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This article is so awesome! I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones o
by milankragujevic 6y ago
This article is so awesome!
I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1 802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.
Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.
Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz the PHY rate drops to <100 Mbps, so in those cases I recommend 802.11n 40MHz on 5GHz band.
The AP/Router/Modem combo that all the ISPs give in my country is very much capable of fast WiFi. It has 4x4 MIMO at 802.11ac with 80MHz + 2x2 MIMO at 802.11n up to 40 MHz (I always tell people to avoid 40 MHz on 2.4GHz band!).
On a good phone, this gets you around 600 Mbps with 867 Mbps PHY, on a cheaper device, between 250 and 290 Mbps on 433 Mbps PHY. Devices with 4x4 can get 1.7Gbps PHY, but I do not have any.
This does not stop people from complaining about the free modem they get, demand it is put into bridge mode, buy an ASUS router for >400€, and get the same result. Some (smartly) return the router they bought right away, and request the ISP put the device back into routing mode, but some keep the useless and expensive trophy of stupidity...
- Dahoon 6y agoI'd rather have that ASUS stupidity trophy than a backdoored router, which pretty much all of them are when from an ISP. Not many of them (none?) even care to update regularly.
- milankragujevic 6y agoYou can pretty easily disable the backdoors with the backdoor admin account I discovered by extracting the firmware from the TR069 ACS server, and posted on my blog. You have a TR069 interface that operates on a VLAN, you can disable that interface and it does not have the ability to contact the ISP or be contacted (this is not DOCSIS, I'm talking about GPON or xDSL). In general all ISP combo devices are firewalled off from the WAN side, don't reply to pings and no open ports. If there was a kernel network stack bug, you can't bypass that with your own router, unless it's xDSL in which case you can buy ANY compatible modem and use it with the PPPoE login you can extract from your ISP combo device using instructions on my blog. If it's GPON you can't do anything, it's a full Huawei system (ONT and OLT) and it needs to authorize with a serial number over OMCI, which you cannot replicate cheaply. You can use a MikroTik router and a Huawei SFP+ transceiver, but that is too expensive to justify it for moderate-level geeks :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- glogla 6y agoIn my case, the ISP router (combined with cable modem) and my own router (Turris Omnia) are about as fast when they work. But the ISP device is really unreliable - my work laptop can do 3x3 and that causes the router to lock up. It also "smartly looks for least used channel" which can't be turned off in the ui, and causes few minute long disconnects every hour or so. Oh and it overheats and restarts when you load it with a lot of packets, like with BitTorrent or video call with five people. The router is very much worth it.
- milankragujevic 6y agoYes, it can be worth it, but not to people who I tell this. The fact you know how to configure the Omnia or even any custom OS-based router means this wouldn't apply to you. These are basic users who needlessly waste money on something that scammy sellers tell them will fix their WiFi, but it doesn't, because the problem is not the router but the device. It's less a geek or teenager and more your i.e. tech-illiterate parents[1] that I tell this to. [1] not implying all parents are tech-illiterate, it's a cliche and mean stereotype, I mean "tech illiterate person", but mention this cliche to be clearer