3 ms·

I hate wifi issues so much, specially when you stream audio.

by brainzap 4y ago

wizofaus 4y ago
Definitely my biggest bugbear with relying in streaming for music - it's the one thing I use apple hardware for (apple tv) and I can't even sync music to it anymore, plus there's no ability to control buffering that's worked so far. So I'm stuck with listening to music knowing it might stutter at any moment...
Nextgrid 4y ago
The main problem is that OSes do a terrible job at reporting Wi-Fi performance. RSSI is a very poor metric by itself, yet is all that's driving the wireless signal strength indicator. Most wireless links are constantly in a barely working mode that's only made usable by TCP and various retransmission/error-correction algorithms on top, so a lot of connections that people think are "fine" (especially when the signal strength meter is maxed out) are actually not fine at all. There is no magic and those workarounds don't work for real-time streams such as calls/games/etc, so those "fine" connections will crap out miserably as soon as users jump on a call or game. I'm not sure if there's a way for the OS to get any more info about the link quality/stability from the network card itself, but a purely software-level workaround could be to just track all TCP sessions (should be easy, as that's already managed by the kernel), average the percentage of retransmissions across all of them (to prevent a single bad server from skewing the result) and factor that into the "signal strength" meter. An easy way to test this yourself is to run a ping towards your default gateway (the IP of your router). You should see a consistently low latency (in the low single-digits range) and no packet loss. If you're seeing losses or significant variation in response times, your connection is bad and you should do something about it (get closer to the AP or install a second one).

3 ms·

I hate wifi issues so much, specially when you stream audio.

by brainzap 4y ago

I hate wifi issues so much, specially when you stream audio.

wizofaus 4y ago
Definitely my biggest bugbear with relying in streaming for music - it's the one thing I use apple hardware for (apple tv) and I can't even sync music to it anymore, plus there's no ability to control buffering that's worked so far. So I'm stuck with listening to music knowing it might stutter at any moment...
Nextgrid 4y ago
The main problem is that OSes do a terrible job at reporting Wi-Fi performance. RSSI is a very poor metric by itself, yet is all that's driving the wireless signal strength indicator. Most wireless links are constantly in a barely working mode that's only made usable by TCP and various retransmission/error-correction algorithms on top, so a lot of connections that people think are "fine" (especially when the signal strength meter is maxed out) are actually not fine at all. There is no magic and those workarounds don't work for real-time streams such as calls/games/etc, so those "fine" connections will crap out miserably as soon as users jump on a call or game. I'm not sure if there's a way for the OS to get any more info about the link quality/stability from the network card itself, but a purely software-level workaround could be to just track all TCP sessions (should be easy, as that's already managed by the kernel), average the percentage of retransmissions across all of them (to prevent a single bad server from skewing the result) and factor that into the "signal strength" meter. An easy way to test this yourself is to run a ping towards your default gateway (the IP of your router). You should see a consistently low latency (in the low single-digits range) and no packet loss. If you're seeing losses or significant variation in response times, your connection is bad and you should do something about it (get closer to the AP or install a second one).