15 ms·

Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good. The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
  • JoshTriplett 1y ago
    > The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi. Absolutely. Everything other than cell phones and laptops-not-at-a-desk should be on Ethernet. I had wires run in 2020 when I started doing even more video calls. Huge improvement in usability.
    • typpilol 1y ago
      The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls. I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience
      • ericd 1y ago
        Eh flat Ethernet cables can easily be snaked all over with adhesive clips, and if you color match cable/clips/walls, it doesn’t look bad.
        • PaulHoule 1y ago
          Visiting museum ships also showed me you can sometimes route cables over living and working spaces.
        • 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
          This is what I did. Takes minimal effort and then you never have to worry about it again.
        • dpark 1y ago
          Cables routed on visible walls look absolutely terrible. I wish they didn’t, but they do. Yes, it’s better if your cable and clips and wall all match, but it still looks bad.
          • Citizen8396 1y ago
            when done right, raceway along (or even behind the) baseboards works nicely
          • ericd 1y ago
            Why? Run them along baseboards in the corners, you'll never notice them (or at least we didn't at our last house, white on white).
          • jandrese 1y ago
            What if you ran the cable on the top of the wall and covered it with crown molding?
      • wlesieutre 1y ago
        MoCA adapters are an option if you’re already wired for coax
    • fragmede 1y ago
      And the big one I want to point out, is that this AI stuff has me downloading so many ten gigabyte model files to run them locally that I'm really feeling the lack of speed that my setup has.
    • marssaxman 1y ago
      The house I live in was built with ethernet, but of the fourteen outlets the builders saw fit to include, not one is located where we can make use of it. The two devices in our house which use a wired connection are both plugged directly into the switch in our utility closet. (We do have one internet-connected device which permanently lives about an inch away from one of the ethernet sockets, but it is, ironically, a wifi-only device with no RJ45 port.)
      • baby_souffle 1y ago
        > The house I live in was built with ethernet, but of the fourteen outlets the builders saw fit to include, not one is located where we can make use of it. I had a similar situation a few years back. It was a rental so I didn't have access to the attic let alone permission to do my own drops. It'll depend a _lot_ on your exact setup, but we had reasonably good results with some ethernet-over-power adapters.
        • jojomodding 1y ago
          We have them at home as well and they really suck. They lose connection every 20ish minutes at best, and take about 5 to reconnect. Makes Zoom meetings impossible, among other things.
          • virtue3 1y ago
            I’ve used Ethernet over coax in my current apartment. It’s worked well! You do need to be a bit careful as coax signal can be shared with neighbors and others sometimes.
            • variaga 1y ago
              You can isolate your ethernet over coax from your neighbor with a MoCA POE "point of entry" filter which blocks the frequencies used by MoCA. You can buy them online for around $10 and they install without tools, Besides neighbors, you may also need a POE filter if you have certain types of cable modem.
    • CoolGuySteve 1y ago
      It depends on your wiring but I've had pretty good success with AV2000 powerline ethernet. I get about 400Mbps and a reliable 2ms ping which is good enough for gaming and streaming from my media center. The endpoint in my living room also has a wifi AP so signal is pretty good for laptops and whatnot. In NYC every channel is congested, I can see like 25 access points at any time and half are poorly configured. Any wired medium is better than the air, I could probably propagate a signal through the drywall that's more reliable than wifi here. So having something I can just plug into the wall is pretty nice compared to running cables even if it's a fraction of gigE standards.
    • kindacuriouzzx 1y ago
      Does this advice still hold true for Internet that is provided through power sockets in the house?
      • hylaride 1y ago
        If you live in a dense area with lots of APs and regularly get performance issues, power line networking will provide excellent ~400Mbps connections that are more than adequate for things like video calls unless your power cables are ancient or under-spec'd (some older houses can sometimes have lower gauge cables that may not perform as well and I imagine some knob and tube setups are not ideal for data transfer, either). If you have newer clients that support it, Wifi 6E/7/802.11ax (or whatever it's called) uses the 6GHz spectrum that isn't as heavily used (yet). I've had good success with it in my multi-unit apartment condo (feels as clean as 5GHz did ~2010). Some higher end APs can also use multi-antenna beams that can help, too.
    • b3lvedere 1y ago
      When i bought my house i was very pleasantly surprised the previous owners had installed pvc pipes from corner to corner (so at least three connnections per corner) when they installed floor heating. It made installing ethernet and speaker cables everywhere i needed so much easier. Should i ever require more than 1Gbit i could easily replace it for fast fiber cables.
    • ghaff 1y ago
      I was mostly wired throughout the house. But with the smoke mitigation after a kitchen fire, pretty much all the hard wiring for both audio and Ethernet is gone or hopelessly messed up. There's no way I'll spend the time and effort to redo everything at this point.
  • jeffbee 1y ago
    Ethernet pretty much sucks and has not improved substantially in consumer devices since the previous century. It also has pretty severe idle power consumption consequences for PCs, unless you are an expert who goes around fixing that.
    • kjkjadksj 1y ago
      You still get the best speeds over ethernet today because of how wifi standards are slow walked, both on the router and the device connected with the router. Ethernet standards are slow walked too of course but we are talking slow walking a 2.5g or 10g connection here, even otherwise crappy hardware is likely to have 1g ethernet and it’s been that way for at least 10 or 15 years.
      • jeffbee 1y ago
        If you want to transfer the contents of your old mac to your new mac, your best options in order of speed are 1) thunderbolt, 2) wifi, and 3) ethernet. You do not, in any sense, get "the best speeds" from ethernet. The market penetration of greater-than-1gb wired networks in consumer devices is practically nothing.
        • astrange 1y ago
          I have all 2.5gbit at home with some 10gbit SFP copper connections, it wasn't particularly difficult. The devices with built-in Ethernet ports are all gigabit of course, but the ones with USB-C ports have 2.5gbit adapters. I could go to 10gbit but the Thunderbolt adapters for those all have fans.
        • pbronez 1y ago
          If you’re the kind of person who wants better than gigabit Ethernet, it’s very available. 2.5Gbe is just a USB adapter away. Mac Studio comes with 10GbE. Unifi networking gives you managed multi-gig and plenty of others do unmanaged multigig at affordable prices. Piles of consumer NAS support multigig. I think this market is driven by content creators. Lots of prosumers shoot terabytes of video on a weekly basis. Local NAS are essential and multi-gig local networks dramatically improve the editing experience.
  • avree 1y ago
    Unfortunately, Unifi only supports DFS channels (which is the only real way for 'each device to have its own wifi channel in a crowded area) on some of their models.
    • esseph 1y ago
      What unifi AP doesn't support DFS? Sometimes DFS certification comes after general device approval, but I'm not aware of any that just flat out doesn't support it. It supported it 10+ years ago.
      • varenc 1y ago
        Yea I've had all sorts of UniFi gear and have never seen an access point that only works on DFS channels. That'd make no sense and their admin software actively discourages DFS channel selection. I'd guess OP might be trying to use 160mhz channel width on 5ghz band, which will only work on DFS channels though. I wouldn't recommend 160mhz channel width unless you have a very quiet RF environment and peak speed is very important to you. Also I've found it hard to get clients to actually use the full 160mhz width on a network configured this way.
  • mlinhares 1y ago
    Yeah, we built our home and i made sure whenever there would be devices on the wall there was an ethernet cable there, best decision ever.
  • GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago
    yes, and... convenience says 'use WiFi'. No wires! I've said, if it moves - wireless. If it doesn't -- wired. Counterexamples that 'work': AM / FM / TV / Paging big transmitters to simple/cheap receivers. For the 1-way case, that works. But for 2-way....
  • paulddraper 1y ago
    There are two kinds of networks: wireless networks and reliable networks. Wired connection is an absolute hack.
    • lxgr 1y ago
      I hear people say this often, but when you look into what they actually mean, it's often a comparison of having a single mediocre ISP CPE in a corner of an apartment, at most with a wireless repeater in another, vs. Ethernet. Of course the wire wins in that comparison. Now put an access point into every room and wire them to the router, and things start looking very differently.
    • protocolture 1y ago
      Lmao. People say this until it takes 3 days to restore a fibre cut, when the wireless guys just work around the problem with replacement radios etc. Issue with Wireless is usually the wireless operator. And most of them do work hard to give wireless a bad rep.
      • toast0 1y ago
        Where I live we have what seems like an unusual amount of fiber cuts... whenever the cable company or the phone company fiber is cut, at least one of the major wireless networks is offline too; maybe calls work, but data doesn't. They could potentially restore service through wireless backhaul, but they don't. They also rely on utility power and utility power outages longer than about 4 hours mean towers are going to turn off.
        • protocolture 1y ago
          Yeah sounds very true. I am aware of a datacentre, whose principal fibre bundle transits a fast tracked development area where theres always construction and always fibre cuts. I am also aware of a wireless backhaul path with close to 2 weeks battery backup, running entirely off of solar. They only truckroll of they get consistent bad weather. I used to maintain an absolutely perfect 25km link that only went offline due to wind twisting the mast the radio was mounted on. I also have maintained an absolute dogs breakfast of a network where customers frequently lost connection. Like daily. I had one fibre link supporting 1000 customers or so, that the provider admitted had so many joins they could scarcely maintain it. And to add insult to that injury, they mislaid the service id, and would always take an adjacent service offline while troubleshooting it. The technology is rarely the problem, its the implementation.
  • ipython 1y ago
    > the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. So true! Other tips I’ve found useful: Separate 2.4ghz network for only IoT devices. They tend to have terrible WiFi chipsets and use older WiFi standards. Slower speed = more airtime used for the same amount of data. This way the “slow” IoT devices don’t interfere with your faster devices which… Faster devices such as laptops and phones belong on 5ghz only network, if you’re able to get enough coverage. Prefer wired backhaul and more access points, as you’re better off with a device talking on another channel to an ap closer to it rather than tieing up airtime with lots of retries to a far away ap (which impacts all the other clients also trying to talk to that ap) WiFi is super solid at our house but it took some tweaking and wiring everything that doesn’t move.
    • vitaflo 1y ago
      Solid idea and something I should work towards. We have Ethernet drops in every room but you’re right about IoT devices. Now I have some more planning to do.
      • kiney 1y ago
        skip wifi and use zigbee for IoT where possible.
    • chrneu 1y ago
      Absolutely. Your IoT devices should be on their own 2.4ghz network running on a specific channel to isolate them. You should also firewall these devices pretty heavily on their own router. The only devices on wifi should be cell phones and laptops if they can't be plugged in. Everything else, including TVs, should be ethernet. When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything was running off the same router. The 2.4ghz congestion slowed the 5ghz connections because the router was having to deal with so much 2.4ghz noise. A good way of thinking about it is that every 2.4ghz device you add onto a network will slow all the other devices by a small amount. This compounds as you add more devices. So those smart lights? Yeaaahh
      • 1y ago
  • rbranson 1y ago
    > It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi. Certainly this is the brute-force way to do it and can work if you can run enough UTP everywhere. As a counterexample, I went all-in on WiFi and have 5 access points with dedicated backhauls. This is in SF too, so neighbors are right up against us. I have ~60 devices on the WiFi and have no issues, with fast roaming handoff, low jitter, and ~500Mbit up/down. I built this on UniFi, but I suspect Eero PoE gear could get you pretty close too, given how well even their mesh backhaul gear performs.
    • xmprt 1y ago
      I'm not super familiar with SF construction materials but I wonder if that plays a part in it too? If your neighbors are separated by concrete walls then you're probably getting less interference from them than you'd think and your mesh might actually work better(?)... but what do I know since I'm no networking engineer.
      • rbranson 1y ago
        It's all wood construction, originally stick victorians with 2x4 exterior walls. My "loudest" neighbor is being picked up on 80MHz at -47 dBm.
        • hansvm 1y ago
          Man, at times in my life I would've killed to get a -47 dBm or better signal.
        • varenc 1y ago
          Old Victorians in SF will sometimes have lathe and plaster walls (the 'wet wall' that drywall replaced). Lathe and plaster walls often have chicken wire in them that degrade wifi more than regular drywall will.
    • sidewndr46 1y ago
      you have five access points and 60 devices? How many square feet are you trying to cover?
  • lxgr 1y ago
    > You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. TV streaming seems like a bad example, since it's usually much lower average bandwidth than e.g. a burst of mobile app updates installing with equal priority on the network as as soon as a phone is plugged in for charging, or starting a cloud photo backup.
    • vel0city 1y ago
      Kind of true, but potentially also untrue. If that TV is running a crappy WiFi chip running an older WiFi standard on the same channel, it'll end up performing worse or not playing as nice with other clients during those bursts of buffering. That'll potentially be seen by other clients as little bursts of jitter. That's true of any client with older and crappier WiFi chips though, but TVs are such a race to the bottom when it comes to performance in so many other things.
  • drob518 1y ago
    That tip about not using it also works with Ethernet and other technologies, BTW.
  • BadBadJellyBean 1y ago
    I wish I could put Ethernet everywhere but I live in a German apartment in a German house and here walls are massive and made out of brick and concrete. Routing cables through this without it being a massive eyesore is pretty hard.
    • molszanski 1y ago
      Try Powerline. This €40 device will turn your electrical sockets into an 100-500 mbps Ethernet cable. Simple and efficient. Just check if sockets you want to connect are on the same circuit breaker. If yes, chances are really high it would work very well. I’ve connected a switch and a second access point with mine. Also I think they work best if there fewer of them on the same circuit. But not sure. Check first.
      • BadBadJellyBean 1y ago
        I tried that but the performance was worse than wifi.
        • MaKey 1y ago
          G.hn powerline devices are better than the ancient HomePlug AV2 ones. Which devices did you try?
      • izacus 1y ago
        Powerline almost never comes close to performance of wifi in the same conditions. It's literally wifi just over an even worse medium.
        • Hikikomori 1y ago
          Through thick brick walls?
          • izacus 1y ago
            Yes. Usually power line also jumps circuits in those cases which massively degrades reliability and throughput.
  • alyandon 1y ago
    I use powerline ethernet adapters to hook up the media center in the living room. They aren't super fast (~100 mbps) but they are so much more consistent than wifi.
  • m463 1y ago
    > not use it. A few things come to mind... - You can buy ethernet adapters... for iPhone/ipad/etc. Operations are so much faster, especially large downloads like offline maps. - many consumer devices suck wrt to wifi. For example, there seem to me ZERO soundbars with wired subwoofers. They all incorporate wifi. - also, if anyone has lived in a really dense urban environment, wifi is a liability in just about every way. - Whats's worse is how promiscuous many devices are. Why do macs show all the neighbor's televisions in the airplay menu? - and you can't really turn off wifi on a mac without turning off sip. (in settings, wifi OFF toggle is stuck on but greyed out)
    • yardstick 1y ago
      > many consumer devices suck wrt to wifi. For example, there seem to me ZERO soundbars with wired subwoofers. They all incorporate wifi. Sonos has its issues, but I do need to point out that their subs (and the rest) all have Ethernet ports in addition to WiFi.
      • ssl-3 1y ago
        And also, previously: In the dark times when end-user wireless network bandwidth very low and glitchy (and most home users didn't care much), and before "mesh" became a term associated with a single-box collection of items that could be bought at Wal-Mart, Sonos devices were able to mesh together and form their own wireless network that Just Worked. In software-land, they even solved latency inequalities well-enough to keep things properly in-phase at 20KHz between different devices, to allow stereo imaging to work correctly betwixt two wirelessly-connected speakers. (This seems very passe' in these modern enlightened times of seemingly-independent wireless Bluetooth earbuds, but it was a tough nut for them to crack back in 2002[!].) It wasn't all smiles and rainbows, of course, because the world never properly settled on one, true, universal implementation of something like Spanning Tree Protocol and agreed on how to use it. It was very possible for a person to really hose up their network by connecting Sonos gear the "wrong" way -- by connecting "too much" of it directly to the LAN. But those potential problems were broadly mitigable by picking exactly one Sonos device to bridge the wireless SonosNet into the home's LAN: Ideally, a Sonos Bridge would -- uh -- provide that bridge, but any random Sonos speaker (or subwoofer!) would do just as well. This worked, but it involved some aspect of wifi. And yeah, the problems could also be mitigated in other ways if they showed up: A person could certainly plug in their Sonos sub, sound bar, and surround speakers into Ethernet -- which was really quite neat and tidy if it worked, and it often worked. But it was a pickle if it didn't work because STP implementations can be an unadjustable boondoggle in the consumer space. They had a really neat and rather unique thing going for quite a long time before the market shifted to make their products apparently be fickle, outdated, inferior, and expensive. ("What, no Bluetooth?" people once said, even though, being an independent network-based streamer, it doesn't have Bluetooth problems like a person walking to the other side of the house with their phone where everyone but them can hear it noisily glitch out until they wander back.) Nowadays, SonosNet seems to be mostly dead, and the STP problems died with it. Common home wifi has also grown up a lot since 2002. So a person can hard-wire their Sonos sub, soundbar, and surround speakers into the LAN without fear of badness -- or use one or more of those wirelessly, instead. All without problems. It was pretty neat. It's still pretty neat today.
  • dylanowen 1y ago
    For people who don't or can't have Ethernet wiring, I've had great success with Ethernet over coax. My ancient coax wiring gets 800mbps back to my router with a screenbeam MoCA 2.5
    • Denatonium 1y ago
      MoCA is truly amazing. I'm getting full symmetrical 940 Mbps speeds simultaneously over upload and download using RG59 cable with a pair of ECB6250. It helps that our house is fairly small, as the high frequencies that MoCA uses get attenuated pretty quickly on RG59 cabling, but even still, I'm impressed by the results.
  • cryptoegorophy 1y ago
    And all iot devices on protocol such as zwave
  • varenc 1y ago
    An idle Wi-Fi client with no traffic should have a very minimal effect on your network's quality. The TV is only going to be slowing things down if it's actually using the network and downloading/uploading. Which regrettably, is a problem with smart TVs. But there's no reason to limit the number of idle clients on a Wi-Fi network assuming your gateway can handle it. The challenge is though in the real world many devices that should be idle aren't. For my IoT network I just block most every device's access to the internet. That cuts down on a lot of their background chatter and gives me some minor protection. Also honestly, I feel the majority of wifi problems could be fixed by having proper coverage (more access points), using hardwired access points (no meshing), and getting better equipment. I like Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff but other good options out there. Avoid TP-Link and anything provided by an ISP. If you do go meshing, insist on a 6ghz backhaul, though that hurts the range.
  • manmal 1y ago
    I agree, but as a quite heavy user household, switching to Unifi 10y ago has fixed our issues, and they haven’t returned. With most devices on WiFi, on 3 APs.
  • TiredOfLife 1y ago
    > You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. There is other stuff to watch - like uhd bluray backups and those need more than the crappy 100mbps lan port can deliver.
    • ndriscoll 1y ago
      If the playback device isn't terrible (though smart TVs probably are), 100 Mbps should still be adequate as long as the average bitrate stays below that (which I think is the case for almost all UHD blurays?) and you get close to the nominal speed. For example if it peaks at 120 Mbps, then you're only draining your buffer at 2.5 MB/s, so a 150 MB buffer gets you an entire minute of peak bitrate as long as it was full. A quick search suggests very few movies go above 100 Mbps for longer than a few seconds at a time and averages are usually below 80.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
    Younger generations seem attached to internet access over wifi in an unheallthy, irrational way Proliferation of consumer hardware that lacks ethernet ports is probably a contributing factor IMHO, the greatest utility of wifi is wireless keyboards and monitors, not wireless internet access The ability to remotely control multiple computers not on the same network from the same keyboard, for example But I've always had a bias for using a (mechanical) external keyboards over built-in laptop keyboards, even before there were wireless keyboards
  • seec 1y ago
    As far as I'm concerned Wifi is a "solution" for lazy or incompetent people outside of mobile devices (who do really need it to be useful). Network cable is cheap, crimper is cheap, creating a simple network in your house is mostly a trivial matter. I have helped some people who had many troubles with wifi devices (particularly printers) and when then didn't want to run a cable to solve the problem forever I told them to fuck off. If there is one thing that is certain with wifi, it's that it will break at some point and randomly show poor performance/issues. Anything that doesn't have to be absolutely wireless has to be connected that way, problem solved, forever.
• semiquaver 1y ago
  The thing about speed tests causing a bad experience because they hog airtime felt like a non sequitur (since performing them is rare and manual) until I saw this: > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated But there’s no support for this claim presented frankly I am skeptical. What WiFi devices are regularly conducting speed tests without being asked?
  • jeffbee 1y ago
    Google Nest access points do this, but they do it only when networks are idle, so I fail to see the negative consequences.
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    > What WiFi devices are regularly conducting speed tests without being asked? ISP provided routers, at least Xfinity does. I've gotten emails from them (before I ripped out their equipment and put my own in) "Great news, you're getting more than your plan's promised speeds" with speedtest results in the email, because they ran speed tests at like 3AM. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening often across all the residential ISPs, most likely for marketing purposes.
    • kjkjadksj 1y ago
      I have noticed Spectrum internet shits the bed at 12:30am pretty reliably.
      • typpilol 1y ago
        Really? My spectrum has been super reliable in Michigan. Way better than when I had Comcast here
    • gm678 1y ago
      Pretty sure Verizon does this as well, when I had a tech come out he had access to historical speed test results from my router (I didn't ask any questions about it at the time so don't have any more info).
• ttshaw1 1y ago
  I don't get what the point of the article is. Is the takeaway that I should lower the channel width in my home? How many WAPs would I need to be running for that to matter? I'd argue it's more important to get everyone to turn down TX power in cases where your neighbors in an apartment building are conflicting. And that's never going to happen, so just conform to the legal limit and your SNR should be fine. Anything that needs to be high performance shouldn't be on wifi anyway. If you want to spend a really long time optimizing your wifi, this is the resource: https://www.wiisfi.com/ https://www.wiisfi.com/
  • jerf 1y ago
    This sort of thing is definitely in the class of "are you experiencing problems? if not don't worry about it". If you are experiencing problems, this might give you an angle to think about that you hadn't otherwise, if you just naively assume Wifi is as good as a dedicated wire. Modern Wifi has an awful lot of resources, though. I only notice degradation of any kind when I have one computer doing a full-speed transfer for quite a while to another, but that's a pretty exceptional case and not one I'm going to run any more wires around for for something that happens less than once a month.
  • tetris11 1y ago
    I lose wifi signal consistently in my bedroom on my 80Mhz wide 5Ghz wifi. I just now reduced it to 20Mhz, and though there is a (slight) perceptible drop in latency, those 5 extra dB I gained from Signal/Noise have given me wifi in the bedroom again
    • bcrl 1y ago
      Every doubling of the channel width costs roughly 3dB. Shannon's law strikes again!
      • bobmcnamara 1y ago
        Every doubling of the channel width doubles the Shannon limit* * An a gaussian white noise environment, which WiFi usually isn't in.
• 725686 1y ago
  "The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices"... wtf?
  • lynndotpy 1y ago
    And that's not to mention everything else on the 2.4GHz band :) Bluetooth, zigbee, your microwave, etc
  • MrZander 1y ago
    That seems very high to me. A family of four each has 5 devices connected at the same time?
    • paxys 1y ago
      Smartphone, laptop, tablet, watch - that's 4 already. And this isn't just counting personal devices. Include TV, streaming stick, game console, printers, bulbs, plugs, speakers, doorbell, security cameras, thermostat and you'll hit that number pretty quick.
      • MrZander 1y ago
        There are 16 devices on my WiFi right now and I would've though I was above average. I have a bunch of weird stuff like 3 Raspberry Pis that most households would not have, but I don't have most of the stuff you listed. I guess I am less "connected" than the average American. Can't say I feel like I am missing out, though.
    • kllrnohj 1y ago
      Check your network and see how many wifi devices you have. I'm up to 60+ thanks to a handful of IoT devices, smart speakers, etc... It adds up quick.
    • drob518 1y ago
      Most of your mobile devices are doing background tasks. It’s not typically high bandwidth stuff, but they are connected even when you aren’t using them.
• rpcope1 1y ago
  Honestly what's unsaid in a lot of this is that it would be really nice if there were more and wider ISM bands. So much makes use of 900Mhz, 2.4GHz and 5GHz in novel and innovative ways, that if the government and FCC really actually wanted to spark innovation including augmenting wifi performance, they'd stop letting telcos and other questionable interests hoard spectrum and release it as ISM (and no, they shouldn't steal from ham bands to make ISM bands either).
  • esseph 1y ago
    The only way forward is new frequencies and larger blocks of spectrum.
  • ianburrell 1y ago
    WiFi 6E added 6 GHz spectrum bigger than 5 GHz. The problem is that not that many devices support it. I think it is required in WiFi 7. I think it is shared with other users so devices have to find free space. I think most developed countries have allocated it.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• lxgr 1y ago
  > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated. Is that actually a thing? Why would any ISP intentionally add unnecessary load to their network?
  • sidewndr46 1y ago
    I've only met around 10 people that even know what a speed test is. I'm not sure how most consumers would even go about automating one. What would be the first step?
  • cowsandmilk 1y ago
    See https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-samknows https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/cisco-announces-intent-to-... for example, SamKnows is in millions of homes measuring performance and now sending the data to Cisco.
  • chrneu 1y ago
    For what it's worth, I think most ISPs that do this will host their speed test in-network so their speeds are inflated. This benefits both the ISP and whoever is in charge of the speed test(like speedtest.net). So they're not really increasing their network load a measurable amount since the data never actually leaves their internal network. My ISP's network admin explained this to me one day when I asked about it. He said they don't really notice any difference.
    • cruffle_duffle 1y ago
      That’s why Netflix has fast.com, which pulls actual video content, meaning it’s hard for the ISP to inflate the number. (at least as per my understanding)
      • wlonkly 1y ago
        Sort of -- Netflix probably has a CDN cache at the ISP, and the ISP can definitely prioritize that cache. Fast.com will use that CDN if available. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
• somanyphotons 1y ago
  Is there a good guide on what the right things to do are?
  • chrneu 1y ago
    Hardwire everything you can over ethernet to get them off Wifi. Use a dedicated 2.4ghz AP for all IoT devices. Firewall this network and only allow the traffic those devices need. This greatly reduces congestion. Use 5ghz for phones/laptops and keep IoT off that network. That's really about it. If you have special circumstances there are other solutions, but generally the solution to bad wifi is to not use the wifi, lol.
• XorNot 1y ago
  In the IoT space I really wish an "ESP for power line Ethernet" existed these days. I have 50+ ESP based devices on WiFi and while low bandwidth (and their own SSID) I really wish there were affordable options that they could be "wired" for comms (since they mostly control mains appliances, but the rules and considerations for mixing data and mains in one package are prohibitively expensive).
  • Neywiny 1y ago
    Have you considered 1 WiFi device and 49 sub-ghz devices?
    • XorNot 1y ago
      The point isn't wifi contention per se (it's working fine) - it's that having home automation depend on wireless signals at all is both a vulnerability, and feels silly when all those devices have hard wired power.
• kuon 1y ago
  For me the only thing that really matters, and globally sucks with WiFi is roaming. My house is old and has stones walls up to 120cm, including the inner walls, so I have to have access points is nearly all rooms. I never had a true seamless roaming experience. Today, I have TP-Link Omada and it works better than previous solutions, but it is still not as good as DECT phones for examples. For example if I watch a twitch stream in my room and go to the kitchen grab something with my tablet or my phone, I have a freeze about 30% of the times, but not very long. Before I sometime had to turn the wifi off and on on my device for it to roam. I followed all Omada and general WiFi best practice I could find about frequency, overlap... But it is still not fully seamless yes.
  • bcrl 1y ago
    DECT phones run on the 1.9 GHz spectrum which doesn't get absorbed by water like 2.4 GHz, and will penetrate through many other materials far better than higher frequencies. Most people place wifi repeaters incorrectly, or invest in crappy repeater / mesh devices that do not multiple radios. A Wifi repeater or mesh device with a single radio by definition cuts your throughput in half for every hop. I run an ISP. Customers always cheap out when it comes to their in home wireless networks while failing to understand the consequences of their choices (even when carefully explained to them).
    • protocolture 1y ago
      "Wheres your router" "The basement" "Uh, i can send someone out to install some repeaters for $$$" "No just make internet good now"
    • gh02t 1y ago
      Eh, multiple APs and roaming being awful isn't just a matter of shitty placement and bad wireless backhaul, it's also client side software. I have two APs on opposite ends of my house and my phone tries to hang on to whatever AP its connected to far longer than it should when moving around the house. My APs are placed correctly, and support 802.11r, yet my phone and most other devices don't try to roam until far, far past the point they should have switched to the other AP. The design of roaming being largely client initiated means roaming doesn't really work how people intuitively think it should, because at least every device I've ever seen seems to be programmed to aggressively cling to a single AP.
• userbinator 1y ago
  The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices I wonder how many of those could be wired.
• harrall 1y ago
  I actually switched from 40 MHz to 80 Mhz when a friend complained about slow downloads on my Wi-Fi. So yeah, I do think speed is more important. Responsiveness doesn’t matter that often and when it does, plugging in Ethernet takes it out of the equation.
  • chrneu 1y ago
    You can't use that speed if your device is dropping half the packets.
• amluto 1y ago
  I wish the Wi-Fi developers would put some serious effort into improving range and contention. Forgot 40 MHz vs 80 MHz — how about some 5 MHz channels? How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR? How about improving the stack to get better performance when a device has mediocre signal quality to multiple APs at the same time? There are are these cool new features like MLO, but maybe devices could mostly use narrow channels and only use more RF bandwidth when they actually need it.
  • bobmcnamara 1y ago
    IEEE 802.11af old TV band IEEE 802.11ah 900Ish IEEE 802.11ax(WiFi6): traditional channels can be subdivided between 26 and 2x996 resource units according to need(effectively a 2MHz channel at the low end). This means multiple devices can be transmitted to within the same transmit opportunity. > How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR? 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps.
    • amluto 1y ago
      And do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel? Preferably even if they’re from different vendors and even if the users are not experts? > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps I’m a little vague on the details, but those are rather old and I don’t think there is anything that low-rate in the current MCS table. Do they actually work well? Do they support modern advancements like LDPC?
      • bobmcnamara 1y ago
        > > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps > I’m a little vague on the details, but those are rather old They're the original, phase shift keyed modulations. > Do they actually work well? They work great, if your problem is SNR, and if you value range more than data rate. They are, of course, horribly spectrally inefficient which means they work better than OFDM near the guard bands. OFDM has a much flatter power level over frequency, so you have to limit TX power whenever the shoulder of the signal nears the guard band. IIRC, some standard supports individually adjusting the resource unit transmit power which would solve this as well. PSK modulation solves this somewhat accidentally. Guardbands especially suck since there's only 3 non overlapping 2.4GHz channels. > I don’t think there is anything that low-rate in the current MCS table. > Do they support modern advancements like LDPC? Dunno! Generally though, each MCS index will specify both a modulation mechanism (BPSK, OFDM, ...) and a coding rate. All of the newer specs allow you to go almost as slow if you want to, usually 6-7mbps ish , and this is done with the same modulation scheme just a bit faster and with newer coding. > do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel? Yes and no. It doesn't improve RF coexistence directly. But in many cases allows much more efficient use of the available airtime. Before every outgoing packet to a different station consumed a guard interval and the entire channel bandwidth, but now for a single guard interval you can pack as many station's data as will fit.
• throw0101d 1y ago
  The next release standard is 802.11bn, "Wifi 8", and it has been dubbed Ultra High Reliability (UHR): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11bn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11bn So other considerations are being considered.
  • superkuh 1y ago
    It might help. But wifi, like all radio, is a shared medium. Unlike actual transmission lines like ethernet where you get the entire electromagnetic spectrum to yourself to use multiple times, once for each twisted pair. Even if ethernet itself only uses baseband modulation and doesn't efficiently fill the spectrum it's more than enough. The reliability is incomparible to radio.
• PaulKeeble 1y ago
  A households bandwidth use is quite a bit different to a business. While a household may have a lot of devices most of them are doing very little at any given time, but the primary device in use requires the best speed possible. In a business however there are a lot of primary devices and not a lot of idle little devices and as such fairness and reliability dominate the needs as does getting the frequencies maxed out for coverage and total bandwidth available. Wifi 8 will probably be another standard homes can skip. Like wifi 6 it is going to bring little that they need to utilise their fibre home connnections well across their home.
• kazinator 1y ago
  > Because consumers have been conditioned to understand only raw speed as a metric of Wi-Fi quality and not more important indicators of internet experience such as responsiveness and reliability. Whie the two are not the same, they are not exactly separable. You will not get good Internet speed out of a flaky network, because the interrupted flow of acknowledgements, and the need to retransmit lost segments, will not only itself impact the performance directly, but also trigger congestion-reducing algorithms. Most users are not aware whether they are getting good speed most of the time, if they are only browsing the web, because of the latencies of the load times of complex pages. Individual video streams are not enough to stress the system either. You have to be running downloads (e.g. torrents) to have a better sense of that. The flakiness of web page loads and insufficient load caused by streams can conceal both: some good amount of unreliability and poor throughput.
• Havoc 1y ago
  Is it really that big of an issue? With device spread over 2.4 5 and 6 ghz you really need a lot of them to run into issues
• mithcs 1y ago
  Not the "Need for Speed" I expected.
• Brajeshwar 1y ago
  “Behind every good wi-fi network is an excellent wired backbone infrastructure.” - the Tao of Wi-Fi
  • stingraycharles 1y ago
    “Those who understand wireless use cables” - random guy on the internet.
• LikeBeans 1y ago
  I'm surprised, at least for businesses, small cell wifi is not a thing. For example, if you walk into an office building everyone seems to have a physical phone on their desk that is hard wired. What if that is also a small cell AP. Like a personal AP. Using automation and central provisioning and analytics can make this doable. Yeah handoff and roaming has to be seamless and quick but it doesn't feel that hard, no? If so this would be pretty neat and would solve the contention issue in the air.
• varenc 1y ago
  Apple has a draft specification for a better way of measuring network quality than just doing speed tests: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness Their `networkQuality` implementation is on the CLI for any Mac recently updated. It's pretty interesting and I've found it to be very good at predicting which networks will be theoretically fast, but feel unreliable and laggy, and which ones will feel snappy and fast. It measures Round-trips Per Minute under idle and load condition. It's a much better predictor of how fast casual browsing will be than a speed test.
• saghm 1y ago
  Moving into a house for the first time since before college this year, I only just learned about Wi-Fi channel width this week. Apparently the mesh routers I ended up picking several months ago had a default width of 160 MHz, but only go as low as 80 MHz, so that's what I ended up switching to. Anecdotally it has seemed to be somewhat more reliable, but maybe in the long run finding something that can go even lower might be worth it because we do still notice some stutter occasionally that would be nice to reduce even if the theoretical max throughout was a bit lower.
• spragl 1y ago
  This is a clear case of "you get what you measure". Measuring speed is so easy, everybody can do it, and do it all the time. No wonder that providers optimize for speed. But it also works the other way around. We have developed a focus on speed as it was the only thing that mattered. I have worked with networks for many years, and users blaming all sorts of issues on the network is a classic, so of course in their minds they need more speed and more bandwidth. But improvements only makes sense up to some point. After that it is just psychological.
• MedAzizBenSalem 1y ago
  This is such a great write-up it highlights a truth that’s been hiding in plain sight for years: we’ve optimized Wi-Fi for headline speeds, not human experience. Emphasis on throughput reminds one of the "megapixel wars" of early digital photography a simple, clear-cut figure that completely misrepresents actual quality. Responsiveness and reliability are the actual measures that control day to day satisfaction, but they are harder to define and won't neatly go on a store shelf. What is fascinating here is that speed tests themselves actively degrade the network performance. It's like taking your pulse by first dashing a lap in sprinting mode. Whether we'll see more router makers or ISPs start offering "responsiveness scores" instead of speed numbers once the consumer pays attention to latency and airtime contention remains to be seen. At any rate, this post nails the broader cultural problem in networking: the industry still chases awe inspiring numbers instead of better experiences.
  • vlan0 1y ago
    How do you think speeds effect airtime utilization/optimization? And how does this change with lower PHY rates?
    • immibis 1y ago
      Not linearly. The data may take twice as long to transmit at half the rate, but there's overhead which doesn't change. If you can use half the channel width and transmit at half the rate, you halve the Hz-seconds used for preambles and stuff, while keeping the Hz-seconds used for data the same.
  • ieie3366 1y ago
    AI slop
    • estimator7292 1y ago
      [flagged]
• celeryd 1y ago
  I always assumed it was Ethernet protocol itself that made wi-fi suck
• knorker 1y ago
  Is this still true with OFDM and subchannels or whatever it's called? Also MIMO. And don't think it's relevant to compare what to do in a large space with what one should do at home. The requirements are entirely different. In a large space with many users I'd use small channels and many access points. I want it to work good enough for everyone to have calls, and have good aggregate throughput. In a two bed home I'd use large channels and probably only one AP. Peak single device speed is MUCH more important than aggregate speed. And in a home it matters much more what channels are being busyed by neighbors. For latency, of course, there is only wired. Even with few devices.
• vlan0 1y ago
  Honestly, none of the comments here coming from a place with enough protocol knowledge to talk about the "whys" I operate a large enterprise wireless network with 80mhz 5Ghz channels and 160Mhz 6Ghz channels. It is possible if your environment allows.
• everdrive 1y ago
  Wifi sucks in general. You ever get on a video call and someone has starts talking like a robot? And then, out of pure superstition they start walking around their house hoping to "find" the better reception? And it never really works, but they keep trying it anyhow, and then they either say "maybe I need a better internet" or "but I have full bars." No information is really given to a normal (or in some cases, even technical users) which would allow them to actually correctly diagnose their problem. So like Skinner's pigeons, they just keep playing their ritual even though it has no effect.
  • ElijahLynn 1y ago
    WiFi is pretty magical in general. Sometimes it sucks.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  I bought a Wi-Fi 6 TP-Link router recently and found out that it's normal for people to have performance/responsiveness issues due to all the "advanced" features enabled. I turned them all off and use the simplest possible connection settings, but somehow there is still a 20-second delay when my smartphone tries to access a web page (and I use 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8, and this never happened on previous wifi routers). The great enshittification rolls on.
• ElijahLynn 1y ago
  Anyone know what Google Wi-Fi devices are set to? I don't see a way to change that setting and I don't see a way to see what it's currently set to.
• ksec 1y ago
  >The IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8) working group has acknowledged the need for a shift in focus, framing the standard’s goals differently from past generations: not chasing ever-higher peak speeds, but improving reliability, lower latency (especially at the 95th percentile), reduced packet loss, and robustness under challenging conditions (interference, mobility). For people who dont follow WiFi closely. While WiFi 8, or 7 or 6 all has the intended features for its release, they are either not mandated or dont work as well as it should. Instead every release was a full refined execution of previous version. So the best WiFi 6 ( OFDMA ) originally promised will only come in WiFi 7. And current WiFi 7 feature like Multi-Link Operation will likely work better in WiFI 8. So if you wanted a fully working WiFi 8 as they marketed it, you better wait for WiFI 9. But WiFi has come a long way. Not only have they exceeded 1Gbps in real world performance, they are coming close to 2.5Gbps, maximising the 2.5Gbps Ethernet. And we are now working on more efficient and reliable WiFi.
• drewg123 1y ago
  One of the things that makes our wifi suck are HP (and other) printers using wifi direct. Looking at a wifi scan, I can see new fewer than 5 of my neighbors printers screaming to the top of their lungs. The only thing that makes wifi in a large condo building viable is the 6Ghz channels available on wifi 6e