8 ms·

EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consumer broadband hubs

85 points by beardyw 3y ago

vkdelta 3y ago
Wifi 7 consumer routers are already available. This is just Qualcomm partnering with a service provider where they typically less well known on wireline broadband side. All of this was pretty much Broadcom business previously.
snalty 3y ago
I don't think the Openreach ONT is going away for BT FTTP customers any time soon, so for now you are free to just plug whatever router you want into your ONT.
- gandalfian 3y ago
  Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
  - wolrah 3y ago
    > Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service. If you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use any other VoIP provider of your choice.
  - garblegarble 3y ago
    Is that different from the landline service they offer directly from the ONT? My Openreach ONT has a telephone jack as well as the RJ45. I've never actually used the telephone jack, but I'd imagine I would get a voip-backed fake dial tone if I did?
    - ta1243 3y ago
      I used to have BT Broadband FTTP in a previous house, which had a bidirectional fibre into a box of some sort, which was battery powered, and went into another box which emerged as a telephone jack, and an RJ45. This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power and service for a landline in a power cut. My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client, username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old password ("BTSux" for example)
  - Daviey 3y ago
    Emotive language such as "eccentrically" is strange considering the decline in landline subscribers, and even less usage of an actual landline. If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider? This is a good summary of the decline: https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/ https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/
    - snuxoll 3y ago
      > If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider? So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute. I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of choice means you don't have to worry separately about battery backup because regulations usually require they provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
    - gandalfian 3y ago
      Yes Daviey, those of use using a telephone in the traditional way are a diminishing number. Hence passively becoming eccentric... Not as much as the person riding a penny farthing but slowly heading that way. To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...
      - 3y ago
  - ta1243 3y ago
    For FTTP (or indeed FTTC) my ISP will sell a voip bundle for £3 a month or something on top. You just plug in a phone, maybe stick it on it's own VLAN if you want. There's plenty of other voip providers too.
pzo 3y ago
> Wi-Fi 6's comparable maximum rate is 9.6Gbps. There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust and overall latency possibly reduced. I'm definitely looking forward for WiFi 7
- sp332 3y ago
  And MIMO means the AP can talk to multiple such clients at the same time, even if each iPhone is only using 2x2.
- ac29 3y ago
  >Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things: Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor and are are therefore less robust Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less robust
  - pzo 3y ago
    I was more thinking if there is some frame collision and have a lot of data to send then overall robustness latency should be reduced? Similar like in a bus even if they travel at the same speed if you miss your bus or bus is full you have to wait. On the other hand if the bus is bigger with more sits or bus scheduled more frequent it's less likely you will have to wait. Also if bus breaks there is another one not far away behind to pickup passengers from broken bus.
  - eximius 3y ago
    I think I read this somewhere but I am struggling to recall where, so hopefully I didn't dream this: I believe the larger channels are much, much larger and include adaptive techniques to dynamically exclude noisy regions within channel. It can afford to entirely sacrifice bands in this way because the channels are much larger.
agloe_dreams 3y ago
What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps. The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array around it. I'm about two blocks away. Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire house between us. But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.
- bombcar 3y ago
  640Mbps should be enough for anyone! It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would get better speeds).
- ac29 3y ago
  >But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand. I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not going to be a best case test scenario.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
    Getting too close takes you out of the "far field" and into the "near field"[1] where the device just won't work at all. It's probably actually connecting via reflections from the walls if stuck right on top of the router. You need to be at least 7.5cm away from a 5Ghz router with 15cm antennas to be in the far field, and anything within about 4.5cm will be entirely inside the reactive near field (and have very poor coupling with standard antennas designed for far field use). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    My apologies, I was trying to make a bit of a joke of the context of the distance and items between the 5G signal vs the router, below the cause is explained well.
300bps 3y ago
ISP's router [...] Put it into modem mode and pass all the packets straight through to a third-party router. Best thing I ever did. Put in a Linksys Deco X55 mesh system with WiFi 6 system. Have four of them strategically placed throughout the 2,500 square foot house and have perfect coverage on a single SSID. My iPhone 13 gets a bidirectional 360 Mbps just about anywhere in the house (the limit of my $39 per month FIOS line).
throw0101c 3y ago
The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2] or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, with competition at OSI Layer 3. I think at this point 100Mbps would be the minimum, with diminishing returns once you start getting above 1Gbps (but available with XG(S)-PON(G.98(0)7)/NG-PON2(G.989)/HSP(G.9804) and 802.3ca). It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  The internet is designed for average people to suck down content, rather than create content. It's why I get 1gbps down but 35mbps up.
  - thefz 3y ago
    With 2.5Gbps I receive 600Mbit up, which is more than comfy for a home lab and for self hosting... even media. But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy does not mean other types of application could not be created if more bandwidth was available for upload. If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
corn13read2 3y ago
Generally I disagree with this sentiment. Do not wait to make a pipe bigger because it is full. We had this issue with phone lines and then CAT5 and CAT still sucks because commercial equipment is so expensive. How can the world innovate in-home technology when it's not cheap and ubiquitous. I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not just for me but for other adopters.
- RIMR 3y ago
  I agree with you that we shouldn't wait to upgrade until after we are facing constraints, but the current state of home networking is so robust that we're absolutely nowhere close to the pipe being full. I am in no way opposed to the development and deployment of Wi-Fi 7, but I do have a problem with it being marketed as a major upgrade for consumers, when the average consumer is more likely to be adversely affected by worsening radio coverage than benefit from the increased maximum speed.
giantg2 3y ago
I would rather have ethernet in every room and a less sophisticated/powerful wifi. It seems ethernet is fairly rare even in new construction.
- hk1337 3y ago
  Ethernet is how I see the full ~1Gig for up and down at home. I trust the security of ethernet over wifi more too, although at home I am less concerned on wifi.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  To be fair it's a lot less cumbersome to do yourself than a full on electrical installation. Most diy shops will sell baseboards with precut pockets for cable routing. For any reasonably hands on technical person it's a 1 or 2 day job ripping baseboards and installing new ones with CAT6 cabling behind. Of course it's definitely the sort of thing you can only get away with if you own the house.
- malfist 3y ago
  When I built my house in 2014, they told us we got 2 phone jacks that were cat5e that we could convert to ethernet if we wanted. That was the default they provided, we upgraded to 24 ports throughout the house, but I can't imagine this is common. Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house, we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade, probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
- em-bee 3y ago
  20 years ago when we renovated an old house, while the electrician was digging chases into the walls i asked him to add an extra empty pipe for ethernet next to each cable pipe. it barely cost any extra work, and later i ran the ethernet cable myself with the help of a friend. i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't worth the cost. in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up multiple wifi access points, but that's it.
samcat116 3y ago
This article has nothing to do with the next wifi version being bad, rather they're just upset EE doesn't allow bridge mode on their routers it seems.
karaterobot 3y ago
> There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. Honestly, 640kbps should be enough for anyone, if you ask me.
- dmw_ng 3y ago
  I'd imagine the priority for the service provider is new product lines built around wifi sensing rather than the marketing about bandwidth. It is /really/ hard to come up with new applications that require so much bandwidth constrained to a one room, especially given we aren't even remotely tapped out on compression fanciness for visual media in mass deployment (see e.g. the recent obscenely low bit rate videoconferencing codec work from Nvidia)
RIMR 3y ago
The only thing that Wi-Fi 7 might solve right now is powerful local and ad-hoc data transfers. 48gbps would allow for SSD-like speeds over the air. On a home network, you could back up your entire laptop in a few minutes to a NAS. With ad-hoc you could film in raw 8K, and back up everything to a battery powered storage device in a backpack in real time, without needing to be tethered. It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better reliability, not more speed. Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously, allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective signal strength and quality.
- r00fus 3y ago
  WiFi adhoc speed increases are why most people don't complain about iPhones still using USB2 wire speeds. I wonder what the AirDrop speeds would be for a WiFi 7 enabled iPhone.
tempaway28751 3y ago
In the UK supposedly they are switching off Landlines in 2025, so anyone that still wants a "landline phone" (as opposed to mobile) is going to have to do VOIP Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers are just a load of crap that crash all the time. edit: source: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-digital-landlines https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...
- yrro 3y ago
  It's already begun. The Stop Sell for Wholesale Line Rental happened this month, so you can no longer order a analogue phoen line in most areas.
two_handfuls 3y ago
Really looking forward to better wifi for better wireless VR.
aeadio 3y ago
This article is completely inept. I'm nowhere near an expert in WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over the past several years, it's easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation. > Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox. Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as, - 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells - 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better - 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients - 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective - Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions - Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better. It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load, - Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission) - Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ)) - Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA - Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime - Implicit channel sounding - Support of direct links, managed by an access point > There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy. > The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed. Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition. If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway. > It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too. And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances as their devices age out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would've been unheard of to have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi simultaneously.
mikelward 3y ago
Does this affect BT, too? Their branding is a bit of a mess at the moment.
martinald 3y ago
Maybe slightly off topic but does anyone know what's happening with powerline? It seems to have stalled out development in about 2015. G.Hn has came along but doesn't seem to offer speeds that are any better. I can get about 150mbit/sec on AV1200 adaptors and maybe double that on 300mbit/sec. It seems to me that if "WiFi 7" esque modulation techniques were used with powerline we could get far better speeds on it. For example 8x8 MIMO (AV2000 uses 2x2), with perhaps a larger frequency band would enable multigigabit over powerline?
- BenjiWiebe 3y ago
  I don't think you can do MIMO with wired stuff. Isn't it using multiple paths/polarizations to get more bandwidth? You can't do that with wired unless you run more wires. Anyways there's a lot more differences between how a wired protocol works and how a wireless protocol works. Mostly not interchangeable.
- orev 3y ago
  Powerline causes a lot of radio interference and is generally discouraged as much as possible. It should only be used as a last resort if nothing else works, including WiFi. It’s much better to use MoCa over coax and setup WiFi APs.
maurimo 3y ago
EE user in the UK here. Instead of working for Wifi 7 could you please remove roaming charges in the EU, that EE suddenly reintroduced after brexit? You're telling us our future will have Wifi 7 but also roaming charges when I travel to the EU?

85 points by beardyw 3y ago

Wifi 7 consumer routers are already available. This is just Qualcomm partnering with a service provider where they typically less well known on wireline broadband side. All of this was pretty much Broadcom business previously.

snalty 3y ago

I don't think the Openreach ONT is going away for BT FTTP customers any time soon, so for now you are free to just plug whatever router you want into your ONT.

gandalfian 3y ago
Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
- wolrah 3y ago
  > Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service. If you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use any other VoIP provider of your choice.
- garblegarble 3y ago
  Is that different from the landline service they offer directly from the ONT? My Openreach ONT has a telephone jack as well as the RJ45. I've never actually used the telephone jack, but I'd imagine I would get a voip-backed fake dial tone if I did?
  - ta1243 3y ago
    I used to have BT Broadband FTTP in a previous house, which had a bidirectional fibre into a box of some sort, which was battery powered, and went into another box which emerged as a telephone jack, and an RJ45. This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power and service for a landline in a power cut. My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client, username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old password ("BTSux" for example)
- Daviey 3y ago
  Emotive language such as "eccentrically" is strange considering the decline in landline subscribers, and even less usage of an actual landline. If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider? This is a good summary of the decline: https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/ https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/
  - snuxoll 3y ago
    > If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider? So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute. I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of choice means you don't have to worry separately about battery backup because regulations usually require they provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
  - gandalfian 3y ago
    Yes Daviey, those of use using a telephone in the traditional way are a diminishing number. Hence passively becoming eccentric... Not as much as the person riding a penny farthing but slowly heading that way. To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...
    - 3y ago
- ta1243 3y ago
  For FTTP (or indeed FTTC) my ISP will sell a voip bundle for £3 a month or something on top. You just plug in a phone, maybe stick it on it's own VLAN if you want. There's plenty of other voip providers too.

pzo 3y ago

> Wi-Fi 6's comparable maximum rate is 9.6Gbps. There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust and overall latency possibly reduced. I'm definitely looking forward for WiFi 7

sp332 3y ago
And MIMO means the AP can talk to multiple such clients at the same time, even if each iPhone is only using 2x2.
ac29 3y ago
>Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things: Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor and are are therefore less robust Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less robust
- pzo 3y ago
  I was more thinking if there is some frame collision and have a lot of data to send then overall robustness latency should be reduced? Similar like in a bus even if they travel at the same speed if you miss your bus or bus is full you have to wait. On the other hand if the bus is bigger with more sits or bus scheduled more frequent it's less likely you will have to wait. Also if bus breaks there is another one not far away behind to pickup passengers from broken bus.
- eximius 3y ago
  I think I read this somewhere but I am struggling to recall where, so hopefully I didn't dream this: I believe the larger channels are much, much larger and include adaptive techniques to dynamically exclude noisy regions within channel. It can afford to entirely sacrifice bands in this way because the channels are much larger.

agloe_dreams 3y ago

What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps. The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array around it. I'm about two blocks away. Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire house between us. But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.

bombcar 3y ago
640Mbps should be enough for anyone! It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would get better speeds).
ac29 3y ago
>But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand. I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not going to be a best case test scenario.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
  Getting too close takes you out of the "far field" and into the "near field"[1] where the device just won't work at all. It's probably actually connecting via reflections from the walls if stuck right on top of the router. You need to be at least 7.5cm away from a 5Ghz router with 15cm antennas to be in the far field, and anything within about 4.5cm will be entirely inside the reactive near field (and have very poor coupling with standard antennas designed for far field use). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  My apologies, I was trying to make a bit of a joke of the context of the distance and items between the 5G signal vs the router, below the cause is explained well.

300bps 3y ago

ISP's router [...] Put it into modem mode and pass all the packets straight through to a third-party router. Best thing I ever did. Put in a Linksys Deco X55 mesh system with WiFi 6 system. Have four of them strategically placed throughout the 2,500 square foot house and have perfect coverage on a single SSID. My iPhone 13 gets a bidirectional 360 Mbps just about anywhere in the house (the limit of my $39 per month FIOS line).

throw0101c 3y ago

The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2] or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, with competition at OSI Layer 3. I think at this point 100Mbps would be the minimum, with diminishing returns once you start getting above 1Gbps (but available with XG(S)-PON(G.98(0)7)/NG-PON2(G.989)/HSP(G.9804) and 802.3ca). It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
The internet is designed for average people to suck down content, rather than create content. It's why I get 1gbps down but 35mbps up.
- thefz 3y ago
  With 2.5Gbps I receive 600Mbit up, which is more than comfy for a home lab and for self hosting... even media. But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
- thfuran 3y ago
  The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy does not mean other types of application could not be created if more bandwidth was available for upload. If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?

corn13read2 3y ago

Generally I disagree with this sentiment. Do not wait to make a pipe bigger because it is full. We had this issue with phone lines and then CAT5 and CAT still sucks because commercial equipment is so expensive. How can the world innovate in-home technology when it's not cheap and ubiquitous. I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not just for me but for other adopters.

RIMR 3y ago
I agree with you that we shouldn't wait to upgrade until after we are facing constraints, but the current state of home networking is so robust that we're absolutely nowhere close to the pipe being full. I am in no way opposed to the development and deployment of Wi-Fi 7, but I do have a problem with it being marketed as a major upgrade for consumers, when the average consumer is more likely to be adversely affected by worsening radio coverage than benefit from the increased maximum speed.

giantg2 3y ago

I would rather have ethernet in every room and a less sophisticated/powerful wifi. It seems ethernet is fairly rare even in new construction.

hk1337 3y ago
Ethernet is how I see the full ~1Gig for up and down at home. I trust the security of ethernet over wifi more too, although at home I am less concerned on wifi.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
To be fair it's a lot less cumbersome to do yourself than a full on electrical installation. Most diy shops will sell baseboards with precut pockets for cable routing. For any reasonably hands on technical person it's a 1 or 2 day job ripping baseboards and installing new ones with CAT6 cabling behind. Of course it's definitely the sort of thing you can only get away with if you own the house.
malfist 3y ago
When I built my house in 2014, they told us we got 2 phone jacks that were cat5e that we could convert to ethernet if we wanted. That was the default they provided, we upgraded to 24 ports throughout the house, but I can't imagine this is common. Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house, we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade, probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
em-bee 3y ago
20 years ago when we renovated an old house, while the electrician was digging chases into the walls i asked him to add an extra empty pipe for ethernet next to each cable pipe. it barely cost any extra work, and later i ran the ethernet cable myself with the help of a friend. i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't worth the cost. in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up multiple wifi access points, but that's it.

samcat116 3y ago

This article has nothing to do with the next wifi version being bad, rather they're just upset EE doesn't allow bridge mode on their routers it seems.

karaterobot 3y ago

> There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. Honestly, 640kbps should be enough for anyone, if you ask me.

dmw_ng 3y ago
I'd imagine the priority for the service provider is new product lines built around wifi sensing rather than the marketing about bandwidth. It is /really/ hard to come up with new applications that require so much bandwidth constrained to a one room, especially given we aren't even remotely tapped out on compression fanciness for visual media in mass deployment (see e.g. the recent obscenely low bit rate videoconferencing codec work from Nvidia)

RIMR 3y ago

The only thing that Wi-Fi 7 might solve right now is powerful local and ad-hoc data transfers. 48gbps would allow for SSD-like speeds over the air. On a home network, you could back up your entire laptop in a few minutes to a NAS. With ad-hoc you could film in raw 8K, and back up everything to a battery powered storage device in a backpack in real time, without needing to be tethered. It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better reliability, not more speed. Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously, allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective signal strength and quality.

r00fus 3y ago
WiFi adhoc speed increases are why most people don't complain about iPhones still using USB2 wire speeds. I wonder what the AirDrop speeds would be for a WiFi 7 enabled iPhone.

tempaway28751 3y ago

In the UK supposedly they are switching off Landlines in 2025, so anyone that still wants a "landline phone" (as opposed to mobile) is going to have to do VOIP Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers are just a load of crap that crash all the time. edit: source: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-digital-landlines https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...

yrro 3y ago
It's already begun. The Stop Sell for Wholesale Line Rental happened this month, so you can no longer order a analogue phoen line in most areas.

two_handfuls 3y ago

Really looking forward to better wifi for better wireless VR.

aeadio 3y ago

This article is completely inept. I'm nowhere near an expert in WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over the past several years, it's easy to see the differences in quality generation over generation. > Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox. Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as, - 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells - 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better - 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients - 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective - Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions - Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement, as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better. It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load, - Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission) - Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ)) - Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA - Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime - Implicit channel sounding - Support of direct links, managed by an access point > There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy. > The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed. Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition. If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway. > It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too. And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances as their devices age out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would've been unheard of to have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi simultaneously.

mikelward 3y ago

Does this affect BT, too? Their branding is a bit of a mess at the moment.

martinald 3y ago

Maybe slightly off topic but does anyone know what's happening with powerline? It seems to have stalled out development in about 2015. G.Hn has came along but doesn't seem to offer speeds that are any better. I can get about 150mbit/sec on AV1200 adaptors and maybe double that on 300mbit/sec. It seems to me that if "WiFi 7" esque modulation techniques were used with powerline we could get far better speeds on it. For example 8x8 MIMO (AV2000 uses 2x2), with perhaps a larger frequency band would enable multigigabit over powerline?

BenjiWiebe 3y ago
I don't think you can do MIMO with wired stuff. Isn't it using multiple paths/polarizations to get more bandwidth? You can't do that with wired unless you run more wires. Anyways there's a lot more differences between how a wired protocol works and how a wireless protocol works. Mostly not interchangeable.
orev 3y ago
Powerline causes a lot of radio interference and is generally discouraged as much as possible. It should only be used as a last resort if nothing else works, including WiFi. It’s much better to use MoCa over coax and setup WiFi APs.

maurimo 3y ago

EE user in the UK here. Instead of working for Wifi 7 could you please remove roaming charges in the EU, that EE suddenly reintroduced after brexit? You're telling us our future will have Wifi 7 but also roaming charges when I travel to the EU?