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Deeply uninspiring. 5Ghz gets blocked by the thinnest brick walls. We all live in castles in Europe so 5Ghz practically only works line-of-sight. Makes it pret

Deeply uninspiring. 5Ghz gets blocked by the thinnest brick walls. We all live in castles in Europe so 5Ghz practically only works line-of-sight. Makes it pretty expensive and cable-intensive to deploy [well] in a large building. It's also disheartening when a new standard comes out and device manufacturers flock to replace all their old single-radio, single-antenna devices with shiny new... single-radio, single-antenna devices. Wave2/MU-MIMO should be a base requirement. Is there any progress on improving longer band wifi? Ie sub-2.4GHz, or 2.4GHz coordination between masts so devices can actually roam well?

walshemj 7y ago
Yes that's how it works in professional installations you want a lot of AP's that don't overlap and using 5Ghz makes this simpler than using 2.4Ghz 5Ghz Also has lot more non overlapping channels. Just use Powerline for your DS
- oliwarner 7y ago
  What's the "that" in "that's how it works"? 5GHz APs in every room? I'm not saying that 5GHz doesn't have benefits, just that many of them are hard to exploit when you have real walls.
  - gburdell3 7y ago
    They do indeed have 5GHz APs in almost every room in most commercial installations in the US.
  - duelingjello 7y ago
    Using higher GHz is all about selling more hardware. Let’s use 500 GHz so you have to have one in ever corner of every room to work. And don’t breathe or take a shower because that will block the signal.
zamadatix 7y ago
Single antenna devices make sense for a lot of small/low power devices. Not to say manufacturers don't just cheap out sometimes though :). 802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency in the short term. I have a 5 year bet going with another guy in the office that he won't be able to get a client and an AP with it by 2022 (i.e. he thought manufacturers would jump on it, I thought it was going to fizzle and 6/24/60 GHz would have the hardware action). So far it's looking like I'm going to win that lunch. There is also some talk about refreshing the 3.7 GHz space but I'm not sure that'll happen and if it did it'd probably be a ways out before real world impact (if ever). As far as improving 2.4 all of the roaming standards improvements work in it and Wi-Fi 6 works in it. It's really no different than 5 GHz/6 GHz in that regard it just has a bunch of shitty legacy clients to compete with which is amplified by the fact it penetrates farther.
- ac29 7y ago
  > 802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency 900MHz is pretty nice for the 1-10mi range (this is what I do for my day job), but it never really made sense to me as part of the WiFi umbrella for that reason. Its also got a bit of a chicken/egg problem - without the correct antennas and chipsets in devices, its useless in an AP and vice-versa. 2/5Ghz have been around since 802.11a/b days, so continuing to iterate on those bands makes more sense.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Curious what you work on in the 900 MHz space :). I come from enterprise Healthcare so it's mostly about connecting very new consumer type devices and very old pieces of shit. I think the 802.11 group wanted to offer low to mid speed Ethernet/IP + traditional wireless security managed the same as the rest of the devices which makes some sense I just didn't (and still don't) think the types of devices using 900 MHz care about fitting in that mold enough to adopt. Pretty much everything 900 MHz has the chicken and egg scenario on hardware/protocol right now so I didn't/don't count that in my reasoning. There's not really a single protocol that has a large number of products deployed in a large number of verticals where you can safely say "we'll just attach to the existing 900 MHz radio at the customer site". Some protocols at some verticals yes but not enough that choice is locked in due to chicken/egg blocking changes. Overall though while 802.11 is going to continue iterating 2.4/5 they are heavily interested in offering Wi-Fi in basically any unrestricted frequency. Moving extremely high bandwidth things to 60 GHz, moving low bandwidth things to 900 MHz, moving new clients to 6 GHz. They've come to realize they can come up with the coolest protocol in the world but there is only so much you can do with the 60 MHz of space in 2.4 when devices with wireless N chips are still being sold. There are even talks with hardware vendors looking at interest in the 50 MHz of space in the 3.7 range for things that should be 2.4 but 2.4 is too crowded. . Edit: I just realized out of all of that babbling I never said why I didn't think 900 MHz Wi-FI would take off. They made some protocol changes to make it reasonable to use at low bandwidth long range but not enough. That combined with the desire for long range Wi-Fi itself already being niche almost guaranteed hardware manufacturers weren't going to be very interested. I think there was a company in France that actually started sampling some AH hardware but it's only partial spec and very low bandwidth.

walshemj 7y ago

Yes that's how it works in professional installations you want a lot of AP's that don't overlap and using 5Ghz makes this simpler than using 2.4Ghz 5Ghz Also has lot more non overlapping channels. Just use Powerline for your DS

oliwarner 7y ago
What's the "that" in "that's how it works"? 5GHz APs in every room? I'm not saying that 5GHz doesn't have benefits, just that many of them are hard to exploit when you have real walls.
- gburdell3 7y ago
  They do indeed have 5GHz APs in almost every room in most commercial installations in the US.
- duelingjello 7y ago
  Using higher GHz is all about selling more hardware. Let’s use 500 GHz so you have to have one in ever corner of every room to work. And don’t breathe or take a shower because that will block the signal.

zamadatix 7y ago

Single antenna devices make sense for a lot of small/low power devices. Not to say manufacturers don't just cheap out sometimes though :). 802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency in the short term. I have a 5 year bet going with another guy in the office that he won't be able to get a client and an AP with it by 2022 (i.e. he thought manufacturers would jump on it, I thought it was going to fizzle and 6/24/60 GHz would have the hardware action). So far it's looking like I'm going to win that lunch. There is also some talk about refreshing the 3.7 GHz space but I'm not sure that'll happen and if it did it'd probably be a ways out before real world impact (if ever). As far as improving 2.4 all of the roaming standards improvements work in it and Wi-Fi 6 works in it. It's really no different than 5 GHz/6 GHz in that regard it just has a bunch of shitty legacy clients to compete with which is amplified by the fact it penetrates farther.

ac29 7y ago
> 802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency 900MHz is pretty nice for the 1-10mi range (this is what I do for my day job), but it never really made sense to me as part of the WiFi umbrella for that reason. Its also got a bit of a chicken/egg problem - without the correct antennas and chipsets in devices, its useless in an AP and vice-versa. 2/5Ghz have been around since 802.11a/b days, so continuing to iterate on those bands makes more sense.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Curious what you work on in the 900 MHz space :). I come from enterprise Healthcare so it's mostly about connecting very new consumer type devices and very old pieces of shit. I think the 802.11 group wanted to offer low to mid speed Ethernet/IP + traditional wireless security managed the same as the rest of the devices which makes some sense I just didn't (and still don't) think the types of devices using 900 MHz care about fitting in that mold enough to adopt. Pretty much everything 900 MHz has the chicken and egg scenario on hardware/protocol right now so I didn't/don't count that in my reasoning. There's not really a single protocol that has a large number of products deployed in a large number of verticals where you can safely say "we'll just attach to the existing 900 MHz radio at the customer site". Some protocols at some verticals yes but not enough that choice is locked in due to chicken/egg blocking changes. Overall though while 802.11 is going to continue iterating 2.4/5 they are heavily interested in offering Wi-Fi in basically any unrestricted frequency. Moving extremely high bandwidth things to 60 GHz, moving low bandwidth things to 900 MHz, moving new clients to 6 GHz. They've come to realize they can come up with the coolest protocol in the world but there is only so much you can do with the 60 MHz of space in 2.4 when devices with wireless N chips are still being sold. There are even talks with hardware vendors looking at interest in the 50 MHz of space in the 3.7 range for things that should be 2.4 but 2.4 is too crowded. . Edit: I just realized out of all of that babbling I never said why I didn't think 900 MHz Wi-FI would take off. They made some protocol changes to make it reasonable to use at low bandwidth long range but not enough. That combined with the desire for long range Wi-Fi itself already being niche almost guaranteed hardware manufacturers weren't going to be very interested. I think there was a company in France that actually started sampling some AH hardware but it's only partial spec and very low bandwidth.