6 ms·

I 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 ado

by LASR 3y ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Where the data taye requires it. No point in putting a gigabit adapter in a network speaker. TV, maybe, for 4K and beyond.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    I 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 ago
  Please 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.
  - toast0 3y ago
    4k uhd blu-ray peak bandwidth is somewhere around 150 mbps. Discs can be encoded in different codecs, but h.265 is common. Maybe you can buffer it, but a lot of players lack the memory to buffer enough to average out a longer scene with intense encoding (such as the parade with confetti in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). Maybe you can reencode, and AV1 might help a bit, but you're likely going to drop some detail in order to fit in 100 mbps ethernet.
    - pseudosavant 3y ago
      The only reason a disc is authored at that bitrate is to make bit perfect Blu-ray rips impracticably large. There is no visual quality reason to be that high. There is a reason Netflix’s top quality is a fraction of that bitrate and looks excellent.
      - ikiris 3y ago
        The 3 giant blobs of black on the screen disagree strongly.
        mlyle 3y ago
        Netflix at ~10mbps average, 20mbps peak is sometimes a little insufficient, but enough to make most people happy. But it seems like ~30mbps average, 40mbps peak would be really, really good.
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  The truth is, you need a fairly powerful client (PC, game console, flagship smart phone) to ever (occasionally) need more than 100mbps Ethernet. There just aren’t use cases for that much bandwidth. HD YouTube is still in the extremely low single digit mbps. Same for TikTok. Netflix 4K HDR with Atmos easily fits within 100mbps. Even 8k streaming will be under 100mbps.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  These boxes often couldn’t decode 200mbit of content if they tried, and realistically AV1 support is more important than if it supports gigabit or not. It’s just good economics to use a part that already works fine over one that’s overspecced for the use case. What are you getting out of it? Faster app and update downloads? Those are frills.
  - daeros 3y ago
    I think for us, the interest in using Wi-Fi 7 has more to do with WPA3. Honestly, I've spent the last few months learning WiFi Hacking about the 4 way handshake and about DeAuth signals and everything and must say that i'm concerned we're in an arms race with GPU's getting faster and faster along with it hashcat is speeding up and honestly its about to get crazy fast.
- mrandish 3y ago
  I bought the recently released top of the line Fire TV 4k Max (2nd gen) streaming stick on black friday sale and was surprised to discover the external USB port is USB 2.0 speed micro-USB. My fault I guess for not even looking closely before ordering but I assume these days any brand new, top of the line device with a tiny USB port will be USB-C. Anyway, after disabling the Amazon bloatware and side-loading vanilla android apps, even with a fast USB3-capable ethernet adapter connected to a 1Gbps RJ-45, standard streaming apps wouldn't even stream 4k because the ethernet was too slow. I tested the adapter and connection on my laptop and got >200mbps which is more than sufficient. So I was forced to use 5Ghz wifi for the stick to stream 4k, thus further clogging up and adding to wifi congestion. BTW, I found the same thing to be true with my other streaming stick, a Google TV, despite it having a USB-C port. It could do 4k streams through an ethernet dongle but it was kind of on the edge enough to not always do 4k dependably. But that device was >18mo old. Anyway, it's super annoying that these newish devices are making wifi congestion worse by not properly enabling reasonable wired streaming (yes, I know there are lots of no-name Android TV streaming boxes from Shenzen which have USB-C ports with at least USB3.0 support but this new Fire TV stick actually has a pretty performant CPU and is otherwise well-implemented).
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    If you're trying to stream UHD Blu-ray remuxes, you'll have best luck with a Shield TV.
    - mrandish 3y ago
      Yes, you're correct but I was actually just referring to streaming Netflix and/or Prime Video 4k content within the official Netflix/Prime apps. These streams have much lower sustained bit rate requirements than UHD BD remuxes but were auto-falling back to HD due to insufficient bit rate (as reported by the official streaming service app's own network diagnostics). I was surprised and disappointed because this is such a low bar to clear. The issue may not be entirely due to the USB 2.0 interface since, in theory, that's 480 Mbps which should translate to peak throughput close to 40 MBps but according to the network speed test in the official Amazon Prime app their own brand new flagship 4k streaming stick couldn't sustain 30 MBps for 4k HDR10 and would thus fall back to HD. I suspect Amazon didn't bother optimizing the USB driver stack to maximize the bandwidth available from the hardware. Maybe they just assume that no one uses 'old fashioned' 1 gigabit ethernet anymore (sigh). It's double annoying because my home theater gear is all neatly rack mounted in a metal frame that just happens to be a pretty good EM shield. So I have to hang the damn stick out of the rack on a USB extension cable so it can get decent 5Ghz wifi throughput. All when I have a perfectly capable gigabit switch plumbed right into the rack. Excuse me while I step outside to yell at some clouds....
JoshTriplett 3y ago
I love the idea of Wifi 7 and I'm looking forward to upgrading from 5/6/6E, for a couple of reasons: - Yes, I actually do feel limited by the speed of 5 and 6 (not 6E), not least of which because it gets worse with distance. The 6GHz network works great but doesn't get nearly enough range, and I'd love to supplement that by simultaneously talking on 5GHz and 2.4GHz, while using as much 6GHz bandwidth as is getting through from a given location. And I don't want to have to change which network I'm connected to, or even if it's the same ESSID I don't want my device to have to "switch" networks. - No more dealing with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz vs 6GHz channels, or worrying which channels are clear, or which devices should be on which frequency. The premise of WiFi 7 seems to be to use all the bandwidth that nothing else is using, while avoiding anything that another device is interfering with. "What channel is your router using?" "Yes."
faeriechangling 3y ago
I feel limited by the latency AND bandwidth of wifi. Latency interferes with use cases like wireless video streaming which is nice for things like Steam Decks or VR. We’re not even close to being able to decode even gigabit bitrates using hardware decoders though, so bandwidth isn’t important here. A nice coincidence is that Wifi7 coincided with the release of hardware av1 encoders/decoders, so I think we're going to see these SOCs that support both, and I think that's going to marginally improve the viability of computing remotely from the edge (Cloud gaming) or home servers (steam link) and cause those to be used more heavily. Bandwidth interferes with large sequential file transfers, and WANs are starting to have more bandwidth than wifi, so this is starting to cramp things like large downloads of movie content or .iso’s or cloud backups. It also bottlenecks 2.5gbe LANs which are economical given they run on cat5e networks. I think wifi7 is going to explode as ISPs bundle wifi7 modems with their higher bandwidth plans, so it’s going to be pushed because the ISPs need it more than because most customers need it. I only expect certain pros, gamers, and large scale commercial installers to invest in wifi7 themselves.
- klabb3 3y ago
  To add to that: throughput isn’t just about bandwidth, but also latency (BDP) but more importantly (in the case of WiFi) jitter and packet loss. Even if your WiFi supports 1Gbit most of the time, tcp will throttle back to slow start (IIRC - the linear one) upon packet loss. And time to recovery depends on RTT. When I measure I always get inconsistent results on WiFi, whereas ethernet+fiber is butter smooth.
afavour 3y ago
My understanding was that 5G isn’t just a speed improvement, it’s latency etc as well. But, no, I don’t feel limited by my cellphone being on LTE. That being said 5G opens a lot of doors: my home internet connection is 5G now, I pull around 500Mbps with not particularly awful/noticeable latency.
- lxgr 3y ago
  One important factor is that the efficiency gains of each new mobile radio generation increase total usable throughput per MHz, which matters a lot in times of heavy simultaneous use. A lot of the gains with each new generation come from increased spectral usage per device (more MHz, more spatial streams etc, i.e. making each device use more of a given pipe), but some of the improvements are also usually making better use of each MHz (better modulation schemes, MU-MIMO, less overhead etc.)
coolspot 3y ago
> I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). How does that work? Are they components of a mesh network bundle? Do they have same SSID? Are they aware of each other?
- LASR 3y ago
  They are all Unifi APs from 2 different upgrade cycles. 3x UnFi AC Pro and 3x Unifi NanoHD. After I got the newer NanoHDs, I just kept the older AC Pros around for 2.4Ghz devices and exterior coverage. Same SSID and they are all hooked up the same controller etc, so clients can roam.
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  I have three 5/AC access points in my house. All broadcast the same two SSIDs: 2.4Ghz+5Ghz and 5Ghz only). I have 802.11r Fast Transition enabled in OpenWRT to improve roaming, but have never quantified a benefit. Each AP is set on different channels to minimize overlap.
- davkan 3y ago
  In the enterprise it’s a combination of 802.11k 802.11v and 802.11r.[0] All APs have the same ssid, clients initiate transferring between APs in the background based on signal strength, silently re-authenticating to the new ap. Many (most?) off-the-shelf home wifi mesh systems dont implement 802.11r so you may have a brief interruption during transfer, though it still happens without user input. Some older/embedded devices may have issues connecting with 802.11r enabled networks as well. Off-the-shelf home mesh systems typically have one mesh node with all the functions and webui of a normal SoHo router, and then other nodes are in AP mode only with either wired or wireless backhaul to the main node. Enterprise setups instead will have a separate controller for the APs. Also typically all APs in an enterprise will be bridged to the same L2 networks whereas some home mesh systems will use a separate broadcast domain for each AP. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/network/fast-roaming-with-802-11k--802-11v--and-802-11r https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...
  - mlyle 3y ago
orev 3y ago
WiFi is used in places other than homes, and many parts of the newer standards are focused on those situations. Hotels, trains, conference centers, stadiums, offices, apartment buildings, etc. all need to be able to handle large numbers of users. If what you have is working for your case, there’s no reason to upgrade.
toast0 3y ago
> are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5? 4G LTE IMHO, is fine for mobile use, but wouldn't really be enough for a household fixed wireless connection; 5G is much better for that. Occasionaly I run into what seems to be congested towers, and denser encoding should help with that (unless the problem is the backhaul). Of course, additional spectrum allocations is likely the most useful part of 5g, although that didn't have to be tied. Also IMHO, WiFi 5 is limited by running only on 5 GHz, which doesn't go far enough. I'm holding out for now, but I'm fairly sure I'll have significiantly better experiences with wifi 6 than wifi 5/4. Being able to run the newest encoding on 2.4Ghz will be great for me... but I live in the middle of the woods and don't see a lot of outside APs. I'm hoping to find APs that are cheap and let me enhance roaming.
- lxgr 3y ago
  Wifi 4 (802.11n) did support both 2.4 and 5 GHz, only 5 (802.11ac) was 5 GHz only for some reason. Yes, there are tons of reason to avoid 2.4 GHz and it makes for a terrible default (if a device supports only one band), but outright not specifying it always seemed strange to me.
throw0101b 3y ago
> Compared with the adoption of hardwire ethernet standards - which have been seemingly stuck at 1/2.5/10GbE for a while now. Wired connections can do 400 Gb/s over a single pair of fibres at distances of 80km(+) (-ZR(+)): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet 800 Gb/s is available using more fibre pairs; 1600 Gb/s / 1.6 Tb/s is estimated for 2026 (802.3dj). If you're talking about twisted pairs, then 40 Gb/s is available (802.3bq): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair So I'm not quite sure that you're talking about when you say "stuck". Lots of folks are clamouring for more bandwidth, and the optics folks and IEEE are giving them new options on a regular basis. > 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? They feel limited by the limited number of channels in 5 GHz, especially in high-density areas (especially with neighbours, and not just their own APs), which is the primary problem that Wifi 6E (802.11ax) and 7 (be) are trying to solve: not enough non-overlapping channels. And the higher the speed of the connection, the quicker data can be transmitted so that one client can stop transmitting and free up the medium for another client.
AussieWog93 3y ago
>I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps. I think you've answered your own question there. If you need to set up 6 APs as a mesh network to get good performance, the technology can be improved. We were running a single AP, as most consumers do, and getting closer to 50Mbps with occasional dropouts at the other end of the house. Serviceable, but far from the ideal of "set and forget".
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Well the technology isn't getting all that much better for a single access point deployment unless you're sitting relatively close to it. Mesh networking setups at least dramatically cut deployment costs for multi-AP setups.
ksec 3y ago
There is not a single day I dont feel limited by WiFI 5 and 4G. Knowing they are already on their best implementation possible inside office. The keyword here is office, or any location where you have many devices connecting to it. I am just waiting for 5G and WiFi 7 to mature.

by LASR 3y ago

imp0cat 3y ago

The 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 ago
Where the data taye requires it. No point in putting a gigabit adapter in a network speaker. TV, maybe, for 4K and beyond.
- gosub100 3y ago
  I 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 ago
Please 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.
- toast0 3y ago
  4k uhd blu-ray peak bandwidth is somewhere around 150 mbps. Discs can be encoded in different codecs, but h.265 is common. Maybe you can buffer it, but a lot of players lack the memory to buffer enough to average out a longer scene with intense encoding (such as the parade with confetti in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). Maybe you can reencode, and AV1 might help a bit, but you're likely going to drop some detail in order to fit in 100 mbps ethernet.
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    The only reason a disc is authored at that bitrate is to make bit perfect Blu-ray rips impracticably large. There is no visual quality reason to be that high. There is a reason Netflix’s top quality is a fraction of that bitrate and looks excellent.
    - ikiris 3y ago
      The 3 giant blobs of black on the screen disagree strongly.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        Netflix at ~10mbps average, 20mbps peak is sometimes a little insufficient, but enough to make most people happy. But it seems like ~30mbps average, 40mbps peak would be really, really good.
pseudosavant 3y ago
The truth is, you need a fairly powerful client (PC, game console, flagship smart phone) to ever (occasionally) need more than 100mbps Ethernet. There just aren’t use cases for that much bandwidth. HD YouTube is still in the extremely low single digit mbps. Same for TikTok. Netflix 4K HDR with Atmos easily fits within 100mbps. Even 8k streaming will be under 100mbps.
faeriechangling 3y ago
These boxes often couldn’t decode 200mbit of content if they tried, and realistically AV1 support is more important than if it supports gigabit or not. It’s just good economics to use a part that already works fine over one that’s overspecced for the use case. What are you getting out of it? Faster app and update downloads? Those are frills.
- daeros 3y ago
  I think for us, the interest in using Wi-Fi 7 has more to do with WPA3. Honestly, I've spent the last few months learning WiFi Hacking about the 4 way handshake and about DeAuth signals and everything and must say that i'm concerned we're in an arms race with GPU's getting faster and faster along with it hashcat is speeding up and honestly its about to get crazy fast.
mrandish 3y ago
I bought the recently released top of the line Fire TV 4k Max (2nd gen) streaming stick on black friday sale and was surprised to discover the external USB port is USB 2.0 speed micro-USB. My fault I guess for not even looking closely before ordering but I assume these days any brand new, top of the line device with a tiny USB port will be USB-C. Anyway, after disabling the Amazon bloatware and side-loading vanilla android apps, even with a fast USB3-capable ethernet adapter connected to a 1Gbps RJ-45, standard streaming apps wouldn't even stream 4k because the ethernet was too slow. I tested the adapter and connection on my laptop and got >200mbps which is more than sufficient. So I was forced to use 5Ghz wifi for the stick to stream 4k, thus further clogging up and adding to wifi congestion. BTW, I found the same thing to be true with my other streaming stick, a Google TV, despite it having a USB-C port. It could do 4k streams through an ethernet dongle but it was kind of on the edge enough to not always do 4k dependably. But that device was >18mo old. Anyway, it's super annoying that these newish devices are making wifi congestion worse by not properly enabling reasonable wired streaming (yes, I know there are lots of no-name Android TV streaming boxes from Shenzen which have USB-C ports with at least USB3.0 support but this new Fire TV stick actually has a pretty performant CPU and is otherwise well-implemented).
- doublepg23 3y ago
  If you're trying to stream UHD Blu-ray remuxes, you'll have best luck with a Shield TV.
  - mrandish 3y ago
    Yes, you're correct but I was actually just referring to streaming Netflix and/or Prime Video 4k content within the official Netflix/Prime apps. These streams have much lower sustained bit rate requirements than UHD BD remuxes but were auto-falling back to HD due to insufficient bit rate (as reported by the official streaming service app's own network diagnostics). I was surprised and disappointed because this is such a low bar to clear. The issue may not be entirely due to the USB 2.0 interface since, in theory, that's 480 Mbps which should translate to peak throughput close to 40 MBps but according to the network speed test in the official Amazon Prime app their own brand new flagship 4k streaming stick couldn't sustain 30 MBps for 4k HDR10 and would thus fall back to HD. I suspect Amazon didn't bother optimizing the USB driver stack to maximize the bandwidth available from the hardware. Maybe they just assume that no one uses 'old fashioned' 1 gigabit ethernet anymore (sigh). It's double annoying because my home theater gear is all neatly rack mounted in a metal frame that just happens to be a pretty good EM shield. So I have to hang the damn stick out of the rack on a USB extension cable so it can get decent 5Ghz wifi throughput. All when I have a perfectly capable gigabit switch plumbed right into the rack. Excuse me while I step outside to yell at some clouds....

JoshTriplett 3y ago

I love the idea of Wifi 7 and I'm looking forward to upgrading from 5/6/6E, for a couple of reasons: - Yes, I actually do feel limited by the speed of 5 and 6 (not 6E), not least of which because it gets worse with distance. The 6GHz network works great but doesn't get nearly enough range, and I'd love to supplement that by simultaneously talking on 5GHz and 2.4GHz, while using as much 6GHz bandwidth as is getting through from a given location. And I don't want to have to change which network I'm connected to, or even if it's the same ESSID I don't want my device to have to "switch" networks. - No more dealing with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz vs 6GHz channels, or worrying which channels are clear, or which devices should be on which frequency. The premise of WiFi 7 seems to be to use all the bandwidth that nothing else is using, while avoiding anything that another device is interfering with. "What channel is your router using?" "Yes."

faeriechangling 3y ago

I feel limited by the latency AND bandwidth of wifi. Latency interferes with use cases like wireless video streaming which is nice for things like Steam Decks or VR. We’re not even close to being able to decode even gigabit bitrates using hardware decoders though, so bandwidth isn’t important here. A nice coincidence is that Wifi7 coincided with the release of hardware av1 encoders/decoders, so I think we're going to see these SOCs that support both, and I think that's going to marginally improve the viability of computing remotely from the edge (Cloud gaming) or home servers (steam link) and cause those to be used more heavily. Bandwidth interferes with large sequential file transfers, and WANs are starting to have more bandwidth than wifi, so this is starting to cramp things like large downloads of movie content or .iso’s or cloud backups. It also bottlenecks 2.5gbe LANs which are economical given they run on cat5e networks. I think wifi7 is going to explode as ISPs bundle wifi7 modems with their higher bandwidth plans, so it’s going to be pushed because the ISPs need it more than because most customers need it. I only expect certain pros, gamers, and large scale commercial installers to invest in wifi7 themselves.

klabb3 3y ago
To add to that: throughput isn’t just about bandwidth, but also latency (BDP) but more importantly (in the case of WiFi) jitter and packet loss. Even if your WiFi supports 1Gbit most of the time, tcp will throttle back to slow start (IIRC - the linear one) upon packet loss. And time to recovery depends on RTT. When I measure I always get inconsistent results on WiFi, whereas ethernet+fiber is butter smooth.

afavour 3y ago

My understanding was that 5G isn’t just a speed improvement, it’s latency etc as well. But, no, I don’t feel limited by my cellphone being on LTE. That being said 5G opens a lot of doors: my home internet connection is 5G now, I pull around 500Mbps with not particularly awful/noticeable latency.

lxgr 3y ago
One important factor is that the efficiency gains of each new mobile radio generation increase total usable throughput per MHz, which matters a lot in times of heavy simultaneous use. A lot of the gains with each new generation come from increased spectral usage per device (more MHz, more spatial streams etc, i.e. making each device use more of a given pipe), but some of the improvements are also usually making better use of each MHz (better modulation schemes, MU-MIMO, less overhead etc.)

coolspot 3y ago

> I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). How does that work? Are they components of a mesh network bundle? Do they have same SSID? Are they aware of each other?

LASR 3y ago
They are all Unifi APs from 2 different upgrade cycles. 3x UnFi AC Pro and 3x Unifi NanoHD. After I got the newer NanoHDs, I just kept the older AC Pros around for 2.4Ghz devices and exterior coverage. Same SSID and they are all hooked up the same controller etc, so clients can roam.
pseudosavant 3y ago
I have three 5/AC access points in my house. All broadcast the same two SSIDs: 2.4Ghz+5Ghz and 5Ghz only). I have 802.11r Fast Transition enabled in OpenWRT to improve roaming, but have never quantified a benefit. Each AP is set on different channels to minimize overlap.
davkan 3y ago
In the enterprise it’s a combination of 802.11k 802.11v and 802.11r.[0] All APs have the same ssid, clients initiate transferring between APs in the background based on signal strength, silently re-authenticating to the new ap. Many (most?) off-the-shelf home wifi mesh systems dont implement 802.11r so you may have a brief interruption during transfer, though it still happens without user input. Some older/embedded devices may have issues connecting with 802.11r enabled networks as well. Off-the-shelf home mesh systems typically have one mesh node with all the functions and webui of a normal SoHo router, and then other nodes are in AP mode only with either wired or wireless backhaul to the main node. Enterprise setups instead will have a separate controller for the APs. Also typically all APs in an enterprise will be bridged to the same L2 networks whereas some home mesh systems will use a separate broadcast domain for each AP. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/network/fast-roaming-with-802-11k--802-11v--and-802-11r https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...
- mlyle 3y ago

orev 3y ago

WiFi is used in places other than homes, and many parts of the newer standards are focused on those situations. Hotels, trains, conference centers, stadiums, offices, apartment buildings, etc. all need to be able to handle large numbers of users. If what you have is working for your case, there’s no reason to upgrade.

toast0 3y ago

> are people really feeling limited by the speed of 4G LTE & WiFi 5? 4G LTE IMHO, is fine for mobile use, but wouldn't really be enough for a household fixed wireless connection; 5G is much better for that. Occasionaly I run into what seems to be congested towers, and denser encoding should help with that (unless the problem is the backhaul). Of course, additional spectrum allocations is likely the most useful part of 5g, although that didn't have to be tied. Also IMHO, WiFi 5 is limited by running only on 5 GHz, which doesn't go far enough. I'm holding out for now, but I'm fairly sure I'll have significiantly better experiences with wifi 6 than wifi 5/4. Being able to run the newest encoding on 2.4Ghz will be great for me... but I live in the middle of the woods and don't see a lot of outside APs. I'm hoping to find APs that are cheap and let me enhance roaming.

lxgr 3y ago
Wifi 4 (802.11n) did support both 2.4 and 5 GHz, only 5 (802.11ac) was 5 GHz only for some reason. Yes, there are tons of reason to avoid 2.4 GHz and it makes for a terrible default (if a device supports only one band), but outright not specifying it always seemed strange to me.

throw0101b 3y ago

> Compared with the adoption of hardwire ethernet standards - which have been seemingly stuck at 1/2.5/10GbE for a while now. Wired connections can do 400 Gb/s over a single pair of fibres at distances of 80km(+) (-ZR(+)): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet 800 Gb/s is available using more fibre pairs; 1600 Gb/s / 1.6 Tb/s is estimated for 2026 (802.3dj). If you're talking about twisted pairs, then 40 Gb/s is available (802.3bq): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair So I'm not quite sure that you're talking about when you say "stuck". Lots of folks are clamouring for more bandwidth, and the optics folks and IEEE are giving them new options on a regular basis. > 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? They feel limited by the limited number of channels in 5 GHz, especially in high-density areas (especially with neighbours, and not just their own APs), which is the primary problem that Wifi 6E (802.11ax) and 7 (be) are trying to solve: not enough non-overlapping channels. And the higher the speed of the connection, the quicker data can be transmitted so that one client can stop transmitting and free up the medium for another client.

AussieWog93 3y ago

>I have 6 APs in my home running WiFi 5(AC). My devices usually connect between ~800-1300 mbps. I think you've answered your own question there. If you need to set up 6 APs as a mesh network to get good performance, the technology can be improved. We were running a single AP, as most consumers do, and getting closer to 50Mbps with occasional dropouts at the other end of the house. Serviceable, but far from the ideal of "set and forget".

faeriechangling 3y ago
Well the technology isn't getting all that much better for a single access point deployment unless you're sitting relatively close to it. Mesh networking setups at least dramatically cut deployment costs for multi-AP setups.

ksec 3y ago

There is not a single day I dont feel limited by WiFI 5 and 4G. Knowing they are already on their best implementation possible inside office. The keyword here is office, or any location where you have many devices connecting to it. I am just waiting for 5G and WiFi 7 to mature.