3 ms·

For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s compl

For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway. At this juncture, interference and noise are more of the problem with WiFi today. It’s not larger bands capable of faster speeds. We need more spectrum to mitigate interference and provide more landscape for multiple AP’s in tight geographical spaces to CO-exist without competing too much for airspace. Bonding 80Mhz channels for 500+ Mbps is overkill and hogs airspace. 40Mhz channels are more than adequate for 90% of devices out there if that channel is stable and free from congestion. I’m super against the FCC granting more spectrum only for routers/APs manufacturers to default to hogging more chunks of the airspace. It’s a race to the same shitty experience we see today. We should parcel out chunks that are allowed for high channel bonding, leaving the rest of the space to max out at single 40 MHz bands.

Nextgrid 7y ago
Can't the spectrum be allocated dynamically, so routers don't "hog airspace" unless someone is actually using it and their TCP connection is actually going up to those speeds?
- slovette 7y ago
  Well... that’s about software and less about spectrum and the regulation of it. The problem is the box in the aisle of BestBuy that say “FAST 2.5 Gig WiFi” sells better than “Dynamic Signaling” so the incentive to just make really crappy radios that have more throughout outweighs the incentive to actually make decent and smart software defined radios. That’s why I think the FCC needs to just set some band rules. They do this already in the commercial WISP space.
  - ksec 7y ago
    >For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway. Yes I thought it was clear with the WiFi 6E mention, but turns out not everyone is up to date with things as shown in other replies, so I apologies for the confusion. I agree with everything you said, but my opinion is it should be down to Wifi to enforce Dynamic Signalling as mandatory in WiFi 6 ( too late now may be WiFi 7 ) spec rather than having regulation. And I thought OFDMA is part of the solution? If I remember correctly that is what the WiFi 7 / 802.11be committees were looking into. But then again judging from their Opera happening in WiFi 6 I am not too sure if they are capable of doing it. I live in a high density urban living area and my MacBook currently reads at least 20 AP excluding their 5GHz naming counterparts. So I do feel the pain with crappy WiFi.
- Cerium 7y ago
  We could put a requirement that your signal have a certain meaningful information density.
- bcrl 7y ago
  That's exactly how wifi works. If there's no data to be transferred, the radio's transmitter is off and it is not using the spectrum. That said, periodic beacons and keepalives defined in various protocols will cause data to be sent from time to time.
  - labawi 7y ago
    Interpreting an SSID closes to me, with 0 activity (noone connects there). According to wireshark, beacon takes 516µs at 6Mbit/s with 40 beacons/s, which equals 500e-6 * 40 = 0.02 = 2% airtime goes to a single SSID with 0 traffic. Typical settings are 10 beacon/s which would be 0.5%, but 2.4Ghz has 1Mbit/s default rate, so about 3%. With 20 idle SSIDs on 2.4Ghz with default settings, roughly 50% of airtime is spent on SSID broadcast.

Nextgrid 7y ago

Can't the spectrum be allocated dynamically, so routers don't "hog airspace" unless someone is actually using it and their TCP connection is actually going up to those speeds?

slovette 7y ago
Well... that’s about software and less about spectrum and the regulation of it. The problem is the box in the aisle of BestBuy that say “FAST 2.5 Gig WiFi” sells better than “Dynamic Signaling” so the incentive to just make really crappy radios that have more throughout outweighs the incentive to actually make decent and smart software defined radios. That’s why I think the FCC needs to just set some band rules. They do this already in the commercial WISP space.
- ksec 7y ago
  >For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway. Yes I thought it was clear with the WiFi 6E mention, but turns out not everyone is up to date with things as shown in other replies, so I apologies for the confusion. I agree with everything you said, but my opinion is it should be down to Wifi to enforce Dynamic Signalling as mandatory in WiFi 6 ( too late now may be WiFi 7 ) spec rather than having regulation. And I thought OFDMA is part of the solution? If I remember correctly that is what the WiFi 7 / 802.11be committees were looking into. But then again judging from their Opera happening in WiFi 6 I am not too sure if they are capable of doing it. I live in a high density urban living area and my MacBook currently reads at least 20 AP excluding their 5GHz naming counterparts. So I do feel the pain with crappy WiFi.
Cerium 7y ago
We could put a requirement that your signal have a certain meaningful information density.
bcrl 7y ago
That's exactly how wifi works. If there's no data to be transferred, the radio's transmitter is off and it is not using the spectrum. That said, periodic beacons and keepalives defined in various protocols will cause data to be sent from time to time.
- labawi 7y ago
  Interpreting an SSID closes to me, with 0 activity (noone connects there). According to wireshark, beacon takes 516µs at 6Mbit/s with 40 beacons/s, which equals 500e-6 * 40 = 0.02 = 2% airtime goes to a single SSID with 0 traffic. Typical settings are 10 beacon/s which would be 0.5%, but 2.4Ghz has 1Mbit/s default rate, so about 3%. With 20 idle SSIDs on 2.4Ghz with default settings, roughly 50% of airtime is spent on SSID broadcast.