6 ms·

I'd be fine with a 100Mbps Wi-Fi which would be as reliable as a wired connection.

by nawitus 13y ago

untog 13y ago
Speed doesn't necessarily correlate with reliability, though.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Of course it doesn't. There's normally a direct tradeoff, with redundancy giving higher reliability at the cost of throughput. He's advocating higher reliability over higher speed.
- phamilton 13y ago
  I think they were stating two requirements: Ideal wifi: 1) should be fast 2) should be reliable I would much rather see optimizations on #2 than #1 at this point. I agree that once speeds hit 100mbps, reliability is a much more important engineering goal to focus on.
  - pixl97 13y ago
    >reliability is a much more important engineering goal to focus on. Wireless is and can be very reliable. Just go get a FCC spectrum licence for a dedicated and unshared frequency and watch your reliability issues disappear. It's just expensive. Reliability on open spectrums is always going to be an issue, and one you should never depend fully on. There will always be old equipment running that doesn't work well with the new standards and tosses it's new found gains out the window. Unless you can convince each of your neighbors to throw away that ancient 2.4GHz phone handset and old B router. Reliability on telco wireless is a different issue. They would rather run more customers on a segment, reducing reliability, but increasing profits.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Nothing is worse than a perfectly rendered frame of a porn video which then stops due to buffering because the Wifi has flaked out. A drop in quality corresponding to lower bandwidth--delivered reliably--is acceptable. Freezing on a perfectly-detailed closeup of a stupid expression because someone came as the internet went (out) is not. Reliability >> speed.
jotm 13y ago
How is it unreliable?
sliverstorm 13y ago
What do you mean by reliable? My main snag with WiFi right now is its half-duplex nature and dropped packets. 100Mbps WLAN is horrendously worse than 100Mbps LAN for networked storage
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  OP was a bit oddly worded but I think nawitus meant that he or she would be happy with 100Mbps wireless if it were as reliable as a wired connection, so basically exactly what you're saying. I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. While the wireless connection was much faster in theory (and in practice when everything was perfect) than the powerline ethernet speeds, trying to stream HD movies and such was always an exercise in frustration with the wifi no matter how good the routers and/or repeaters were on the wifi connection and how well they were set up. With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. In any case the horrible state of US ISPs is the bottleneck for networking at home for me right now regardless of how I wire myself internally. My two options are Time Warner Cable (which cuts out between the modem and their headend for minutes multiple times a day and was never fixed despite half a dozen on-site technician visits) or AT&T DSL which has been much more reliable but is annoyingly slow for big downloads and such. I'm currently using the AT&T connection, but both options are terrible in their own way and nothing else usable is available to me. Fuck you, US ISPs.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    > I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. ... With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. Powerline networking is still a shared medium. You're sharing the available bandwidth with all of the neighboring houses on the same utility transformer. It does have the benefit that signal strength drops off with linear wiring distance. Thus, you're farther from your neighbors than you would be with Wi-Fi. However, as with 5 GHz, you're getting good results right now because powerline networking isn't too popular. But if every house were to get powerline networking, then you would start encountering interfering networks.

I'd be fine with a 100Mbps Wi-Fi which would be as reliable as a wired connection.

by nawitus 13y ago

I'd be fine with a 100Mbps Wi-Fi which would be as reliable as a wired connection.

untog 13y ago

Speed doesn't necessarily correlate with reliability, though.

barrkel 13y ago
Of course it doesn't. There's normally a direct tradeoff, with redundancy giving higher reliability at the cost of throughput. He's advocating higher reliability over higher speed.
phamilton 13y ago
I think they were stating two requirements: Ideal wifi: 1) should be fast 2) should be reliable I would much rather see optimizations on #2 than #1 at this point. I agree that once speeds hit 100mbps, reliability is a much more important engineering goal to focus on.
- pixl97 13y ago
  >reliability is a much more important engineering goal to focus on. Wireless is and can be very reliable. Just go get a FCC spectrum licence for a dedicated and unshared frequency and watch your reliability issues disappear. It's just expensive. Reliability on open spectrums is always going to be an issue, and one you should never depend fully on. There will always be old equipment running that doesn't work well with the new standards and tosses it's new found gains out the window. Unless you can convince each of your neighbors to throw away that ancient 2.4GHz phone handset and old B router. Reliability on telco wireless is a different issue. They would rather run more customers on a segment, reducing reliability, but increasing profits.
- angersock 13y ago
  Nothing is worse than a perfectly rendered frame of a porn video which then stops due to buffering because the Wifi has flaked out. A drop in quality corresponding to lower bandwidth--delivered reliably--is acceptable. Freezing on a perfectly-detailed closeup of a stupid expression because someone came as the internet went (out) is not. Reliability >> speed.

jotm 13y ago

How is it unreliable?

sliverstorm 13y ago

What do you mean by reliable? My main snag with WiFi right now is its half-duplex nature and dropped packets. 100Mbps WLAN is horrendously worse than 100Mbps LAN for networked storage

georgemcbay 13y ago
OP was a bit oddly worded but I think nawitus meant that he or she would be happy with 100Mbps wireless if it were as reliable as a wired connection, so basically exactly what you're saying. I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. While the wireless connection was much faster in theory (and in practice when everything was perfect) than the powerline ethernet speeds, trying to stream HD movies and such was always an exercise in frustration with the wifi no matter how good the routers and/or repeaters were on the wifi connection and how well they were set up. With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. In any case the horrible state of US ISPs is the bottleneck for networking at home for me right now regardless of how I wire myself internally. My two options are Time Warner Cable (which cuts out between the modem and their headend for minutes multiple times a day and was never fixed despite half a dozen on-site technician visits) or AT&T DSL which has been much more reliable but is annoyingly slow for big downloads and such. I'm currently using the AT&T connection, but both options are terrible in their own way and nothing else usable is available to me. Fuck you, US ISPs.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > I personally ended up using power-line ethernet to replace a lot of the wireless throughout my apartment. ... With the powerline ethernet adapters, OTOH, I just plugged them in and everything Just Worked, much slower peak speed, but nice and consistent and more than enough bandwidth for HD movie streaming. Powerline networking is still a shared medium. You're sharing the available bandwidth with all of the neighboring houses on the same utility transformer. It does have the benefit that signal strength drops off with linear wiring distance. Thus, you're farther from your neighbors than you would be with Wi-Fi. However, as with 5 GHz, you're getting good results right now because powerline networking isn't too popular. But if every house were to get powerline networking, then you would start encountering interfering networks.