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WiFi 7 is officially here, but routers are pricey. Do you need it yet
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI'm not yet making use of wifi 6 or 6E, let alone needing wifi 7, when my ISP fiber speed at home is only 300Mbps so even the old wifi 5 AC currently in use is sufficient for my household with its 866 Mbps theoretical top speed. I could in theory install it at my parents place where they have multi gigabit fiber internet available, but there's only so fast you need to beam cat videos to your iPad before you reach diminishing returns and I feel like we crossed that point a while ago. Wifi 7 feels just like mm-wave 5G and 8k TVs, as in there's legit use cases it for them, but for 90% of people it's overkill compared to the previous-gen they already have, and all the hype in the media is basically advertising to drive consumer interest and sales for something they most likely don't need.
- treesciencebot 3y agowith MLO and the promised latency decreases, even at 300Mbps, it should significantly make a difference on how "snappy" everything is (and how reliable video calls are).
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThat sounds nice I guess, but since I'm not a professional twitch streamer or cam-girl, I doubt that one improvement will change my life.
- slau 3y ago5G marketing always made me smile. “It will allow doctors to operate on a patient on the other side of the planet”. How? “It will enable next gen VR content”. How? If WiFi + fibre can’t do that, how on earth is 5G supposed to do that? Even if 5G was supposed to replace WiFi (it didn’t), you’re still stuck with the same fibre in between the two 5G masts.
- geraldhh 3y agotelemedicine and vr are held high for new infotech since i can remember. probably because those usecases are generic, futuristic and useless, so they can be employed again and again.
- dataengineer56 3y agoThere's a British TV advert for a mobile phone network where Kevin Bacon helps a family to land a plane from their living room using a 5G dongle. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/ee-lands-plane-family-home-broadband-ad/1735511 https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/ee-lands-plane-family...
- coder543 3y agoI have never seen a WiFi 5 device benchmark anywhere close to 866Mbps in real world scenarios. Most of the time, you're lucky to reach half of the "theoretical" numbers for WiFi due to the way that they're calculated. I would almost be amazed if you could consistently max out your 300Mbps internet connection over WiFi 5, but that's probably just within reach of WiFi 5, assuming there isn't much interference for WiFi 5 to handle. EDIT: I checked on my old iPhone SE (1st gen), which is a WiFi 5 client device, and it was only able to achieve ~240Mbps down on the best run. Are you sure you're not bottlenecked by WiFi 5?
- bradfa 3y agoMy iPhone SE 3rd gen is bottlenecked by my 500Mb fiber line in speed tests within my office room where the wifi AP is located. My AP is only a wifi 5 device.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhat do you stream to your iPhone that you're bottlenecked by 500 Mbps? Call of Duty ISOs?
- bradfa 3y agoAs mentioned, I'm just doing a speed test to show the bottleneck is my fiber line and not the wifi, hence my wifi is giving significantly better performance than was expected by the commenter I replied to.
- coder543 3y agoTesting with a WiFi 5 client device (iPhone SE 1st gen), I'm seeing only 240Mbps down and 122Mbps up, which is far closer to what I would expect from WiFi 5. I don't know how a WiFi 6 client (like your phone) might work around the limitations of a WiFi 5 access point, but I'm not seeing anywhere near 500Mbps out of WiFi 5 from a normal client device.
- bradfa 3y ago
- Brajeshwar 3y agoThe fantastic article, Wireless is a trap[1], is one the best resource and will likely be valid for quite a pretty long time that -- yes, Wi-Fi is cool and all -- but you it will still lag behind wires. The article was also discussed over and over again; - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23589798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23589798 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358855 1. https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/ https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/
- vanilla_nut 3y agoWorse, ultrawideband/mmwave 5G and 8k TVs can be a nuisance. I've seen 5G phones repeatedly get "stuck" on a weak or nonexistent mmwave signal while traveling, and it can take quite some time before the phone decides to fall back to a different tower. 8k TVs are cool until you realize that a lot of your cables won't even output 4k signal to them, if the manufacturer didn't implement a decent fallback. I'm not sure if wifi 7 has similar hangups, but considering the fact that my 10 year old Airport router still does everything I need at home, with an integrated backup for my Macs, it's a hard sell. I still get reduced bufferbloat on the Airport Extreme compared to most commercial routers -- I'm guessing that even when you just use one, modern mesh network configs have some nasty overhead.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThe worst thing about TV input is usually refresh rate. Many TVs will display 120hz internally, but their HDMI port will only carry 4K@60. Because of this, the only way to see 120fps video is by playing 60fps (or less) video through the TV's internal GPU-based frame interpolation. If TV manufacturers would have just put in a DisplayPort port, we wouldn't be in this mess.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>If TV manufacturers would have just put in a DisplayPort port, we wouldn't be in this mess. HDMI winning the TV market over DisplayPort wasn't a free market victory like VHS over Betamax, it was an anti-consumer corporate monopolistic grab. The big TV manufacturers at the time (Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sony and Toshiba) were also the main founders the HDMI consortium when it was invented, meaning they had vested interest to push their proprietary shit to get paid and make more money.[1] HDMI was also backed by Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney along with system operators DirecTV, EchoStar (Dish Network) and CableLabs.[1] It's like politicians voting themselves bigger salaries. Open standards like DisplayPort stood no chance compared to so much corporate moneybags, who monopolized the TV market, pushing in the opposite direction. Consumers were never given a choice in the matter, but the TV manufacturers, movie studios and cable operators decided for us. From the bottom of my asshole, a big "fuck you" to them and to the regulators who slept at the wheel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#History
- gumby 3y agoThere aren't any 6 clients in our house yet, much less 6E. 7 can wait.
- bluGill 3y agoI'm still on 5, but I keep meaning to get something for my shed. If I ever do this I'll buy the latest for the places I spend most of my time and moving an old AP to the shed. It might be Wifi8 by the time I get a round toit though.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoI believe, not yet for quite a while. I moved mostly to wired during the Pandemic and the wi-fi is just there for the ones that needs it. Recently, I saw Crosstalk Solutions video[1] about Wi-Fi 7 with the new Unifi Access Point and he makes some good point about Wi-Fi 7 not something almost all of us don't need yet -- for quite a while. And from my cursory readings, this is still not going to be easy for the Indian Homes (Apartments) where we have pretty thick concrete walls that blocks the 5GHz bands very successfully. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNXghzzaZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNXghzzaZc
- paxys 3y agoIt's rare to have multi-gigabit internet at one's home. Basically no device out there supports WiFi 7. Getting a WiFi 7 router for "future proofing" also makes no sense considering they cost $500+ right now and the price will come down by a lot. TL;DR – no, you do not need it.
- coder543 3y agoThe UniFi U7 Pro that I bought was ~$200. For that money, it upgraded my network from WiFi 6 to WiFi 7, so now the 6E devices that I have are noticeably faster (since I didn't have 6E before), and my network is future-proofed for WiFi 7. It seemed like an easy win for me, so I disagree with your assessment. You also don't need multi-gigabit internet to have a NAS that you want to connect to over the local network.
- paxys 3y agoYou can get 6E router for <$100. Sure future proofing may be a valid argument in some cases, but the vast majority of users simply do not need to spend that extra money.
- coder543 3y agoI checked Amazon, and the cheapest one I saw was ~$140, not <$100. I saw WiFi 6 (not 6E) options for <$100. Spending $200 now means that I don't have to spend $140 now and $140 again in two to three years.
- devrand 3y agoUbiquiti did come out with their U7 Pro which is only $189, which is really not bad considering their AC Pro is $149 and their U6 Pro is $159. I ended up upgrading since I do now have a couple of Wifi 6E devices and I live in a very dense apartment building. The 6 GHz band has been crazy good! With the same laptop, with line of sight to the AP, I'll get 800 mbps on the 6 GHz band and 250 mbps on the 5 GHz.
- zenonu 3y agoI wonder why many don't consider working with a lot of data off of a NAS that could benefit from the cleaner network setup. 6Ghz is also clearly helpful as an early adopter.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoI'm moving into my first house this summer, I'll buy a couple of the new unifi 7 access points since I was just running a dream machine for now. Paired with 3 gigabit internet I think it makes sense but overall I might as well go for the latest.
- bee_rider 3y agoWiFi is nice for people in apartments but if you own the house, you can just do wired connections.
- wongarsu 3y agoCounterpoint: WiFi is nice for people in detached houses, but in apartments the spectrum is so crowded that you really want wired connections.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>in apartments the spectrum is so crowded “Hear, hear!”
- jeffbee 3y agoWiFi is substantially faster than wired Ethernet which has stagnated in consumer applications at 1gbps for decades. For example the last time I did a macos migration it chose WiFi despite the wired path being available, and proceeded at greater than gigabit speeds. That's on top of all the convenience.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoThis is a valid point for sure. The router Bell provides in Canada now has a 10 gig ethernet port but I'm plugging that into my dream machine which only has 1 gig. I'll need to upgrade to the dream machine pro and then add 10 gig switches through the SFP+ port I believe. The new unifi 7 pro access points have 2.5 gig ports which will definitely be close enough to the 3 gig fiber internet. Then I'll need to upgrade my desktop PC and nas to 10 gig ports :) Will it change much for my daily usage? I doubt it. But it will feel good lol.
- emmet 3y agoLet me know when Wifi gets to the point where I don't need 4 mesh nodes in my 700sqft 180 year old house just to get 50mbps in my bedroom out of my gigabit line at the front of the house.
- FredPret 3y agoIf it’s 180 y.o., is it built out of brick / stone? Not an RF expert but maybe you’ll need a totally different radio frequency for that. I would assume all the tech is built around 2.5 - 5 GHz
- themerone 3y agoLathe and Plaster wall construction is not WiFi friendly. It was the dominant interior wall material during the Victorian era until drywall became popular in the 1930s and 40s.
- madaxe_again 3y agoYeah - I have had this repeatedly as I tend to live in old stone houses with meter thick walls. I’ve found powerline networking to work surprisingly well - over a hundred megabits on a crufty 70 year old power install, and I just jam them strategically in rooms that are separated by a thick wall. At home, I throw regular 802.11n half a kilometer through empty air with a yagi, but that’s a different story entirely.
- ghaff 3y agoI got it working a few years ago in my house. But it took a certain amount of shifting stuff around plugs to do so.
- mping 3y agoSame, I have two powerline APs that deliver ethernet+wifi, more than enough for chromecast/netflix/etc. The only issue i have is sometimes clients don't choose the best APs.
- 3y ago
- neilalexander 3y agoConsidering how pervasive Wi-Fi is in the modern world, there isn't a huge amount of spectrum allocated for it. Only 3x 2.4GHz 20MHz networks and 5x/6x 5GHz 80MHz networks are enough to congest the most accessible spectrum in high-density areas. The addition of the 6GHz range in Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 is a welcome addition there, but it's also interesting to talk about the fact that newer modulation schemes also help to improve the efficiency of available spectrum. For example, Wi-Fi 7's 4096-QAM theoretically improves transmission rates by 20% compared to Wi-Fi 6's 1024-QAM without increasing the channel width.
- adrr 3y ago5GHZ is smaller than that if you live next to a weather/airport radar. https://www.kahuna-fi.com/post/dfs-tpc-tdwr https://www.kahuna-fi.com/post/dfs-tpc-tdwr
- gruez 3y ago> Considering how pervasive Wi-Fi is in the modern world, there isn't a huge amount of spectrum allocated for it. Only 3x 2.4GHz 20MHz networks and 5x/6x 5GHz 80MHz networks are enough to congest the most accessible spectrum in high-density areas. In reality networks aren't transmitting all the time, so even though only 3-6 networks can be active at a time without interference, that's fine as long as everyone in the same apartment building aren't all trying to download a 100GB game update.
- fmajid 3y agoWiFi 7 can do 320MHz channels in the 6GHz band. Fortunately the FCC ignored the cellcos' lobbying and assigned nearly the entire 6GHz band to WiFI rather than selling it to the rapacious data monopolists (motto: no one should ever transfer data for free without paying us a cut).
- josefresco 3y agoComcast is my only wired ISP option. They can't even deliver the speeds I pay for. I'll upgrade my router once they can actually deliver speeds these routers are made to handle. Historically I've been able to stay 1-2 generations behind and not lose any top end performance because our local Comcast node is overloaded.
- no_wizard 3y agodo you have Comcast Business or Xfinity (consumer)? Business is marginally higher cost, but no caps on business plans and you get upgraded node priority. The likelihood your neighbors are also on business is low to none, and your traffic will get prioritized before consumer lines, not to mention there are less shenanigans to deal with when you interact with Comcast via their business unit, usually. Its a better deal all around. I had them for a time, and while I still loathe Comcast and I'm so happy to be on a true fiber provider[0] (Ziply Fiber FTW!) I did find Comcast Business to be much superior service wise. [0]: While not all of Ziply installations are FTTH, mine is, and its amazing, and its only 60 dollars a month.
- josefresco 3y ago> do you have Comcast Business or Xfinity (consumer)? Both! Xfinity at home, and I have an office in the same town as my home and sub to Comcast business there. I know the download rate I pay for at my office is much, much lower than at home but it doesn't really effect me. With two teens, gaming and and an "all streaming" house I need the down speeds most at home. I will consider it for "at home" when I close my office and my kids are off in the world (lol on that last one). Thanks for the tip!
- martinald 3y ago7 is actually a huge breakthrough imo because of multi link support. It's not just 'overkill'. It can band the various frequencies (2.4 + 5 + 6) together transparently. This is actually a huge boon for normal users, as often devices get stuck on 2.4GHz which is congested to hell even though a 5/6GHz network is available (especially on a laptop or smartphone moving around). It should shift between them transparently. However, Windows 11 doesn't support this yet on the release version, and I have a feeling compatibility could be really poor (let's hope not). But this feature alone is a massive breakthrough for reliability of WiFi. Also the 320MHz bandwidth on 6GHz is hugely helpful (though in the UK/EU only 1 channel is available at that channel width, in the US there is much more spectrum allocated - I believe this should change in the future though). I struggle personally to get more than 1gig/sec out of real world usage on 160MHz channels, which is a pain because I can get faster than 1gig from my router but wifi is the limiting factor. So I would basically expect to see real world speeds (ie: not right next to the router and through a wall or two) of around 3gbit/sec on WiFi 7, compared to 1gig/sec on WiFi 6/6E - as you will have a 320MHz 6GHz channel bonded with 160MHz 5GHz (and perhaps some 2.4, but I'm not sure if it can do 'tri band' operation, I've seen conflicting information about that).
- bzmrgonz 3y agoWell I'm pegging my hopes on bananapi, whichin collaboration with openwrt is building a wifi7 board!! https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wifi-7-router-board-mediatek-filogic-880-processor/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wif...
- frankjr 3y agoMore details at https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-7-explained/ https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-7-explained/ Somehow I think I will be fine staying on 802.11bgn with the pathetic internet speeds I'm getting from my ISP.
- Havoc 3y agoI've got a wifi 6 era wifi bridge going for something that I can't wire. That's working grand - 1 gig eth on both ends and link rate often ~1.8 in between so that's near enough to wired if you forgive the ms or two extra latency. So unless my ISP decides it's time for 2.5gbe I'm not changing a thing. I do have a 6E AP too but haven't used it yet. 7...I just don't see why I'd need it any time soon
- johnklos 3y agoWhat I'd really like is for someone to discuss and review any improvements that newer access points can have with older clients. For instance, 802.11ac brought beam forming that made a network of 802.11n clients work better. Otherwise, what's the point when the same hardware will be 1/3 the price when we finally start getting WiFi 7 clients?
- BuckRogers 3y agoNo we don't need it yet. Wifi7 is approaching if not endgame wifi though because it combines all frequencies into one endpoint. That's really nice. But I am in need of a new router-switch-AP so I'm going for it this year. I'm still on 802.11AC, and ethernet to my desk as always.
- dingaling 3y agoStill on 802.11n in an old solid-wall house with multiple APs connected over ethernet, because it works reliably and cost under £100 to implement with second-hand kit.