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Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry's New Priority: Stability
- Firerouge 3y agoNo mention of roaming, which seems to be the biggest hurdle to stability and reliability. Transitioning from one station to another, or worse back to call service, seems to consistently causes stability and reliability problems. Worse still, the ability to spread connections across multiple spectrums is likely to make the roaming problem worse. 6Ghz will usually drop before 5Ghz, and that before 2.4Ghz, which has the best wall penetration. How will that impact reliability as people walk through buildings?
- eppp 3y agoWe are going to end up with an ap with very low power every 400sqft or something the way this is going.
- ipython 3y agoThat’s the preferred deployment strategy anyway (less power, more cells)
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoIn contrast to the system of wifi access points in apartment buildings, which is more cells AND more power!
- konschubert 3y agoDoesn’t work for homes.
- Filligree 3y agoI don't see why not. That's how I've built mine.
- konschubert 3y agoSo have I. (kinda) But you and me are probably more tech savvy than the average person.
- ikiris 3y agoYeah wifi works better when your ap is shouting from across your property.
- ipython 3y agoAbsolutely works for homes. Problem is it’s more expensive and requires know how- it’s not just “plug in router with max power and 52 antennas”
- konschubert 3y agoSorry I wasn’t clear: It doesn’t work for homes for 98% of users who don’t have the know-how to implement this.
- TheFuzzball 3y agoI have a 65sqm apartment with 3 APs, 5GHz set to low power. I'm pretty happy with the performance.
- cryptonector 3y ago> Transitioning from one station to another, or worse back to call service The former is clearly in scope for Wi-Fi protocols. The latter is clearly out of scope for Wi-Fi protocols, as it really involves work at the IP layer (or higher even).
- Faaak 3y agoYeah, this looks to be what Multipath TCP / MPTCP does
- ikiris 3y agoHow is multipath going to tell radios how to roam between cells?
- mlyle 3y ago"Back to cell service" --- you probably have radios connected to both wifi and to the cellular network. It's not the same radio. Then you need to decide what links to send frames over (and how). MPTCP is one approach to this.
- ikiris 3y agothis is a terrible solution to anything except guest wireless networks
- mlyle 3y ago? I'm not sure you understand. If you have a device that can use cellular and wifi, it has to figure out when it should be sending packets over wifi, or when it should give up and send packets over cellular. MPTCP isn't mature or a good approach for this yet (and may never be), but it could present a way to smoothly roam between wifi and cellular. Imagine walking across a big campus, and having your device keep a network connection up seamlessly as you lose wifi between buildings. Whether solved via overlay networks, or a clientside protocol like MPTCP-- this is a service networks should provide. Unfortunately, we've got no way to roam except within a single network (wifi roaming; satellite handoff; cellular handoff).
- gsich 3y agoRoaming is already defined. 802.11k,r,v
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago802.11r at least doesn't work on hostapd with wpa3. Supposedly it's not compatibleb may threads on that. Although there are some counter-examples which I've just found! https://forum.openwrt.org/t/802-11r-wpa3-does-it-work/135041/4 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/802-11r-wpa3-does-it-work/135041... It seems like most clients will stay associated with an AP until times are truly truly desperate/signal is near totally hosed. As far as I know, the only open source option to bandhsteering/ap-steering clients is Dawn, which is quite new (relatively speaking). I've been running it on my nighthawk's for a while, and it's... Ok. Clients sometimes ping pong around, or get sent to a suboptimal band or AP. But it's a huge improvement over nothing! https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn
- throw0101b 3y agoSee the following videos from the Wireless LAN Professionals folks: "IEEE 802 11kvr | Perry Correll | WLPC Phoenix 2019" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_K9xHxFM8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_K9xHxFM8Y "Effects of 802.11k/r/v | Andrew McHale | WLPC Prague 2019" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ua2lI6HBhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ua2lI6HBhE "The Challenges of Modern Wi-Fi Roaming Including in 6 GHz | Wes Purvis | Prague 2023" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAG5jXZCd_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAG5jXZCd_8 "Wi-Fi Roaming Revealed" * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ahOnG76HvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ahOnG76HvQ The Wifi infrastructure needs to send out the appropriate frames (e.g. neighbour reports), and the client has to use them to make reasonable decisions.
- lxgr 3y agoIs it? It seems like a solved problem, at least when using hardware supporting the right 802.11 extensions. I've had Skype calls on Wi-Fi walking all around campus (on a Cisco-based network) on an old Symbian smartphone back in 2011 without any audible glitches, and that was with 802.1X/WPA Enterprise/WPA-EAP which makes things more complicated. Android couldn't do the same for the next several years though, and my Linux laptop also used to cling to the worst possible access point for dear life while sitting directly under a closer and less-loaded one, so there were clearly network and client side elements to that feature.
- amluto 3y ago> Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision. If there is a factory that allows a worker to step in front of a robot and depends on a wireless communication mechanism for safety, something is very very wrong.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoYeah that is a horrible example.
- jandrese 3y agoI guess it has to call back to the manufacturer's cloud service to see if the factory subscribed to the "avoid crushing people" option.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoDiscarding ideas out of hand is easy & cheap. Why do you think this so absolutely unacceptable an idea? A factory seems like a big space where there could perhaps be a predictable well known radio spectrum, and where that spectrum could reliably be monitored for stability. Unlike most spaces, there's a lot of possibilities for controlling the environment well, if you wanted; no end-user devices allowed, nothing but known systems. This feels like you could very quickly get to some kind of known state. "We will be able to send priority signals within under 2ms." Or some such quality metric. Keep a signal analyzer going: any time this isn't met, everything goes into an independent failsafe shutdown mode until the issue is debugged and started up again. Our instincts to judge & discard ideas & possibilities is so dangerous, is such a deep human peril. Your instinct feels like it comes from a good place, feels correct, but ultimately, this is acting in fear uncertainty & doubt, & your execution rests on no contentions other than it's own self certainty. I think we must be much more thorough in our thinking & arguing, must not leap to discard ideas so quickly totally & casually; FUD must be rooted out deep within ourselves & challenged. Let not progress be onstructed by meek wills.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y agoWi-Fi 6 was a huge let down, bandwidth increases are useless for home users when they require line of sight.
- aendruk 3y agoThe trick I discovered is to have a 500-sqft home. Wi-Fi 6 has been great!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ttyyzz 3y agoIt's true, I still run relatively old Unifi nanoHD APs (3x) and considered their newer U6 Pro AP for my house. However, the small benefits that would result from this are not worth the price to me, especially since everything works great with the older gear. We also don't have that many wifi6 clients in the family yet, so I discarded the idea.
- karlshea 3y agoI got a U6 Enterprise the other day, Mac Studio 12 feet away with one partial wall in between tries and stays on 6GHz for awhile but then falls back to 5GHz pretty quickly.
- gosub100 3y agothis, and... how many 6/6e routers don't try to pressure you into "download our app so you can easily control your outer" (at the cost of privacy)
- LASR 3y agoI am always supportive of newer tech. But I am a bit surprised by the evolution of standards for both 5G and WiFi over the last few years. Compared with the adoption of hardwire ethernet standards - which have been seemingly stuck at 1/2.5/10GbE for a while now. I know there are a ton more benefits of these newer standards, but setting those aside for now, are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5? I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps. On a few ocassions where I am transferring huge files to / from my NAS, I reach for a ethernet adapter. It's going to cost a lot to upgrade my network, so I've been debating whether it's actually worth it or just marketing hype.
- imp0cat 3y agoThe current state of Ethernet in 2023 in consumer devices is quite sad. I mean, most TVs and players (and usually not the cheap ones, yes, I'm looking at you, Sony) come with 10/100 Mbit ethernet adapters. I'd expect gigabit to be standard everywhere by now.
- barbazoo 3y agoWhere the data taye requires it. No point in putting a gigabit adapter in a network speaker. TV, maybe, for 4K and beyond.
- gosub100 3y agoI can see a point in no longer producing 10mb wired chips anymore, just to take the burden off of production. I cannot picture a situation where you cannot upgrade to 100mb, maybe at the cost of a 48-port 100mb switch, which is essentially free these days. at some point it (must) cost more to produce antiquated technology, even if your equipment (say, a peanut butter factory) doesn't need GigE or 100mb bandwidth..
- xxpor 3y agoPlease explain why there needs to be an upgrade. There's no business case. Even a full blu-ray 4k rip is only ~60ish Mbit/sec encoded as HEVC. Netflix and co have been pushing streaming bitrates down to sub 10 mbit.
- im3w1l 3y agoThis sounds like a good direction: even very infrequent, very brief stutters can be a dealbreaker for hardcore gamers, and make them chose wired over wifi.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agolol ethernet to everything please. soooo may helldesk calls. "uoooh internet... bad..." okay plug dat shiiiii in
- ttyyzz 3y agoWhat? Of course you should wire everything up if possible, but some devices just don't allow that. I once used the USB to Ethernet adapter that came with my Fire TV, only to discover that it runs at 100 Mbit and that the USB controller is a bottleneck. In addition, the connection kept dropping out, so I switched back to WiFi for that specific device.
- cryptonector 3y ago> “The question that we posed ourselves was, ‘What do we do now?’” says Carlos Cordeiro, [...] Uh, Wi-Fi security still sucks. Can we fix that?
- mschuster91 3y agoDoes it? My only gripe is that for whatever goddamn reason Android isn't able to detect what specific subset of WPA2 Enterprise config the AP actually wants/supports and the UI seems to constantly change around over the years, a common annoyance in large campus networks where the admins don't stay on top.
- cryptonector 3y agoYes: I still don't have an easy way to authenticate the network I'm joining. All I have is an SSID name but no public key or fingerprint thereof with which to authenticate the network. When I go to someone's home it'd be nice if they could post a QR code for their guest Wi-Fi network and all I'd have to do is scan it to join it. Plus a QR code could elide the need for a password.
- lxgr 3y ago> Yes: I still don't have an easy way to authenticate the network I'm joining. PSK authentication works both ways. If the network does not know your entered passphrase, your device won't connect to it. The same is true for some (but not all) WPA enterprise EAP authentication methods (EAP-PWD uses it, for example); others do use public key certificates (like anything based on EAP-TTLS/EAP-PEAP). In case of EAP-PEAP-MPSCHAPv2 you even get both.
- cryptonector 3y ago> PSK authentication works both ways. Yes, but the PSK is shared so... > others do use public key certificates What's needed is a mechanism for learning those. That's where the QR code thing comes in.
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- bofaGuy 3y agoI cannot remember the last time WiFi reliably was an issue for me. Maybe over 5 years ago..?
- jl6 3y agoIndustry, please please please take your time and get the feature set right and stick to calling it simply WiFi 7 - or just leave the marginal stuff for WiFi 8. I don’t want to see a 7E.
- edward28 3y agoWifi 7E Ultra Pro Max V2
- kazinator 3y agoWi-Fi 7 probably signals that the 5 megabyte kernel module for Wi-Fi you're using in your embedded system (whose kernel image is "only" 12 megabytes) is going to grow to 7 megabytes.
- hakfoo 3y agoI think my primary distaste for Wi-Fi tends to be generations of obtuse binary blobs, and driver support that's scattershot and years coming. TBH, I'd love to see Wi-Fi presented as a bridge device rather than a direct NIC-- the host PC sees an Ethernet chipset that has drivers that work on anything from MS-DOS 3.3 onward, and when first booted, you connect to a simulated network containing a REST endpoint/web page which lets you configure the WLAN side.