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That's a bit of an oversimplification. Access Points coordinate communication to ensure clients take turns, and Wi-Fi avoid collisions by having clients listen
by varenc 2y ago
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Access Points coordinate communication to ensure clients take turns, and Wi-Fi avoid collisions by having clients listen for an idle channel before transmitting and exponentially backing off if it's busy (CSMA/CA). So even when clients share the same frequency, it’s not 'circuit-switched' since transmissions are managed dynamically. Clients wait for the AP to respond before sending additional data. And there's QoS features to ensure things like live voice take priority over a bulk download.
Wi-Fi 6 adds OFDMA, which splits channels into sub-channels so multiple clients can transmit simultaneously, and MU-MIMO allows simultaneous streams to different clients. Beamforming helps too with directional signals.
tl;dr; it is a shared medium but with lots of tech on top of it that mitigate much of the issues!
- mmooss 2y agoThanks ... but one thing I don't understand: > MU-MIMO allows simultaneous streams to different clients That's great, but the question is the same: how? How does it solve what I called the circuit-switching problem (i.e., each tranmission utilizing the channel 100%)?