to be solved for. We either need to make it easier for people to use alternatives, or we’re going to continue to see growing demand for more Wi-Fi spectrum allocations that will never quite be enough.
Powerline holds promise if they can get the technology to a functional level where each household can get setup with powerline in such a way that it works adequately, and is cheap/easy for end users. then the tech industry would need to basically build the standard into power supplies. Even power units for cellphones, tablets, laptops, etc, could have powerline integrated so you’re off Wi-Fi while charging, and the power brick would operate a bit like a USB connected charging dock…
But all of this is based on an easy to deploy, consumer friendly way to add powerline networking that doesn’t suck… So far, the companies making powerline adapters have not solved that problem.