3 ms·

let's assume that this takes off and it will become standard addition for our WiFi devices. Given big range of this technology, how this handle air congestion

let's assume that this takes off and it will become standard addition for our WiFi devices. Given big range of this technology, how this handle air congestion when we would have hundreds maybe thousands of devices in range? I expect low througput of this technology and for IoT that's usually fine, but when we need to share this spectrum with lot of devices we might quickly make this non operational. And this is even assuming we do not have some devices that request much more bandwidth that others. Wirh WiFi 2.4ghz we already struggle with air congestion and quick Google shows that lora have 13 + 8 channels and if I understand it correctly some of them are used explicitly for joining network (?) I think this technology is really cool only if it won't get much popularity

neuroelectron 2y ago
It could be silently adopted to allow longer distance for things like map apps that only need a few kilobytes for wifi triangulation.
486sx33 2y ago
I live on a pretty standard density street , there are a few semi detached homes mixed in. I’d still call it light density. I have 2 x 5ghz channels, 2 x 2.4 ghz channels, and then a repeater with another 2 and 2 In the evening there is so much congestion on every available channel on either band that I can’t watch 1080p tv This long range thing sounds awful.
- sneak 2y ago
  This means something is wrong with one or more of the stations on those bands. It’s not normal.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  You don't need to watch 1080p TV to report the current temperature and humidity, or to receive a command to turn on a light bulb. As for channel congestion, check if your WiFi repeater is in mesh mode or not. If not, it literally halves the throughput on your WiFi network, that seems to be already over-congested by whatever is messing with your channel settings. Based on your description of the area, if your 5GHz somehow ran out of space, something seriously weird is going on. Maybe some non-WiFi-device is using the 2.4/5.2GHz band to transmit data? I know stories of cheapo baby monitors wiping out entire neighbourhoods, for instance.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    We have some bad channel congestion (UK, terraced house, relatively narrow street) but part of the problem appears to be ISPs lock the channels, there are completely free channels but the settings on the router don't allow one to select a channel, it auto-picks. Weird. The algo appears to be "choose channel 1 even if it's totally congested"; for most of the neighbours too (4 or 5 different ISPs). I can only assume that they sell "super-duper routers with greater bandwidth" where they make the box look like a spaceship and actually enable a useful channel selection algorithm? Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful?
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Is there any reason you can't just plug your own WiFi router into its Ethernet port so you have control over your WiFi?
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      > Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful? The only one I can think of, based on my experience back in the day, is to prevent people from picking 2.4GHz channels that aren't 1/6/11. Modern routers often come with visualisations to show why this is a bad idea, but I've seen plenty of cases where people went "wow, these 1/6/11 channels are super crowded, I'll just use channel 3 because nobody else is using that" and making the situation much worse by now overlapping and interfering with two common channels instead of just one. Part of the spec also mandates that for wide 802.11n channels, you can't just force yourself into using a wide spectrum when there's not much spectrum to go around. On the 5.2+GHz band there are also legal restrictions (such as DFS, to not interfere with radars, and sometimes transmission power limits on specific subsections of the band). Some larger corporate WiFi installations will automatically adjust channels across many access points to optimise coverage and minimise interference. Perhaps ISP APs will do something similar, as ISPs have a somewhat accurate map of what frequencies are used in a geographical area. That seems rather overbearing to me, though. I still can't think of a reason to not let users pick one of the "good" bands themselves. Some kind of automatic frequency selection is a solid default, but I don't see why users shouldn't get the freedom to override that default.
zamadatix 2y ago
People are responding to this with the mindset of watching 1080p TV not realizing 1 second of a 1080p Netflix stream will use 5x the total daily bandwidth of an IoT device reporting temperature once every 10 seconds for the whole day. It's entirely different use cases and the impact of congestion between the two is like talking about what matters to a garden on Mars vs Earth. The big limitation I see here, and where Wi-Fi has historically failed even with 802.11ah specifically built for the IoT use case and standardized back in 2015, is the "uses extra power" bit. Other protocols like LoRa are designed around minimizing power at the end stations. At the end of the day that's often a bigger deal than bandwidth for long IoT.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  > 1 second of a 1080p Netflix stream will use 5x the total daily bandwidth of an IoT device reporting temperature once every 10 seconds Don't have a Netflix file to test with but YT, the video data is 73KiB for the first second (tested by ffmpeg'ing the first second into a new file with codecs set to 'copy'). The page, however, seems to fetch about 9 megabytes in the first second of loading (various features still loading such as comments). Reporting temperature, let's say it's super secure with IV and MAC headers and trailers and another nonce for replay protection (all in all 3x 32 bytes) plus the actual value and other metadata (like which device the report is from) of, say, another 32 bytes, plus IPv6 headers etc. is a couple hundred bytes. Call it 256. There are a gross ten minutes in a day, coming to 144×256 = 36 KiB. Huh, that's pretty accurate when considering video data ("any second" rather than the first second specifically that needs to include the page weight). I had expected the video data to be vastly bigger compared to that sensor reporting just one value per ten minutes. That keyframe+video compression is really quite something; raw 24-bit would be 6 MiB rather than 73 KiB
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    Video services use adaptive bitrate so a 1 second sample will give a very variable estimate. If you can watch the full video and monitor the NIC bandwidth (or, if you don't want to count headers, download the full video and look at the media info average bitrate) you'll get a more consistent number. For 1080p TV type content it's often a lot more than 262 MB/h. Raw should be 192010803*24 = ~149 MB since there are 24 frames in a second, keeping that magic of video compression alive despite the larger base rate. Netflix actually gives the value of 3 GB/hour directly for high definition content https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 which is ~833 KB in one second (or about an average 6 mbps plus some delivery overhead) which simplifies things quite a bit though. Encryption is an interesting thought in that LoRaWAN will have encryption built in and the device would typically expect the gateway to handle producing that to IPv6 with traditional encryption and application headers. CTR is used so the packets don't gain much bloat, the minimum size is ~bytes and the maximum size is ~256 bytes. Temperature reports (4 byte float) typically fit in that 50 byte minimal packet category or 432 KB/day reporting every 10 seconds. So I suppose my estimate of 5x was a bit high after all, maybe 1-2x would have been more apt :). But it does beg the question, back to your point, what would that look like in this WiLo protocol? Standard Wi-Fi has a minimum frame size in the air is going to be closer to 100 bytes (minimum Ethernet length of 64 plus Wi-Fi bits). On top of that Wi-Fi doesn't usually act as the gateway like LoRa - does the IoT device now need to package everything in IPv6 + transport security itself and send it over the air with WiLo or is the expectation APs would be more gateway like for these clients? Dunno, wasn't able to read the actual paper in the link to see what is proposed :).

neuroelectron 2y ago

It could be silently adopted to allow longer distance for things like map apps that only need a few kilobytes for wifi triangulation.

486sx33 2y ago

I live on a pretty standard density street , there are a few semi detached homes mixed in. I’d still call it light density. I have 2 x 5ghz channels, 2 x 2.4 ghz channels, and then a repeater with another 2 and 2 In the evening there is so much congestion on every available channel on either band that I can’t watch 1080p tv This long range thing sounds awful.

sneak 2y ago
This means something is wrong with one or more of the stations on those bands. It’s not normal.
jeroenhd 2y ago
You don't need to watch 1080p TV to report the current temperature and humidity, or to receive a command to turn on a light bulb. As for channel congestion, check if your WiFi repeater is in mesh mode or not. If not, it literally halves the throughput on your WiFi network, that seems to be already over-congested by whatever is messing with your channel settings. Based on your description of the area, if your 5GHz somehow ran out of space, something seriously weird is going on. Maybe some non-WiFi-device is using the 2.4/5.2GHz band to transmit data? I know stories of cheapo baby monitors wiping out entire neighbourhoods, for instance.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  We have some bad channel congestion (UK, terraced house, relatively narrow street) but part of the problem appears to be ISPs lock the channels, there are completely free channels but the settings on the router don't allow one to select a channel, it auto-picks. Weird. The algo appears to be "choose channel 1 even if it's totally congested"; for most of the neighbours too (4 or 5 different ISPs). I can only assume that they sell "super-duper routers with greater bandwidth" where they make the box look like a spaceship and actually enable a useful channel selection algorithm? Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful?
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Is there any reason you can't just plug your own WiFi router into its Ethernet port so you have control over your WiFi?
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    > Is there an actually good reason for the channel selection being awful? The only one I can think of, based on my experience back in the day, is to prevent people from picking 2.4GHz channels that aren't 1/6/11. Modern routers often come with visualisations to show why this is a bad idea, but I've seen plenty of cases where people went "wow, these 1/6/11 channels are super crowded, I'll just use channel 3 because nobody else is using that" and making the situation much worse by now overlapping and interfering with two common channels instead of just one. Part of the spec also mandates that for wide 802.11n channels, you can't just force yourself into using a wide spectrum when there's not much spectrum to go around. On the 5.2+GHz band there are also legal restrictions (such as DFS, to not interfere with radars, and sometimes transmission power limits on specific subsections of the band). Some larger corporate WiFi installations will automatically adjust channels across many access points to optimise coverage and minimise interference. Perhaps ISP APs will do something similar, as ISPs have a somewhat accurate map of what frequencies are used in a geographical area. That seems rather overbearing to me, though. I still can't think of a reason to not let users pick one of the "good" bands themselves. Some kind of automatic frequency selection is a solid default, but I don't see why users shouldn't get the freedom to override that default.

zamadatix 2y ago

People are responding to this with the mindset of watching 1080p TV not realizing 1 second of a 1080p Netflix stream will use 5x the total daily bandwidth of an IoT device reporting temperature once every 10 seconds for the whole day. It's entirely different use cases and the impact of congestion between the two is like talking about what matters to a garden on Mars vs Earth. The big limitation I see here, and where Wi-Fi has historically failed even with 802.11ah specifically built for the IoT use case and standardized back in 2015, is the "uses extra power" bit. Other protocols like LoRa are designed around minimizing power at the end stations. At the end of the day that's often a bigger deal than bandwidth for long IoT.

lucb1e 2y ago
> 1 second of a 1080p Netflix stream will use 5x the total daily bandwidth of an IoT device reporting temperature once every 10 seconds Don't have a Netflix file to test with but YT, the video data is 73KiB for the first second (tested by ffmpeg'ing the first second into a new file with codecs set to 'copy'). The page, however, seems to fetch about 9 megabytes in the first second of loading (various features still loading such as comments). Reporting temperature, let's say it's super secure with IV and MAC headers and trailers and another nonce for replay protection (all in all 3x 32 bytes) plus the actual value and other metadata (like which device the report is from) of, say, another 32 bytes, plus IPv6 headers etc. is a couple hundred bytes. Call it 256. There are a gross ten minutes in a day, coming to 144×256 = 36 KiB. Huh, that's pretty accurate when considering video data ("any second" rather than the first second specifically that needs to include the page weight). I had expected the video data to be vastly bigger compared to that sensor reporting just one value per ten minutes. That keyframe+video compression is really quite something; raw 24-bit would be 6 MiB rather than 73 KiB
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Video services use adaptive bitrate so a 1 second sample will give a very variable estimate. If you can watch the full video and monitor the NIC bandwidth (or, if you don't want to count headers, download the full video and look at the media info average bitrate) you'll get a more consistent number. For 1080p TV type content it's often a lot more than 262 MB/h. Raw should be 192010803*24 = ~149 MB since there are 24 frames in a second, keeping that magic of video compression alive despite the larger base rate. Netflix actually gives the value of 3 GB/hour directly for high definition content https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 which is ~833 KB in one second (or about an average 6 mbps plus some delivery overhead) which simplifies things quite a bit though. Encryption is an interesting thought in that LoRaWAN will have encryption built in and the device would typically expect the gateway to handle producing that to IPv6 with traditional encryption and application headers. CTR is used so the packets don't gain much bloat, the minimum size is ~bytes and the maximum size is ~256 bytes. Temperature reports (4 byte float) typically fit in that 50 byte minimal packet category or 432 KB/day reporting every 10 seconds. So I suppose my estimate of 5x was a bit high after all, maybe 1-2x would have been more apt :). But it does beg the question, back to your point, what would that look like in this WiLo protocol? Standard Wi-Fi has a minimum frame size in the air is going to be closer to 100 bytes (minimum Ethernet length of 64 plus Wi-Fi bits). On top of that Wi-Fi doesn't usually act as the gateway like LoRa - does the IoT device now need to package everything in IPv6 + transport security itself and send it over the air with WiLo or is the expectation APs would be more gateway like for these clients? Dunno, wasn't able to read the actual paper in the link to see what is proposed :).