5 ms·
We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of st
by avhception 1mo ago
We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam.
I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
- jauntywundrkind 1mo agoDECT or DECT-NR+? I do kind of want to play with this.
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoAny DECT (NR) stuff is super expensive if you build embedded software/hardware for it. It's basically Nordic-only.
- dmos62 1mo agoSounds like your old, random clients might be a problem?
- avhception 1mo agoOne of many, yes!
- abhinavk 1mo agoEnsure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.
- afavour 1mo agoEasier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.
- jameshart 1mo agoSure, but then this becomes a bit of an irrelevant comment on a discussion of how WiFi 8 will focus on increasing reliability. Your old devices won’t magically get more reliable because WiFi 8 comes out. You will benefit from this after it comes out by migrating to WiFi 8. Meanwhile, you can benefit from existing reliability enhancements by upgrading to WiFi 6. If your response to that is ‘I can’t use WiFi 6’ then presumably the putative benefits of WiFi 8 are even more remote.
- asymmetric 1mo agoCare to expand?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Avamander 1mo agoLegacy clients force APs to accomodate them. Be it by using slower speeds with worse airtime consumption or by just disabling features that (can) make old clients misbehave.
- moffkalast 1mo agoThings you can say in 2062, not 2026.
- euduhdhbene 1mo agoI was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs). Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoDifficult within the EU due to ISM limits. Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.
- mrjay42 1mo agoPhew, I looked it up, just by curiosity. What a nightmare :') the rules, regulations, laws are damn strict Oo
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoUsually this rules are for experts who have to implement the limits. They should not be exposed to end-users.
- crote 1mo agoThe problem is that the application of the rules is inherently usage-specific. For example, with the 1% duty cycle limit it is totally fine to have a transmission take 30 seconds - provided you only send 1 transmission an hour. Want to send one transmission per minute? You'll have to get your transmission time down to 0.6 seconds. And your transmission speed is inherently linked to your data rate, and by extension your signal range. There's no one-size-fits-all solution possible here. Either the user has to give it some information about their specific use case, or it'll have to stick to the absolute most pessimistic limits.
- euduhdhbene 1mo agoWe have devices sending telemetry and occasional OTA updates without urgency (if it takes a few hours to get it over it’s not a problem). If you need consistent MB range traffic for cameras I wouldn’t advise it but for low (5kbs) traffic it can be attractive. A few thousand bits can encode quite a bit of information. Don’t be fooled by the “kbs”.
- mschuster91 1mo ago> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better. Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else. RF is a weird world.
- fragmede 1mo agoHow much money do you have? Nokia's Centralized RAN basically solves for cellphones by not choosing between AP1 and AP2. The device yells out a packet, both radios hear it, and the signals are combined in baseband processing. Wifi 8 doesn't quite do this, maybe 9's gonna have it. Or the patents run out and the telecom networks cooperate and everything gets a cell modem.
- avhception 1mo agoI'm no RF expert, and we're not a big company. I wear many hats, from DBA to local WiFi expert. And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.
- mschuster91 1mo ago> And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail. DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.
- rbinv 1mo agoI've had similar issues with clients (Blink camera sync modules) connecting to far-away APs instead of the much closer router. I could not force them to connect directly to the router no matter what. Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
- maccard 1mo agoAnd actually debugging this unless you have a bunch of enterprise level kit, or know exactly what the failure you’re looking for is is absolutely impossible
- rbinv 1mo agoI used Wireless Diagnostics.app on macOS ("Scan" window) and looked for the 2.4 GHz radio's MAC address which was nowhere to be found. But yeah, you have to have a hunch.
- maccard 1mo agoThanks - I’ll try this. I have a problem where my kindle only downloads books in one room (but I can make purchases in any), and I’m pretty sure that it’s connecting to a different AP and doing something stupid in the process
- spockz 1mo agoIn ubiquity gear you can “lock” devices to a specific endpoint. I suspect ultimately you would prefer to have failover available but at least for troubleshooting you can see how it connects to that specific AP. Similarly you could see the amount of clients connected to an AP on every frequency and WiFi version.
- smashed 1mo agoYou can ban devices from all access points except one. That is not "locking" it to one, it's just preventing it from successfully connecting. It will still try to roam, it will still cause issues. A lot of the roaming logic is in the clients. Newer android and iOS versions have gotten better but there are tons of old and new devices with poor roaming logic and capabilities.
- mytailorisrich 1mo agoWarehouses, factories, etc need private 5G, not Wi-Fi.
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoIndustrial 5G is super expensive. Also almost impossible to find a vendor that offers all the nice protocol features (Low Latency, native Ethernet tunneling, etc.) in their infrastructure.
- coretx 1mo agoMost don't want you to setup your own APN ;-)
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoThat's a standard IoT usecase almost all telcos offer. We have industrial SIMs with our own APN and get a IPSec tunnel to the Telco where we have a dedicated network to see our devices.
- avhception 1mo agoWe have about 20 client devices, I would very much prefer to throw a bunch of APs into the warehouse and it just works - DECT can do it, so wifi should, too. I'd settle for 10mbit/s!
- FrustratedMonky 1mo agoI know what you are trying to say. But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.
- Dylan16807 1mo agoWi-Fi should be able to do it. Dense 5G uses similar bands after all and they'll go through a couple walls.
- cookiengineer 1mo agoLoRa is quite nice for this in the lower frequency bands, and the bandwidth should suffice for this sorta thing. And the tech is super cheap to build and maintain, both hardware and software is open source.
- wildzzz 1mo agoLoRa is dialup speeds at best. Fine if the clients are basically wireless terminals but useless if you need to send photos or look at webpages.
- cookiengineer 1mo agoMaybe read grandparent's comment again? They were talking about using DECT as an alternative and about string encoded EAN codes, not about watching YouTube in 4k.
- gumby 1mo agoI hadn’t realised that DECT is still in use. It was pretty good in its heyday so glad it’s survived.
- bzzzt 1mo agoThere are still landlines in use (although they mostly use VOIP instead of analog phone lines). All cheap cordless phones I know run DECT. It's more than enough speed for speech and more stable than wifi. The AVM Fritz product line of consumer modem/routers all include a DECT modem for registering extra handsets for voice but they have their own proprietary handsets that support TCP/IP over DECT for things like audio streaming or sending extra media like a caller photo.
- Marsymars 1mo agoI've never really liked talking on cellphones and got a grandstream cordless DECT phone that runs over a voip line probably a decade ago. One of my favourite purchases.
- devilbunny 1mo agoCordless phones have mostly disappeared but the Panasonic Link2Cell models - where the base station acts as a Bluetooth headset for up to two mobile phones - are still around and are absolutely marvelous for older adults. They can plug their mobile phone in to charge and walk around with one of the handsets (a base station can support up to six!) so that if they should fall, they have a phone on them to call for help.
- kcb 1mo agoI have a DECT headset and I would never go back to Bluetooth. The range, reliability and the quality of modern DECT is great. Just make sure you get one with ultra wide band or similar otherwise you end up with cordless phone quality.
- namibj 1mo agoYeah you can run stuff through DECT I'm not sure what handheld suitable gateway you'd use and strap to the holster of the associated scanner, but otherwise... That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range. I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios. The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side. You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in. Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.
- teleforce 1mo agoPerhaps you can try DECT NR+ the new reincarnation of DECT and also backward compatible with the original DECT [1]. It can also do roaming. It's under 5G standard but for non-cellular connectivity that means you can use it without base-station like Wi-Fi direct. It's geared toward IoT but its data rates are from 1 Mbps up to 1.3 Gbps depending on the operating frequency and the type of modulation being used [2]. [1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comnents): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644 [2] Technology: DECT NR+ [pdf]: https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-nr-_11-2025_lr https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-...
- avhception 1mo agoThat sounds really interesting! Any concrete products for end users? Seems mostly chips and specs so far
- BatteryMountain 1mo agoHere's another one for you: today I found out that my dual-sim android phone has a single radio that is shared between the two sims. So when you are on a call, the 4G/5G doesn't work on the other sim, likewise, sometimes the the voice sim is unavailable while the other sim engaged with 4G/5G things... which is just stupid. Can't they just add two radios/chips (like many wifi AP's....)? So the whole setup on a consumer phone is actually quite unreliable because of reusing a single radio. I thought it was my buggy code, but nope, just the radio being shared and the mobile operator seeing the sim as offline. Crazy.
- UltraSane 1mo agoVoice is normally done using VoLTE now.
- tecleandor 1mo agoYep, although (at least in my experience) it's not enabled by default. I also learnt about VoWiFi (also called "WiFi Calling") that allows you using WiFi for calling, including when you're abroad or you don't even have phone signal. Support for VoWiFi is a bit weird. Some operators don't allow it outside of your region (for example, the EU), some others will allow it and even bill you as if it were a local call made from your country. Also, although it's in theory made only for working through WiFi, seems like if you have a second SIM or eSIM with a data plan (for example, a travel SIM local for the country you're on vacations) and some combination of phone and/or operators, it can use the second SIM as the data provider for WiFi Calling.
- BenjiWiebe 1mo agoFor the major US carriers, since they shut down 3G, VoLTE is the only way calls work. Which meant that a non-VoLTE-but-4G-capable device can no longer make 911 calls. I was using a Samsung S5 running LineageOS for a while with Google voice for calls, but the no 911 thing is one of the main reasons I finally moved to a different phone. The S5 supports VoLTE but only with stock firmware.
- hulitu 1mo agoYou need to enable automatic updates. /s
- ErroneousBosh 1mo agoHow much data do the scanners really send backwards and forwards? I feel like a lot of the problems people try to solve with wifi and dozens of access points could be better solved by a 450MHz-ish transceiver up on the roof with a downfire turnstile, and 9600bps radio modems in everything. I'm going to embroider some red hats, going to put on them "MAKE SLOTTED ALOHA GREAT AGAIN".
- crote 1mo ago> We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point Those two are the same thing, though! Literally nobody is hitting those insane theoretical transmission speeds. Heck, most access points don't even have the uplink for it. So why bother? Easy: because it provides you margin. A 10Gbps link degrading to 100Mbps due to poor signal quality is a lot better than a 1Gbps link degrading to 10Mbps when you are trying to achieve that 20Mbps connection. The expectation is that your signal will degrade, so it is all about starting with a good-enough spec that you'll still have a reasonably-usable connection left at the end. It's a similar story for multi-client connectivity. A 10Gbps link might sound overkill for a 500Mbps residential internet connection, until you've got legacy and poor-signal-quality clients taking of 95% of the airtime for 5Mbps of data. Being able to still get enough data through that remaining 5% airtime to saturate your internet connection is incredibly useful. And before you praise DECT too much: its 2020 revision allows for a 1.2 Gbit/s transfer rate, with all the fancy stuff like MIMO and beamforming you might know from Wifi. Quite excessive for a few simple phone calls, wouldn't you think?
- jychang 1mo ago"Hearing a person speaking really fast" and "picking out a voice in a crowded room" are two completely different things.
- grahamburger 1mo agoAnother option here might be Private LTE in the CBRS band.
- burner420042 1mo agoI understand the question and the environment you're alluding to re RF noise and AP distance from clients, etc. in a warehouse environment. By default clients will always try to connect at the highest wifi standard and link rate, regardless of that connection type's qos level. I've not seen an AP setup where the wifi standard (a, b, g, N, 5, 7, ...), channel size (20 vs 40mhz), channel, and in some cases speed stepping, couldn't be forced at the AP. If you force the APs to only broadcast G, each on a specific channel, (literally just an example for discussion) the clients will connect that way if the device radio supports it,while re-using existing auth credentials. No client-side changes are necessary here and thus easy to test. I've encountered device radios that are only 5GHz, but that'd be clear in your testing. Forced AP settings do wonders for wireless networks. Regarding user's opinions, they may claim to need the latest and greatest but in real life if their network use only needs megabits and the connection type satisfies that, they don't notice. And you don't tell them. :-)
- avhception 1mo agoI have already limited the "warehouse" SSID to 2.4GHz, 20MHz channel size and made an optimized channel plan that keeps the neighboring APs on channels manually chosen for minimum overlap. Anything else? Speed stepping? Reducing the wifi standard looses features like roaming hints and stuff like that, no?
- vlan0 1mo agoYeah it sucks. But it will always be a dance. And the folks that make the clients will always choose “best effort”. Sadly, we can only reduce clients decision so far before things break
- runjake 1mo agoYour first paragraph is possible now with most enterprise 802.11ac equipment (Cisco, Aruba, Mist, Ruckus, etc) but it needs to be properly designed, placed, and configured. DECT is a different frequency and is much less vulnerable to nearby metal, backscatter and so on. You need to get someone in there who is competent at wi-fi design (I am only marginally so, but I’ve done a lot of learning by failing)
- matt-p 1mo agoTwo very different ideas at play, I agree. Only easy to argue in hindsight that it should of more tightly specified everything to aid better roaming. Wi-Fi: general-purpose, massively interoperable LAN radio → let the client make decisions. DECT: purpose-built cordless mobility system → tightly specify the radio, handset/base-station behaviour and handover mechanisms.