Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed
xda-developers.com349 points by taubek a month ago
349 points by taubek a month 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.
I 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).
Difficult 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.
We 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”.
You can do quite a lot with a few MB. Don't tell every React behemoth on the web that we know this trick.
Phew, I looked it up, just by curiosity. What a nightmare :') the rules, regulations, laws are damn strict Oo
Usually this rules are for experts who have to implement the limits. They should not be exposed to end-users.
The 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.
The ETSI document actually does allow higher duty cycle if the radios take anti-interference measures. Some countries unfortunately have "harmonized" but skipped that part. Theoretically only a dumb transceiver (that can utilize only a single channel) has to limit duty cycle that low in those bands.
The EU's ISM limits are trash.
Really there should be a world wide 900-1000MHz ISM band.
Kinda explains why starlink router doesn’t integrate it. Would be perfect for cameras around small farms.
Sounds like it fills the same niche as LoRa. Never heard of it though, thanks.
Dead outside the US unfortunately, worse range than regular wifi due to being strangled by lower channel width and ridicolously low power limits. The two bulky HaLowLink routers are the only off the shelf thing with support for it, it's nonexistent as a wifi standard.
I was so excited when I discovered it a few months back after struggling for years to set up reliable wifi for outdoor robotics, only to realize we can't have nice things. The struggle continues.
Lower channel width improves range, at the cost of bandwidth.
No I mean the total frequency range is much smaller. The US has 26 MHz width, while EU/Africa/India only allocated 7 MHz total. The difference in absolute frequency is minimal at ~30 MHz, you almost get more difference from using different channels in the US. What affects range even more is that in the US you can transmit at 1000 mW vs. 25 mW, so the end result is about ~5-10 km vs. 100-200 m. At that range 2.4 GHz is king and stomps it at over four times the allowed power to transfer ridiculously higher amounts of data.
LoRa is not fast enough?
Don’t know about the parent, but I found LoRa adequate for (tiny) payloads (sensor data and such) but OTA updates are a PITA without some alternative channel. Speeds are measured in bytes / sec.
Same channel width and power restrictions. The US' 915MHz band is much much better than the EU 869MHz band
No one is using it in real life. It's a super weak hobbyist protocol with a lot of hype and marketing.
Seriously. Only rich nerds in SAN FRANCISCO are using it.
LoRa has rather iffy security. I certainly would not use it for anything serious.
Perhaps 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
[2] Technology: DECT NR+ [pdf]:
https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-...
That sounds really interesting! Any concrete products for end users? Seems mostly chips and specs so far
Here'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.
I can't speak to your specific setup, but if the two SIMs use different carriers then they will often need to use different frequencies. A phone could in theory use twice as many radios, but the emitted power limits would be the same, so you'd have reduced range or throughout for each (plus additional size, weight and power for the second radio). Access points have different SWaP budgets than phones.
When I travel, I try to use an eSIM that uses a network my home provider partners with. This seems to improve the chance that voice and data over LTE or 5G NR work simultaneously.
> the emitted power limits would be the same
Dumb question: If the limit is L, why do regulators care if I have one device with two radios each outputting L or if I have two devices each with one radio outputting L. Either way, total output is 2L.
What is the objective?
* To limit range? Then regulators shouldn't care about 2 radios in one device outputting L, as long as one radio doesn't output 2L.
* To avoid cooking nearby electronics and people? How do they account for the unpredictable, theoretically limitless number of devices in an area? What about someone working in a cell phone store or passengers on a Tokyo train at rush hour? Do regulators just set L low enough that any realstic number of devices together is safe?
Usually, the exposure limit is based on an active phone next to an ear. RF field strength falls off with the square of distance, so a phone on each side of your head is most dangerous to the respective ear and bits of your brain close to your skull; each phone is considered acceptably safe to the middle of your brain and the opposite ear.
Common dual SIM configuration eTLA(extended three-letter abbreviations) are:
- DSDA: Dual SIM Dual Active, theoretically can call and do everything on both SIMs simultaneously
- DSDV: Dual SIM Dual VoLTE, can standby on both at all time but can't "use" at the same time
- DSDS: Dual SIM Dual Standby, can standby on both on so long radios don't conflict(3G+4G|4G+5G)
- DSSS: Dual SIM Single Standby, can physically mount two SIMs to just electronically switch betweenIt depends on the phone. The rule of thumb in the past for typical dual-SIM phones was nG on the first SIM, n-1G on the second. Then, after you encounter that for the first time, you make sure that your next phone has a baseband that supports nG on both SIMs, although with 5G it's become a bit blurred, typically 5+4 or 4+4, not that that makes any difference (5 vs 4 I mean).
Voice is normally done using VoLTE now.
Yep, 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.
For 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.
Auch, wasn't familiar with that, haven't been in the US for a while. At least around here (EU) is not enabled by default on phones you buy off the shelf. I'm not sure about phones bought from the carrier.
What part of EU doesn't have VoLTE enabled? It is definitely widely used here in Sweden, though they simply forbid phones unable to do emergency calls over WiFi (including existing phones, which forced me to buy a new one. That was very irritating).
To explain myself better: it's readily available on the carriers, but if you just buy an off the shelf phone and put a SIM on it, it won't be enabled automatically (at least in a couple countries I tested it), and you'll need to go to your Android SIM/carrier settings menu and enable it yourself.
LTE was originally designed as a data-only upgrade to 3G. It became the full on successor to 3G, but launched with voice spec left as TBD. It eventually got defined, but ended up being a cursed nonstandard SIP-VoIP software thing, and so a lot of carriers and networks implement whitelists for VoLTE phones to manage anxieties around it.
VoLTE was an advertising feature for a long time. Major carriers here were advertising it as active and available for at least a year before it was actually available.
Not for everyone in many places. Many carriers still only allow VoLTE for a limited alow-list of phone models. Any customers of those with less popular models still gets dropped to 3G calls.
In the US all 2G and 3G has been shut down and VoLTE is the only way voice calls are done on 4G and Voice over New Radio on 5G
Or you can only use 2 sim cards at a time even tho both can connect over wifi calling.
An additional radio would raise the price of your phone for at least another 200 or 300 dollars. Try to enable VoLTE if available for your operator. That makes the phone use the LTE connection for voice and don't drop the Internet connection while you talk.
Dual SIM Dual Active phones are under £100 in the UK, I imagine under $100 in the US.
Dual SIM Dual Standby (two or more SIMs, one radio) is cheaper, less battery, less space, and usually good enough. It's literally a few dollars, not 200-300.
Seems like I forgot to specify "5G" (those radios tend to be expensive) as the original poster was asking for an additional 4G/5G radio.
DSDA in 5G is rare, and I can't reliably find a phone that can do it in EU or US (I can find higher end chipsets that can do it, but phone vendors don't seem to follow through with it). Usually it's 4G+5G or 4G+4G.
You can get an additional phone with a screen, 5g radio, ram and everything for $150. An additional radio should not raise the price for another 300.
I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.
In many phones, some of the radio hardware is integrated into the SoC. Adding a second, independent radio is a larger engineering task.
A non-linear cost for a small fraction of the phone. A slightly larger PCB with two more layers is about twice the price for the PCB, more antennas is a couple dollars, a one lane PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC. And if it shrinks your battery 10% you save money on that part.
I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.
Edit: fixed the pcb wording
> PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC
perhaps you're more familiar with these options than I am, but I see 4 lane PCIe switches are 10x10 mm and maybe they are a few dollars but take more board space, new/larger power supplies, etc so it seems that the costs are more than just a few dollar PCIe switch chip. not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2 but definitely looking forward to learning more.
[1] https://www.diodes.com/products/connectivity/pcie-packet-swi...
add to the antennas are likely based on best/cheapest efficiency for the available area, then additional antenna would reduce the area for each and require more effort/cost.
> not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2
You are clearly out of your league. Get some 20 y/o flip Motorola, disassemble it and think, think hard.
No, 'PCIe switches' has nothing to do with the smartphones at all - so their PCB real estate do not indicate anything.
It won't, but the pre-made platform solution you pick and the prompt you send to Chinese ODM who do all the hard work must specify it has to be (DSDA|DSDV|DSDS|DSSS), or otherwise it'll default to DSDS.
> Can't they just add two radios/chips
no. Too expensive.
Ironically, the cheapest phones available all tend to have Dual SIM Dual Active, usually because (in Europe at least) many have a second SIM card specifically for international calls.
So yes, it's "too expensive" because it's higher than $0, but it's not "too expensive" as in it would cost a lot.
> 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.
Often times the problem is that the client radios are much weaker than the APs radios.
Sometimes we forget that for the communication to be reliable, signal must flow both ways. Clients will happily connect to far away APs, but won't be reliably heard back.
Solution is to use more APs and lower their radio tx power. A lot of customers push back on the approach because they have only one gaming router monstrosity in their country home and it works perfectly, not understanding that their downtown office with 150 devices have nothing in common.
I'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.
> 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.
In a way, that was my point. There is a market gap for a simple and robust 20 to 50 mbit, IP capable tech.
This has been a solved problem in the land mobile radio world for a number of decades.
You have a bunch base stations forming a logical channel with a single uplink frequency, and either a single downlink frequency on which every base station is precisely synchronised in frequency and time (simulcast), or multiple downlink frequencies (a multicast system).
A comparator selects, or votes, the highest quality signal from the base receivers based on either lowest noise or lowest BER, and then repeats that through all of the base transmitters simultaneously.
At the same time, in a multicast system, the mobile scans for and selects the base transmitter with either the highest RSSI or lowest BER.
How 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.
I'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.
In 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.
You 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.
And 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
I 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.
Thanks - 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
Yeah 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.
I 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. :-)
I 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?
LoRa 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.
LoRa 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.
Maybe 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.
I hadn’t realised that DECT is still in use. It was pretty good in its heyday so glad it’s survived.
There 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.
I'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.
Cordless 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.
I 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.
How 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".
Ensure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.
Easier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.
Sure, 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.
Care to expand?
Legacy 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.
Your 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)
Warehouses, factories, etc need private 5G, not Wi-Fi.
Industrial 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.
Most don't want you to setup your own APN ;-)
That'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.
We 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!
Wi-Fi should be able to do it. Dense 5G uses similar bands after all and they'll go through a couple walls.
The issue is that Wifi offers no reliability guarantees and does not scale when number of nodes grows beyond a relatively low number. So when number of nodes is large and you want to perform critical tasks (e.g. control robots, machinery, etc remotely) Wifi does not work.
There's no good reason it can't handle even more nodes, especially since you can have over 50 separate channels. Central control of the frequencies helps somewhat with density but not that much. We can and should fix those flaws.
I don't think I trust 5G for sub-second critical tasks either...
I know what you are trying to say.
But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.
Two 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.
> 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?
"Hearing a person speaking really fast" and "picking out a voice in a crowded room" are two completely different things.
Yeah 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
DECT or DECT-NR+?
I do kind of want to play with this.
Any DECT (NR) stuff is super expensive if you build embedded software/hardware for it. It's basically Nordic-only.
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.
> What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware
I think this is spot on. On a Banana Pi Pro 4E, the vendor supplied image which carries custom patches supports MLD/MLO, yet when I try the latest upstream OpenWRT it doesn't work. I've not had too much time to investigate the reason(s) why.
Its not really implemented yet. The various router vendors are still working on fully implementing the chipset and there is trickle of patches still coming from Filogic development on the chipset making there way into the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT.
There is also the issue few client devices implement at this point as well and certainly nothing that is mobile in nature on the sales pitch of "it costs power".
For a while I had wireless mesh networking in my new house, until I finally got around to pulling fiber to get a proper 10Gbps backbone. Upgrading from my UniFi WiFi6E AP to a WiFi 7 doubled my effective throughput as measured by SpeedTest. This in a 1930s house with solid brick construction.
What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support).
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
Every once in a while I visit this page to see if there is any router that does support true MLO: https://www.rtings.com/router/learn/research/wifi-7-mlo#the-...
I feel like this is the same problem USB and bluetooth have, where there are so many optional extras, that it's so hard to truly compare devices since a standard is actually like 100 standards packaged together.
It's a Unifi Dream Router 7. The 6GHz doesn't reach through the wall IIRC
That doesn't support high power 6GHz (called standard power/AFC). You need one that does support that to get the (much) higher 6GHz transmit power.
Why would 6GHz make such a difference compared to 5GHz?
Because it supports (on WiFi 7) 320MHz channels. So there is double the bandwidth. 5GHz only supports 160MHz channels.
Wouldn't it make more sense then to ask about high bandwidth channel support rather than frequency support? It's not the frequency that's important here.
Higher frequencies support higher bandwidths though.
I don't think the 2.4GHz band even has 160MHz free, for example. Literally impossible to support because 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz is all you get (100MHz or so).
5GHz isn't much larger than 160MHz. Like it can fit but some number of channels is better for everyone.
6GHz band is like 5.9GHz to 7GHz or something stupidly wide. Because of the new wider band, you can effectively have larger channels with fewer problems.
Well you can run any bandwidth at any frequency, I get that the WiFi specs define set bands which include both a center frequency and a bandwidth but it's a bit weird then to focus on the frequency when the bandwidth is what matters isn't it? I assume there are products which can operate on frequencies around 6GHz but which don't support the extreme wide band channels?
Focus???
These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.
The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.
The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.
Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading
Yes exactly. Also with MLO (bonding eg 5GHz and 6GHz) together on WiFi 7 you could get 480MHz of spectrum, which would allow many gigabits quite "easily".
Only problem is firmware support etc is somewhere between non existent and very poor in general for MLO, which is a shame as it's definitely a great feature in theory.
> interference motivation
I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?
For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP. Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.
Try OpenWRT if you want a good OS for routers. No need to change hardware.
Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless.
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
Interesting, I don't really have downtime with my OpenWRT setup. Probably because I don't really touch the setup once it's there, other than occasionally doing the firmware updates.
Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.
For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.
Yea, good shout. I can keep my existing wifi in place anyway for the time being, I've only got 6e stuff.
How often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?
My router is slightly loadbearing for my homelab so probably much more often than average!
I had a TP-Link deco, which while great as mesh, you couldn't limit the speed of certain devices. Which was again fine, except when the PlayStation 5 in a room could literally saturate the whole 250mbs bandwidth of my internet and when it would do an update would make our whole houses internet unusable.
It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
Is your Deco in AP mode or router mode? Mine says QoS is only available in router mode. I just use my ISP router with the AP turned off and my Decos in AP mode. My ISP router is pretty full-featured so I don't really care to deal with whatever simplified management the Deco would give me if it was the router and firewall instead.
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.
Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
And how stably. Ours works amazing if you ignore that it duplicates packets 2-3 times for no reason (netting a few hundred megabits, many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver here), but then it will die for a few minutes roughly once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we briefly switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed or turn off the phone and go sleep, depending on the time of day :-)
It's a strange pattern and I'd be interested to solve the mystery. Not many powerline debugging tools available though, not to say none
Yeah I get occasional dropouts in the setup I installed at my mum's place too.
And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.
As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
for anyone else wondering, that new acronym means coax
> MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables
It’s been around for quite some time. I assumed it would be known around here. The lowest level is 100 Mbps and I keep telling people on Reddit that 100 Mbps is plenty for so many use cases. I wouldn’t install it on a new plant, but if it’s there, use it.
Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit.
A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.
Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought
I tried this once too and instead bought a big-ass SRS bit and went through a concrete wall instead.
Rock solid and reliable networking =)
For me it is good but I'm in an apartment with 300mbps internet so not really pushing it.
(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
> with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz
Dumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)?
Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible.
Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers?
This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G standard (early 2030s per the article)?
It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
The real reason why 5G and Wifi are separate is because one is licensed spectrum, and the other is unlicensed spectrum.
I'm not talking about legal differences- laws can always be changed- but rather how bandwidth is allocated. The biggest benefits of cellular comes from:
Verizon owns/controls channel
↓
gNB decides:
"You transmit here."
"You transmit here."
"You get 20 MHz."
"You get these time slots."
Everybody shares unlicensed spectrum.
AP: "Is anyone transmitting?"
↓
wait
↓
transmit
And furthermore, the unlicensed spectrum problem is complex. "Anyone transmitting" includes Bluetooth devices, and Zigbee, and many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec.
> many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec
Such as microwave ovens (although my microwave oven does indeed follow the 802.11 spec)
5g-NRU allows what you are speaking of, but imo still needs quite developments for actually being deployed in bands with interferance (i.e. WiFi).
My semi educated guess is because different kinds of people sit on the two different standards boards, so you get siloed specs with the cross sharing of some good ideas. You could ask a similar question about HDMI vs thunderbolt.
How would I connect to my own network? Wifi and cellular solve different problems.
That's purely a software problem that stems from typical usecase. There's no technical reason preventing phone users from selecting the network to connect to. It's just that currently a SIM serves that purpose.
On layer 2? I guess that would require a virtual network. For layer 3 and above, everything has an IP address so use that?
Stop chasing everything. Stop and give me true open source repos for the Wi-Fi chips and drivers so the already well-established community can care for my router for the next 20 years. Force this into the spec.
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....
There's only 1 (one) all-open chip I know of: ath9k ar9271 802.11n 2.4 GHz from 2011.
Atheros (now Qualcomm) released its firmware source: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
I have many, many these dongles :)
Are you talking about router firmware or NIC drivers? There's a slim chance of vendors opening drivers, but firmware is never going to happen.
Even Intel is doing a poor job with firmwares. Its been such a pain lately to deal with them (WIFI, LAN, CAMERA). Its no longer just plug and play.
WiFi should be like Bluetooth. One stack with generic drivers.
Yeah, somehow nobody invented HCI for Wi-Fi chips. USB has it, Bluetooth has it, but not Wi-Fi.
It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
Ethernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.
If you're using a Mac, it could be from the brain-dead way Apple OSes implement WiFi based geolocation.
It's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
I put in 2 CAT6 wires to every room in the house (4 in my office, 4 in garage), with one big PoE switch in the garage.
Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS).
Works great!
Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
Not theory, this is literally just how it works. Only one device can transmit on a WiFi channel at any given moment. A whole lot of the WiFi standard is just dealing with scheduling multiple clients wanting to transmit on the same channel at the same time.
The more clients you have on the same channel, the less bandwidth they all get (effectively). Using wires where you can will improve wireless for everyone else, including your neighbors.
Incidentally I ran cat6 to a few locations but its so thick and stiff I kinda regret it. The internet seems to think 5a is more than enough and 6 was a waste.
Thinking of installing cameras and need power, so at least PoE seems like a proper reason to run Cat 6 in 2026. Otherwise, I'd just invent a 12/24/48V power protocol and still having to do per-device WiFi setup.
I did this five years ago, and it's been great. My wired access points are still Wi-Fi 6 and I've got no inclination to upgrade them yet, connectivity has been near-bulletproof.
I wired up my office, and thr speed test after was slower than on wifi. haven't had a chance to debug it yet, but it's something to consider.
If wired Ethernet shows less than 1Gbps, something is wrong. This stuff is super reliable.
USB Ethernet dongles generally suck. Even “name brand” dongles are cheap crap from contract manufacturers.
anybody tried fiber network / hubs at home ?
I have a 10gbit LAN running over fiber with Mikrotik switches and cheapo Intel NICs. Works fine, and it makes remote disks quite a bit nicer than when they are over 1gbit.
It works, but kind of inconvenient for things that aren't desktops... or you need a switch with sfp to act as a media converter everywhere you have devices.
And I have cat5 in my walls that was installed 25 years ago (way before it was my house)... That gets me to 10g everywhere I tried, so no reason to pull anything else.
The switches are very cheap though. I put fibre in my house (simply because the cable is far far thinner and easier to retrofit under carpets etc).
I got a few 2.5Gbit switches which have 4 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 2 10Gbit SPF+, they cost around $30 off AliExpress.
I don't actually have any devices with 10gigE but it's not a huge amount more for 10gig ones (and no doubt will get a lot cheaper with the new lower power 10gige chips).
I put some fiber in the walls just in case but there are not really many cases for this to be worth just yet
A few years ago, for some reason my ISP began to screw up my WiFi. Tech support could not help; I had at least two devices showing the same symptoms; at one point I even shut down my home connection out of frustration. I could only think of two possibilities: that there had been some kind of security event that tripped their security AI and was blocking my WiFi (and inexplicably leaving all Ethernet connections unhindered.) Second possibility: they were deliberately (but deniably) messing with my WiFi access at home so that I would use more mobile data. In fact a salesman told me that would be a logical move. Except it was affecting my Chromebook too.
So my only choice was to purchase a third-party router/WiFi. I did not want to make the network more complex, but if my ISP router couldn't provide WiFi, it would need to happen.
So now I have a working WiFi 7 router, and my ISP's device is permanently in Bridge Mode. I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of little cable staples, and I nailed up an Ethernet cable from the router to the bedroom. There are 3 desk positions in here that can be reached by Ethernet cable.
Unfortunately, if I am out on the balcony, I normally need to use WiFi, because I can't fully shut the door when a cable is snaking out of it. Also, I picked up a little USB-C-Ethernet dongle for my phone, if worse comes to worst. The bandwidth is great; besides, my downstream is only 100Mbps, so who needs overpowered LAN bandwidth?
Having WiFi 8 (or even 7) on your access point is only really useful if you have a population of clients that can use the features it offers. I regularly sample the devices attached to residential wifi routers and the facts are grim: in a house of 40+ devices, two can do wifi 7, about 10% can do 6Ghz, 50 to 60% can do 5GHz but not 6GHz, and a core rump of 50% of the devices are stuck on 2.4GHz. I suspect this is because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask.
Even more important: I hope Wifi 8 makes all the good stuff MANDATORY even if it's expensive!
For example, Wifi 7 doesn't make actually useful MLO mandatory. So most wifi router manufacturers - even Ubiquiti - don't implement it! What's the point of adding something to the standard if it's optional.
Ideally, the standards body should make expensive stuff mandatory- then prices will come down as soon as everyone is building it, due to economics of scale.
Ubiquiti has a half-hearted MLO implementation with AFAICT utterly silly restrictions on WPA mode.
> because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask.
Cost certainly is the primary factor in the decision, but you definitely want those low-bandwidth but long-range devices OFF your precious 5GHz band.
Unless you want the same crappy experience of 2.4GHz band in 5GHz.
This is true if you only have one access point.
If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.
In typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7.
Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi...
Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors.
There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.
On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
Client side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.
Yup. I might have forgotten Marvell in the list but yes, that is pretty much it.
I am also not sure of their exact market shares but I would suspect one or two are probably steering the majority of the "standards". I'd suspect Broadcom and Qualcomm to have the most influence.
I believe Intel is also a pretty prominent member in the standards committee. Mostly for historic reasons as I don't think they have too much market share outside of PC/laptop wifi modules.
But I agree, Broadcom and Qualcomm are the heavy hitters.
Makes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
It's nice to have the fastest Wi-Fi possible even if your upstream internet is slower. Sometimes you want to transfer files locally between devices, or run backups etc. Faster Wi-Fi here can make a huge difference to those tasks.
I have found that higher tier WiFi aids local game streaming significantly, but most of that benefit seems to be the 6Ghz band that you get with WiFi 6E.
Yeah. I ran ethernet from my router specifically to improve games streaming (GeForce NOW). It was a huge improvement over standard 5 Ghz WiFi.
You can still make use of more. Local video streaming from your PC to tv, file transfers between nearby devices etc.
Modern wifi is fast enough that using cables is often not required.
You used the wrong units there. Should be Mbps and Gbps.
I did not use the wrong units, I converted them. The speeds available in my area currently max out at 1.2Gbps which is 150MBps.
When talking about network bandwidth, it is custom to measure in bit-per-second therefore the "bps" notation. If you convert to bytes, it is highly recommended to use "b/s" notation instead, i.e 150MB/s, to avoid confusion.
But IIRC the de facto unit for network transmission speeds are bits - not bytes - pr second, and when it’s more the rule than the exception than people write ‘B’ in stead of ‘b’ then the confusion gets even higher..
I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-)
B is defacto for storage…
The widely-accepted convention is to use bits when discussing line speeds (as the article does).
Am I understanding that graph about "distributed-tone resource units" correctly that WiFi is finally going the way of Bluetooth frequency hopping?
Ever since I found out that this is possible, it seemed like the obvious better choice because it divides the spectrum across everyone equally with no configuration, whereas on WiFi you (or your router) always had to choose one channel to work on and hope for the best. It might look clear for a full minute, but then the neighbor presses 'next song' 20 seconds later and whatever channel they're on is now trying to push some megabytes of audio. Probably it also has downsides or they'd long ago have done this, though?
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect... (used by Bluetooth) mentions also that some jurisdictions allow a 1000x higher transmit power if you hop between enough frequencies with short enough dwell times on each, which it sounds like Bluetooth would easily reach at its usual 1600 hops per second at the full 2.4 GHz unlicensed band
FHSS was actually used by the original (2 Mbps) 802.11 radio modems in the mid 90s. It wasn't until 802.11b/a came along a few years later that the world moved to DSSS (along with other innovations such as, er, proper intercompatibility between different vendors' kit!).
AIUI, DSSS was necessary to make use of the full channel bandwidth, but FHSS is more resistant to interference so might be good for the warehouse use case mentioned in another top level comment.
What they really need is cheap WiFi 8 on 2.4 channel only so IOT devices stop shipping WiFi 4 or worse and cause headaches on the network.
Makes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
Are we not yet at a point where we could have a truly global network that uses multiple technologies and mediums to keep a user always connected?
Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
It's possible using overlay networks but other than that there has been no progress on that front. The routing table updates would overwhelm the system. Ipv6 does nothing to address device roaming. There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it.
Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
There's a great hyper-sci-fi RPG setting called Numenera, set a billion years in the future, that has this cool little concept of a "datasphere", as in analogous to atmosphere, an omnipresent permanent connectivity network..
Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
> There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it.
IIRC siri uses it and iOS (maybe macOS too?) exposes it to app developers.
Google/IETF works on that with QUIC multipath.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-quic-multipath/
> Last updated 2026-08-13
I read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree?
Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see how Wi-Fi 8 handles that. Via the wired backbone?
From my understanding, the ideal solution for roaming would be that all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client, while sharing state. Scaling such a system may be hard in crowded environments.
Anyway, I updated to a Wi-Fi 7 router, and it runs warm enough.
> all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client
That is decidedly not a solution. Neighboring APs necessarily need to be on different channels, to avoid Co-Channel Interference (CCI). An AP doesn't answer just on BSSID but also on a specific channel.
Oh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!
You are not missing too much.
One of the core features (MLO) is currently mostly scam. APs/Clients negotiate the protocol (and it shows up in the status) but doesn't it to either increase robustness or bandwidth (by combining/switching between two frequency bands).
Also the driver quality is a huge mess.
(We tested it using the latest generation Cisco Enterprise gear but also with Prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti or TP-Link)
But honestly: we need WiFi-8. It finally brings infrastructure-controlled roaming which is super important for any VoIP service.
The only reason to get a wifi 7 router is that it supports wifi 6 better than a wifi 6 router
It sounds like you're talking about throughput aggregation, which indeed no device currently supports. Not even Apple's most recent devices have any sign of it, except that M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models are tested for simultaneous transmission on 2.4+5GHz and 2.4+6GHz: https://mrncciew.com/2026/03/17/macbook-pro-m5-wi-fi-7-missi...
> which indeed no device currently supports
Aren't devices with Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200/BE202 are supporting that?
As well as latest Samsung phones?
Being connected to multiple frequencies simultaneously is one thing. Actually using multiple of the links in parallel to increase speeds has not really been seen in practice yet. That is called STR (Simultaneous Transmit/Receive; what I called "throughput aggregation" above), which requires MLMR (Multi-Link Multi-Radio), which almost nothing that supports MLO has right now. Maybe some bleeding-edge mesh networks are doing it, and Ubiquiti has one or two products that does it, but you basically won't see it anywhere else and especially not in client devices yet. Intel BE200/BE202 does not actually perform throughput aggregation, it connects to multiple frequencies and then uses only the best of them (eMLSR, or "Enhanced Multi-Link Single Radio").
AFAIR: the BE200/B202 only have one radio. So no parallel streams on two frequencies.
But they are the best cards around if you want to play with Wifi-7 on Linux. But always go for the latest wireless-next kernel + firmware blobs. Also they are not compatible with AMD mainboards (go for Qualcomm then).
> infrastructure-controlled roaming
802.11 r/k/v exists
That's not controlled, seamless hand-over as we know it from GSM/3G/LTE/5G for 30 years now.
We basically miss all data (received stations/signal levels from both sides, Bit Rate errors, etc.) for making roaming decisions and then to softly connect them to an AP you want them to be on.
Enterprise WiFi is currently mostly "This is a list of APs you maybe can connect to.. have fun.. if you can connect we pre-seeded the AP with some crypto data, so it doesn't take ages to negotiate. Here's your (more or less friendly) disassoc. Fuck off bye."
It does somehow work for stationary setups - but as soon as you have mobile traffic (like walking around or machines moving) with multiple APs the quality hits the shitter brutally.
Currently this gap is being filled by industrial 5G with dedicated frequencies. It's crazy expensive.
On paper, yes. In the real world, that random Android client is clinging to an AP that can barely hear it while a better one would be available.
The upgrade to 6E was a big jump in my network (Wifi7 Unifi Wall AP). On the same spot, the M3 MacBook (6E) has basically zero lag over VNC, while the M1 MacBook (6) has a noticeable lag. It’s a bit mind blowing how big the difference is.
That is likely because of AWDL and your WiFi card doing channel hopping to listen between packets.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
My favorite thing about AWDL is that AirDrop barely even works between Apple devices that are right next to each other.
Is 6 even ubiquitous for you? I bought my first WiFi 6E device this year, specifically because I want it to be future-proof and work well outside of the house (like on a conference), but all other phones, laptops, desktops, and access points are on 802.11ac. It's going to take a while to reap those benefits at home, and that's assuming we ever get FTTH and want to pay for a 1gbps uplink in the first place (on LAN with WiFi 5 I currently get several hundred mbps, almost regardless of distance until it drops off the network completely, and our uplink is 40mbps, the fastest we can get on VDSL here)
Not missing much. I feel like it's in many ways misguided. 6ghz ftw because 5ghz penetrates too much and causes noisy neighbor problems. Well, from my experience, 6ghz doesn't penetrate at -all-. So unless you live in a barndo or studio apartment, it's mostly an exercise in frustration.
I have a Wi-Fi 7 AP and this confused some members of my family that didn't even know it went higher than 6. I thought it was pretty funny
My family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".
That is true everywhere. I think operating systems could do a better job at informing about the health of the internet connection in words the user understands. What seems to be the current bottleneck:
Your router does not respond. Turn it off and on.
This comes close: https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/
You can’t blame them, though. I live in the industry for over 25 years now, and when 5 Ghz wifi got introduced, and started to live alongside 2.4 Ghz with all the different protocols, I was like: "Nah. Screw it." I honestly have no idea what the current hot stuff in terms of wifi is.^^
Yeah, I guess I draw the line at the workplace. Some of these "Internet kaputt" cases turned out to be a rejected login to our bespoke ERP website.
> They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably.
I was helping our neighbor with WiFi issues. They asked at some point if a "WLAN-Kabel" would solve the issue :)
The sad part is that they realized the mistake a minute later, and since I didn't say anything but just answered the question (I understood what they meant, no point correcting the technicality), they assumed that I was just laughing at them behind their back / internally. Turns out once again that tech is as much social as it is technical, and I really struggle with people who think everyone else is hiding something (they vote accordingly, let's say)
It really doesn't help that a part of our attention-economy has hopped on the "what (the government/big tech/car company) doesn't want you to know!11" bandwagon and constantly feeds into this notion that there is this great ominous evil cabal working against you.
> "Wi-Fi 8 is expected to be finalized in 2028"
So we should see mainstream consumer device adaption by 2030 (not much point in having a wi-fi access point that implements pre-finalized Wi-Fi 8 if none of the client devices do) and prices become reasonable maybe by 2032? The tech is cool but it's hard to care about something that far in the future.
Wifi is a weird one, consumer devices arrive very quickly (often times before the standard is finalized). You can expect devices as early as next year.
I don't change phones every 3 years though, and my current AP/router is 8 years old. The only reason I got a new one is that I didn't have one with a VDSL modem built in, which we needed in our new flat. If the first devices ship in 2027 then widespread adoption is probably more like 2033 for people that routinely upgrade for fun and 2038 (or 2³¹ unix time) for those who aren't into tech
>> But with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
With real devices I get something like 1.8GBit/s with less than 2 meters between the stuff. Which is far from maximum but who cares, it is still great.
>The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency
So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
Less latency is excellent news. This is the main reason why gamers still prefer Ethernet.
Consistent latency is generally more important for gaming than low latency. If I had to pick between a baseline of 8ms but with enough spikes to > 200ms to bring the average to 30ms, or a consistent 90ms with no spikes or dips, I would certainly choose the latter.
Hey, that was a great comment about homoiconicity and {code} in C. It's nuts that it got killed, apparently because you said you used an LLM. HN (among others) is in the grip of hysteria on the issue.
Thanks, I did put a decent amount of time into that. I couldn't get any model to one shot a truly homoiconic C, it took some coaxing, even from SOTA models. Maybe I caught a length based flag or something too, since it was fairly long. Oh well, I tried.
> (…) while further increments have been smaller in percentage, speeds have always increased very significantly.
Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
Well, if the first increment is 100%, you only need 50% the next time to get the same absolute increase as the first time. And then 33%, and so on.
That's how I read it at least.
Time for new steamlink.
I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit.
It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..
My phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m)
The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious:
> .he on
> select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10;
reportId|c
123|227
> select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was
Edit: a quick grep through the source code (`grep -rE '[^0-9]200[^0-9]'`) doesn't reveal anything that looks very promising at first glance. I'm curious what you're running into now though
It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.
Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file).
If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical
Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.
What about latency and jitter?
I still get more ping in Counter-Strike on Wi-Fi than on Ethernet.
…even in pristine conditions, excluding perfect lab conditions.
Probably never. WiFi still fundamentally works over a shared medium, by clients that talk on the same frequency, and if they interfere, they have to wait a random amount of time and then retry.
Wired switches have dedicated physical cables linking to each client and can buffer packets per-client, buffers that can be flushed at optimal times.
If you could guarantee that (1) you were the only client on the access point and (2) there was zero interference from any nearby access points, then I’d expect the latency/jitter to be comparable. But that’s basically impossible unless you’re inside a faraday cage with direct line of sight.
People who are experts in wireless, when they have the choice, will always pick wired communications where feasible, if latency and jitter matter.
That's the point of the article, that WiFi 8's point is lower latency and more reliability?
> Instead, the organization is focusing on improving the reliability [...]. The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency, and decrease MAC protocol data unit loss (MPDU) by 25%.
Jitter not explicitly mentioned but high jitter is low reliability so it's an implicit goal. It'll simply be more stable when there are 25% fewer retransmissions needed anyway (of course that's just a goal under some assumed scenario, but say that it's 5% in your setup or whatever)
I'd just like something that can manage 250m and a few large oak trees in between.
A drone carrying a fiber cable across the tree line. Battle tested.
Does the network automatically detect when birds have eaten the fiber cable and send out drones to fight off the birds and lay a new cable?
Pre-terminated direct burial fiber, a trencher, and two media converters.
"Hands up who's every gotten close to the theoretical max speed of wifi 7. Ok, sure, well hands up who's even got half that... er."
Sacrificing bandwidth for range and reliability would be a welcome change, but I’ve far passed the point where all news about Wifi just strikes me as marketing bullshit.
The peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum.
The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.
My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
> Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users.
Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
I think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.
old wifi already have sub 1ms latency, it doesn't matter to be any faster than that
My neighbor thinks that they can increase their 100Mbps ISP speed by having 5 or 6 access points at 2.4GHz in their 1400sq ft (~140m2) apartment.
There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
Having a AP in every room can be as significant boost if the walls impede the signal a lot. In fact we have one wall which is especially bad. Stand in front of it or next to it and reception from the front of the house is decent. Take one step back behind the wall and signal drops to less than 10%.
So having the 5-6 AP is not the problem, then shouting at max power is the problem. Especially “gaming” routers tend to do this.
2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.