8 ms·

802.eleventy what? Why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

159 points by adunk 9y ago

JPLeRouzic 9y ago
I dropped out ouf the 802.11 business a few years ago but it seems I am still relevant, after all the article is about 802.11ac, not something about 802.11ax. On the technical side I agree with most of what the author says, but it is only a part of the larger picture. -First I did my own tests of 802.11ac in 2014 and the manufacturers were correct in their claims at that time. You have to understand that the best speed is when you are in ideal radio conditions and simply you are never in ideal conditions and most of the time you are even far from the ideal case. - Second, 802.11 sucks but not about raw speed, the MAC layer of most chip implementations is often ultra simplified and the outcome is that it is difficult to be authentified. This is strange as the Wi-Fi chip most often is a little computer and the MAC is implemented in software. - Third, there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? - Fourth: Your phone has more hard time to cope with that throughput, than the Wi-Fi chip has. Android and Linux in general have many internal buffers because there are layers in charge of different features. The usable throughput is the raw radio throughput divided by the number of buffers. There are research OSes which use pointers instead of buffers, but Linux and Windows use buffers.
- jimrandomh 9y ago
  > The usable throughput is the raw radio throughput divided by the number of buffers. This is not true. Buffers can under some circumstances increase latency, or cause a TCP connection to take longer to get to its steady-state speed, but they don't hurt steady-state throughput unless something else is very wrong.
  - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
    You are talking of yet another issue which is real and is related to the way TCP detects a congestion, but this is not specific to Wi-Fi. There are also problems of interoperability between TCP/IP and the Wi-Fi MAC layer, some of them could trigger congestion algorithms, but as the MCDU gets larger and larger this should not be a problem nowadays. Indeed it is a bit strange to have MCDU that are 64k large and IP packets that are 1.5k large. What I discussed was the way the buffers are in series inside the OS, this is known since a long time. A modern operating system throughput could be 5 to 9 faster than Linux: https://www.usenix.org/node/186147 https://www.usenix.org/node/186147
- ajross 9y ago
  > there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? Honestly the big reason mobile radios are more reliable is that they're allowed to transmit at like 20x the power of devices in the ISM band. That's not a cost thing, it's just a regulatory issue steming from (some rather outdated) concerns about interference in the shared environment. I mean, it's true that wifi is sort of a mess. Marketing of the standards has gotten way ahead of real world hardware capability (frankly MIMO as it stands is basically voodoo snakeoil that provides no consumer benefit whatsoever). But it's no less complicated than all the junk going on in LTE either. Everything's a mess. Wifi continues to have the extraordinary advantages of being privately deployable, performant, pervasive, and standard (i.e. ethernet-framed, so everything Just Works the way everyone expects). It's not going anywhere.
  - JPLeRouzic 9y ago
    I completely agree.
  - freyr 9y ago
    > frankly MIMO as it stands is basically voodoo snakeoil that provides no consumer benefit whatsoever Curious why you say this. In the last few years, I've seen a significant increase in PHY data rate when using multiple spatial streams.
    - dmourati 9y ago
      I bought the snake oil in the form of a high end Ubiquiti WAP. Waiting for myco to issue me a new MBP touch bar so I can test it out.
      - freyr 9y ago
        Yeah, it's not snake oil. There are only a couple reasons it wouldn't work: you're in an unusual and unfortunate indoor environment with insufficient reflectors, or the modem designers were incompetent. Barring those things, you'll get a faster connection.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Third, there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? How are customers supposed to know what "economically reasonable" expectations are if suppliers are flat out making claims they can't deliver? Imagine you're planning a trip to City X, you look online and four-star hotels with brands you've heard of quote $75 a night. If you turn up and it's not a four-star hotel, is it your fault because you had "unreasonable economic expectations"? Should you somehow have known that the going rate for a four-star hotel room was $500 a night, when half a dozen reputable suppliers were offering the same thing at a fraction of the cost? Seems to me it's not your fault - you've been a victim of fraud.
  - bsamuels 9y ago
    dont think i've ever seen packaging that advertised that a router works well in a crowded environment
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      And the hotel didn't advertise that they weren't in the ghetto.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      At least on the outside of the packaging, I don't think the vast majority talk about spectrum over allocation. Of course many issues like that could be solved if APs shipped with their signal strength on low rather than blasted to the FCC limits. But I don't think we'll see that changed any time soon.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      Unknown unknowns. Does the average consumer even understand that contention is an issue? All the average person sees is the number of bars in their wifi connection UI, which AFAIK doesn't take contention into account, only signal strength.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  > Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? I would be happy with any kind of reliability for a mobile chipset in reasonable radio conditions. Too often, I have to turn off WiFi to get basic connectivity happening. 4G/LTE connections are way better. It would be nice if Apple detected a bad WiFi connection and fell back to cell, but it seems they haven't figured out that trick yet.
  - jrullman 9y ago
    Have you tried using the Wi-Fi Assist feature? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296
    - acdha 9y ago
      The problem isn't the fallback to cellular but the function it uses to detect whether the WiFi is actually working. It works if there's a gross network failure but fails to detect networks which have packet loss, captive portal pages which cannot be loaded, etc. With the exception of captive portal pages, this isn't specific to the WiFi implementation either – the cellular stack is just as broken. As far as I can tell, this comes down to two problems: the most obvious technical challenge is the difficulty of detecting soft failures rather than hard failures. What they need to implement is a hard timeout which resets the connection state if the remote end fails to respond correctly within a set interval. I encounter this regularly commuting on the subway or taking underground tunnels between buildings; toggling airplane mode is the only way to get it to accept that the base station (WiFi or cellular) it was talking to 1500 feet back is never going to start responding. The social problem appears to be that nobody considers this a keynote demo feature and so it hasn't advanced beyond iOS 1.0 despite years of bug reports.
      - angry_octet 9y ago
        Even an app which you could program yourself would be excellent. It seems the system has equal belief in the reliability of all wifi networks, in terms of sticking with them. I'd like to give good reputation to my home wifi, but any new wifi should start with low reputation. And anything with a captive portal, you really want your phone to connect via 3G every few minutes to see if the connection is filtered.
runn1ng 9y ago
Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790871
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
choward 9y ago
If wifi sucks then how do you describe Bluetooth?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cbhl 9y ago
  Bluetooth (and BLE) optimizes for a different set of constraints: low cost, low power. It performs terribly if you have thousands of devices in a small room (basically any conference or convention).
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
    Or if you make the mistake of changing all of your light bulbs for Bluetooth LED light bulbs. Have to fight to turn on the damn lights on all the time.
  - choward 9y ago
    I have never had a Bluetooth headset that doesn't sometimes cut out when my phone is in my pocket.
  - X-Istence 9y ago
    My Apple Watch battery drains in hours when I forget to place it in Airplane mode when I am at a convention. Soooo many Bluetooth devices in one place makes it very unhappy.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Really really sucks
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
airesQ 9y ago
WiFi doesn't have an easy life either: - It needs to work on unlicensed spectrum, which means that it has to play well with all manner of devices that contend for this spectrum (e.g. other WiFi devices, Bluetooth, IEEE802.15.4). In practice this means that it cannot do much beyond CSMA/CA (i.e. the 'listen before talking' thing). CSMA/CA is a terrible contention mechanism for high density scenarios, and before long much of the air-time is taken by collisions. LTE does not have this problem, it works on licensed spectrum, as such, an LTE base station can just divide the time/spectrum blocks and allocate them to the various contending devices as it pleases (as it owns the spectrum), making almost optimal use of the spectrum that is available to it. 802.11ax will improve on this a bit (e.g. it will have OFDMA, which reduces the collision domain; it will allow the AP do to some coordination, via 'trigger' frames) - Wifi has a lot of luggage; IEEE 801.11ax will be backward compatible with tens of billions of devices going all the way to IEEE 802.11b, which came out in 1999. - Costumers don't like spending all that much money on Wifi. This cost-pressure means that we don't have as many people looking into WiFi as we should (people writing drivers; people debugging problems; radio engineers; investment in testing equipment). - MIMO (introduced in 802.11n), downstream MU-MIMO (introduced in 802.11ac), and upstream MU-MIMO (to be introduced in 802.11ax) are all technically impressive, but also very hard to implement well. (But we are now starting to see the benefits of this, particularly the 802.11ac wave2 devices.) Anyway, I have high hopes for WiFi, well beyond a billion WiFi chips are sold every year, and it is getting better all the time.
- m-j-fox 9y ago
  Yeah. If your neighbor has one 802.11b device and your router sees it on its channel then it has to get out of it's way, dragging your whole Network into the pits. If you detect anything older than 802.11n, change channels or start knocking on doors.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    It's extremely annoying as some devices /only/ support B. They're quite legacy at this point, but some people still use older Nintendo handhelds that infamously only work on 802.11b with /very/ 'compatibility minded' options. IMO the entire 2.4ghz public spectrum block should be viewed as for legacy support. However far more spectrum should go to limited range use. (Also, building walls should have filter meshes that absorb frequencies not designed for use with mobile computer to cell towers / GPS).
jumpkickhit 9y ago
I'm curious about "AX" coming up. Uses 2.4/5ghz bands, just more channels apparently. "AD" i think is 60ghz, which doesn't penetrate walls too well in comparison. Who knows, maybe we'll all use special wifi wall paint in the future, just to make the entire inside of the house or business an antenna.
petra 9y ago
I'm curious: what do mmWave means for WiFi ? How ideally for consumers should we regulate it ? And could we achieve, maybe at the lower end of mmWave, an unlicensed alternative that competes well with LTE, in urban spaces?
- zmb_ 9y ago
  Millimetre wave Wi-Fi (60 GHz) does not penetrate walls and in practice needs line of sight and beam-forming antennas. The scenarios it is good for are things like docking stations, or connecting mostly stationary devices within line-of-sight to each other in the same room. Definitely not suitable for anything like LTE scenarios.
m-j-fox 9y ago
I used to work on the 4x4 mu-mimo chip. The way we tested was to connect coax cables from one board to another. You could get about 800MB/s out of the link that way. At home, I measured 100MB/s between two boxes in the same room and maybe 15MB/s to a laptop 3 rooms away. The only way to get something better is to cheat on TX power levels. No amount of signal processing can defeat attenuation through a couple of walls.
xenadu02 9y ago
I really want to use Plume... but I don't want my WiFi network to depend on "the cloud". I don't see any reason they should need to upload data about my private internal network to their servers. It means I can't trust them. If they ever went out of business, got acquired, or otherwise shut the service down I'd be left with a bunch of bricks too. Does anything else do the same kind of mesh dynamic frequency allocation, but without requiring any kind of cloud service?
ryanlol 9y ago
So how does one set up a LTE network in their home? :)
- westbywest 9y ago
  If you're handy with software defined radios: https://github.com/Microsoft/OTP4LTE-U https://github.com/Microsoft/OTP4LTE-U
rayiner 9y ago
What a weird article. My MBP gets 600 Mbps in my living room where my AirPort Extreme is, and around 300 Mbps in the bedroom above it. Both are like four years old. Newer APs are getting to the point where the GigE uplink port is the bottleneck, and consumer 10g hardware is non-existent. What exactly "sucks" about it?
- Nition 9y ago
  I feel like people who write these articles live in houses with two desktop PCs, four laptops, six smartphones, and 15 IoT devices all connected all the time. That sort of setup really does cause problems. The rest of us live in a world with a couple of computers and a couple of phones and maybe a game console or TV connected and everything is fine.
  - paulfurtado 9y ago
    It could also just be in a densely settled area. When I lived in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, I purchased a brand new top of the line router for my parents in the suburbs, but did all the configuration at my apartment. When testing in my apartment, 2.4ghz couldn't move more than 5mbps. At my parents' house, it had no trouble pushing 120mbps+. From my apartment, something like 40 2.4ghz wireless networks were visible.

159 points by adunk 9y ago

I dropped out ouf the 802.11 business a few years ago but it seems I am still relevant, after all the article is about 802.11ac, not something about 802.11ax. On the technical side I agree with most of what the author says, but it is only a part of the larger picture. -First I did my own tests of 802.11ac in 2014 and the manufacturers were correct in their claims at that time. You have to understand that the best speed is when you are in ideal radio conditions and simply you are never in ideal conditions and most of the time you are even far from the ideal case. - Second, 802.11 sucks but not about raw speed, the MAC layer of most chip implementations is often ultra simplified and the outcome is that it is difficult to be authentified. This is strange as the Wi-Fi chip most often is a little computer and the MAC is implemented in software. - Third, there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? - Fourth: Your phone has more hard time to cope with that throughput, than the Wi-Fi chip has. Android and Linux in general have many internal buffers because there are layers in charge of different features. The usable throughput is the raw radio throughput divided by the number of buffers. There are research OSes which use pointers instead of buffers, but Linux and Windows use buffers.

jimrandomh 9y ago
> The usable throughput is the raw radio throughput divided by the number of buffers. This is not true. Buffers can under some circumstances increase latency, or cause a TCP connection to take longer to get to its steady-state speed, but they don't hurt steady-state throughput unless something else is very wrong.
- JPLeRouzic 9y ago
  You are talking of yet another issue which is real and is related to the way TCP detects a congestion, but this is not specific to Wi-Fi. There are also problems of interoperability between TCP/IP and the Wi-Fi MAC layer, some of them could trigger congestion algorithms, but as the MCDU gets larger and larger this should not be a problem nowadays. Indeed it is a bit strange to have MCDU that are 64k large and IP packets that are 1.5k large. What I discussed was the way the buffers are in series inside the OS, this is known since a long time. A modern operating system throughput could be 5 to 9 faster than Linux: https://www.usenix.org/node/186147 https://www.usenix.org/node/186147
ajross 9y ago
> there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? Honestly the big reason mobile radios are more reliable is that they're allowed to transmit at like 20x the power of devices in the ISM band. That's not a cost thing, it's just a regulatory issue steming from (some rather outdated) concerns about interference in the shared environment. I mean, it's true that wifi is sort of a mess. Marketing of the standards has gotten way ahead of real world hardware capability (frankly MIMO as it stands is basically voodoo snakeoil that provides no consumer benefit whatsoever). But it's no less complicated than all the junk going on in LTE either. Everything's a mess. Wifi continues to have the extraordinary advantages of being privately deployable, performant, pervasive, and standard (i.e. ethernet-framed, so everything Just Works the way everyone expects). It's not going anywhere.
- JPLeRouzic 9y ago
  I completely agree.
- freyr 9y ago
  > frankly MIMO as it stands is basically voodoo snakeoil that provides no consumer benefit whatsoever Curious why you say this. In the last few years, I've seen a significant increase in PHY data rate when using multiple spatial streams.
  - dmourati 9y ago
    I bought the snake oil in the form of a high end Ubiquiti WAP. Waiting for myco to issue me a new MBP touch bar so I can test it out.
    - freyr 9y ago
      Yeah, it's not snake oil. There are only a couple reasons it wouldn't work: you're in an unusual and unfortunate indoor environment with insufficient reflectors, or the modem designers were incompetent. Barring those things, you'll get a faster connection.
michaelt 9y ago
Third, there are unreasonable economic expectations by users as well as the article's author: Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? How are customers supposed to know what "economically reasonable" expectations are if suppliers are flat out making claims they can't deliver? Imagine you're planning a trip to City X, you look online and four-star hotels with brands you've heard of quote $75 a night. If you turn up and it's not a four-star hotel, is it your fault because you had "unreasonable economic expectations"? Should you somehow have known that the going rate for a four-star hotel room was $500 a night, when half a dozen reputable suppliers were offering the same thing at a fraction of the cost? Seems to me it's not your fault - you've been a victim of fraud.
- bsamuels 9y ago
  dont think i've ever seen packaging that advertised that a router works well in a crowded environment
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    And the hotel didn't advertise that they weren't in the ghetto.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    At least on the outside of the packaging, I don't think the vast majority talk about spectrum over allocation. Of course many issues like that could be solved if APs shipped with their signal strength on low rather than blasted to the FCC limits. But I don't think we'll see that changed any time soon.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    Unknown unknowns. Does the average consumer even understand that contention is an issue? All the average person sees is the number of bars in their wifi connection UI, which AFAIK doesn't take contention into account, only signal strength.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vinceguidry 9y ago
> Wait you want gigabit speeds, ultra-reliability in challenging radio conditions, and that at a tenth of the cost of a 3G mobile radio? I would be happy with any kind of reliability for a mobile chipset in reasonable radio conditions. Too often, I have to turn off WiFi to get basic connectivity happening. 4G/LTE connections are way better. It would be nice if Apple detected a bad WiFi connection and fell back to cell, but it seems they haven't figured out that trick yet.
- jrullman 9y ago
  Have you tried using the Wi-Fi Assist feature? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296
  - acdha 9y ago
    The problem isn't the fallback to cellular but the function it uses to detect whether the WiFi is actually working. It works if there's a gross network failure but fails to detect networks which have packet loss, captive portal pages which cannot be loaded, etc. With the exception of captive portal pages, this isn't specific to the WiFi implementation either – the cellular stack is just as broken. As far as I can tell, this comes down to two problems: the most obvious technical challenge is the difficulty of detecting soft failures rather than hard failures. What they need to implement is a hard timeout which resets the connection state if the remote end fails to respond correctly within a set interval. I encounter this regularly commuting on the subway or taking underground tunnels between buildings; toggling airplane mode is the only way to get it to accept that the base station (WiFi or cellular) it was talking to 1500 feet back is never going to start responding. The social problem appears to be that nobody considers this a keynote demo feature and so it hasn't advanced beyond iOS 1.0 despite years of bug reports.
    - angry_octet 9y ago
      Even an app which you could program yourself would be excellent. It seems the system has equal belief in the reliability of all wifi networks, in terms of sticking with them. I'd like to give good reputation to my home wifi, but any new wifi should start with low reputation. And anything with a captive portal, you really want your phone to connect via 3G every few minutes to see if the connection is filtered.

runn1ng 9y ago

Past discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790871

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

choward 9y ago

If wifi sucks then how do you describe Bluetooth?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cbhl 9y ago
Bluetooth (and BLE) optimizes for a different set of constraints: low cost, low power. It performs terribly if you have thousands of devices in a small room (basically any conference or convention).
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  Or if you make the mistake of changing all of your light bulbs for Bluetooth LED light bulbs. Have to fight to turn on the damn lights on all the time.
- choward 9y ago
  I have never had a Bluetooth headset that doesn't sometimes cut out when my phone is in my pocket.
- X-Istence 9y ago
  My Apple Watch battery drains in hours when I forget to place it in Airplane mode when I am at a convention. Soooo many Bluetooth devices in one place makes it very unhappy.
tomcam 9y ago
Really really sucks

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

airesQ 9y ago

WiFi doesn't have an easy life either: - It needs to work on unlicensed spectrum, which means that it has to play well with all manner of devices that contend for this spectrum (e.g. other WiFi devices, Bluetooth, IEEE802.15.4). In practice this means that it cannot do much beyond CSMA/CA (i.e. the 'listen before talking' thing). CSMA/CA is a terrible contention mechanism for high density scenarios, and before long much of the air-time is taken by collisions. LTE does not have this problem, it works on licensed spectrum, as such, an LTE base station can just divide the time/spectrum blocks and allocate them to the various contending devices as it pleases (as it owns the spectrum), making almost optimal use of the spectrum that is available to it. 802.11ax will improve on this a bit (e.g. it will have OFDMA, which reduces the collision domain; it will allow the AP do to some coordination, via 'trigger' frames) - Wifi has a lot of luggage; IEEE 801.11ax will be backward compatible with tens of billions of devices going all the way to IEEE 802.11b, which came out in 1999. - Costumers don't like spending all that much money on Wifi. This cost-pressure means that we don't have as many people looking into WiFi as we should (people writing drivers; people debugging problems; radio engineers; investment in testing equipment). - MIMO (introduced in 802.11n), downstream MU-MIMO (introduced in 802.11ac), and upstream MU-MIMO (to be introduced in 802.11ax) are all technically impressive, but also very hard to implement well. (But we are now starting to see the benefits of this, particularly the 802.11ac wave2 devices.) Anyway, I have high hopes for WiFi, well beyond a billion WiFi chips are sold every year, and it is getting better all the time.

m-j-fox 9y ago
Yeah. If your neighbor has one 802.11b device and your router sees it on its channel then it has to get out of it's way, dragging your whole Network into the pits. If you detect anything older than 802.11n, change channels or start knocking on doors.
- mjevans 9y ago
  It's extremely annoying as some devices /only/ support B. They're quite legacy at this point, but some people still use older Nintendo handhelds that infamously only work on 802.11b with /very/ 'compatibility minded' options. IMO the entire 2.4ghz public spectrum block should be viewed as for legacy support. However far more spectrum should go to limited range use. (Also, building walls should have filter meshes that absorb frequencies not designed for use with mobile computer to cell towers / GPS).

jumpkickhit 9y ago

I'm curious about "AX" coming up. Uses 2.4/5ghz bands, just more channels apparently. "AD" i think is 60ghz, which doesn't penetrate walls too well in comparison. Who knows, maybe we'll all use special wifi wall paint in the future, just to make the entire inside of the house or business an antenna.

petra 9y ago

I'm curious: what do mmWave means for WiFi ? How ideally for consumers should we regulate it ? And could we achieve, maybe at the lower end of mmWave, an unlicensed alternative that competes well with LTE, in urban spaces?

zmb_ 9y ago
Millimetre wave Wi-Fi (60 GHz) does not penetrate walls and in practice needs line of sight and beam-forming antennas. The scenarios it is good for are things like docking stations, or connecting mostly stationary devices within line-of-sight to each other in the same room. Definitely not suitable for anything like LTE scenarios.

m-j-fox 9y ago

I used to work on the 4x4 mu-mimo chip. The way we tested was to connect coax cables from one board to another. You could get about 800MB/s out of the link that way. At home, I measured 100MB/s between two boxes in the same room and maybe 15MB/s to a laptop 3 rooms away. The only way to get something better is to cheat on TX power levels. No amount of signal processing can defeat attenuation through a couple of walls.

xenadu02 9y ago

I really want to use Plume... but I don't want my WiFi network to depend on "the cloud". I don't see any reason they should need to upload data about my private internal network to their servers. It means I can't trust them. If they ever went out of business, got acquired, or otherwise shut the service down I'd be left with a bunch of bricks too. Does anything else do the same kind of mesh dynamic frequency allocation, but without requiring any kind of cloud service?

ryanlol 9y ago

So how does one set up a LTE network in their home? :)

westbywest 9y ago
If you're handy with software defined radios: https://github.com/Microsoft/OTP4LTE-U https://github.com/Microsoft/OTP4LTE-U

rayiner 9y ago

What a weird article. My MBP gets 600 Mbps in my living room where my AirPort Extreme is, and around 300 Mbps in the bedroom above it. Both are like four years old. Newer APs are getting to the point where the GigE uplink port is the bottleneck, and consumer 10g hardware is non-existent. What exactly "sucks" about it?

Nition 9y ago
I feel like people who write these articles live in houses with two desktop PCs, four laptops, six smartphones, and 15 IoT devices all connected all the time. That sort of setup really does cause problems. The rest of us live in a world with a couple of computers and a couple of phones and maybe a game console or TV connected and everything is fine.
- paulfurtado 9y ago
  It could also just be in a densely settled area. When I lived in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, I purchased a brand new top of the line router for my parents in the suburbs, but did all the configuration at my apartment. When testing in my apartment, 2.4ghz couldn't move more than 5mbps. At my parents' house, it had no trouble pushing 120mbps+. From my apartment, something like 40 2.4ghz wireless networks were visible.