7 ms·
No 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 serv
by Firerouge 3y ago
No 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.