[HN Gopher] Wi-Fi 6 is designed to reduce congestion from devices
___________________________________________________________________
Wi-Fi 6 is designed to reduce congestion from devices
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-02-24 12:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| vmception wrote:
| I've been looking for a Wi-Fi 6 router with 10GBe ethernet ports
| too.
|
| Its kind of silly to have wireless that is faster than the wired
| options. One use case is that I want to store larger files on a
| NAS but I don't want throughput to randomly drop such as during
| large image backups and restorations to a cloud server.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The AXE11000 and RAXE500 both have 2.5G ports, at least.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| And the EAP660 HD.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| WiFi specs refer to the maximum theoretical link-layer rate in
| perfect conditions. The actual amount of data (not link-layer
| bits) transferred is less than the headline number.
|
| In the real world, 1G ethernet isn't going to hold back a WiFi
| 6 router. The only exception might be a multi-radio WiFi 6 AP
| that is within several feet of WiFi 6 clients on both radios.
| hansel_der wrote:
| was going to say this.
|
| feels kinda weird that wifi marketing speek is taken at face
| value two decades into the bullshitting with theoretical
| maximum agregates.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I'm actually still surprised at how expensive Wifi5 routers are.
| I still see "top of the line" wireless routers which still use 8
| year old technology.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| I have a Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC-HD wifi access point for my home.
| It's not WiFi 6, but it can handle 500+ concurrent users while
| delivering 800 Mbps on 2.4 ghz and 1733 Mbps on 5 ghz.
|
| All in all, I have around 70 wifi devices in my apartment. That
| might sound like a lot of devices (it is), but I'm a nerd and I
| like to tinker with lots of smart home stuff and I also have a
| lot of computers and gadgets.
|
| Also, because I live in an apartment complex, there is a ton of
| WiFi noise from other neighbors. There are around 20 different
| WiFi networks within range.
|
| I went through multiple WiFi routers (including high end $300
| ones), but I was rarely able to get over 100 Mbps.
|
| When I upgraded the Unifi UAP-AC-HD, it was like flipping a light
| switch. All of my wifi problems went away, and I was able to get
| 300-400 Mbps in pretty much every room.
|
| I get that WiFi 6 is great and all, but at this point, I'm not
| really sure what I would be gaining by upgrading. The UAP-AC-HD
| is on the high end of the previous generation, and at least for
| now, it's good enough for me.
| hansel_der wrote:
| > but it can handle 500+ concurrent users while delivering 800
| Mbps on 2.4 ghz and 1733 Mbps on 5 ghz.
|
| i feel you, its much better than your previous ap's but please
| dont buy too much into the marketing.
|
| (single dualband-ap can at best handle >200 concurrent devices,
| but not active users)
| pfundstein wrote:
| And those throughput figures will be shared among all the
| users. Not available to each and every user, as it seems to
| imply.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The Ubiquiti hardware is fantastic!
| MR4D wrote:
| My parents have a Ubiquiti as well. Don't replace it until your
| friends have faster WiFi. It's one of the best units I've ever
| used in a home. Probably the best, actually.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Any clue "How" did it fix everything?
|
| With everybody's router blasting at High Power, what can you
| actually do on your side with just one router to compensate?
|
| Thx muchly!
| dasil003 wrote:
| Ubiquiti is enterprise grade gear, so first thing is this is
| not a router, it's just an access point, and it's optimized
| for lots of devices, lots of interference typical of office
| scenarios.
| vetinari wrote:
| For enthusiasts and small and medium businesses it is fine,
| but it definitely is not enterprise grade.
| amluto wrote:
| An an owner of a decent amount of Ubiquiti gear, it's
| "enterprise" in the sense that the management system scales
| to lots of devices, and that's about it. Every recent
| revision of the management tools makes it shinier and less
| usable.
| remote_phone wrote:
| It's pro-sumer, definitely not enterprise grade gear at
| all.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Use DFS channels. I have a friend who is a streamer and lives
| in an urban setting... almost 100 5GHz APs are visible in a
| scan in her apartment. She was having constant issues that we
| tracked down to huge latency spikes due to the congestion for
| the non-DFS channels. It turns out that her cable company's
| wifi AP / cable-modems do not support DFS.
|
| I got her a wifi AP that supports DFS, and she has not had
| any issues..
|
| Note that I initially got her a fancy Netgear which claimed
| to support DFS, but we could never get it to work. I spent a
| week going in circles with their support and eventually
| returned it.
|
| I eventually just gave her my several year old Atheros-based
| TP-Link router running DD-WRT. It was able to use DFS
| channels, and she has a channel to herself now.
| jasdine817 wrote:
| Along with what everyone else has said some vendors such as
| Meraki and Ruckus have separate radios just designed for
| monitoring the spectrum and making changes accordingly.
| Groups of APs will automatically decrease their power and
| channel swap to avoid channel overlap etc.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| The Ubiquiti stuff has a lot of automatic channel selection
| stuff built in to use the best frequencies for your
| conditions.
| zachberger wrote:
| Most APs do this already.
| pstrateman wrote:
| Most APs do this once at startup.
|
| Gives you good benchmarks when you start it but over time
| fails in a noisy environment.
| numpad0 wrote:
| So cell breathing is effectively prevented?
| wtetzner wrote:
| I guess it comes down to how well they do it.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Maybe, but my experience with consumer grade network
| gear's software has left a lot to be desired. I'll never
| bother with Netgear/Linksys crap again.
| ploxiln wrote:
| It's really not power, it's just debugging and optimizing
| rates and retries. Lots of wifi has lots of dumb bugs that no
| one ever figures out, because stuff still mostly works, with
| all the built-in retries.
|
| (I used to work for an enterprise WiFi AP vendor, debugged
| some driver bits myself ... back when 802.11n was brand new,
| all the enterprise vendors were increasing their effective
| throughput from 80mbps, to 100mbps, to 140mbps, etc, just by
| debugging and optimizing their drivers.)
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Nearby networks won't harm your signal to noise ratio unless
| there is active traffic. Most of the time, 90% of the 30
| SSIDs you see nearby are mostly inactive.
|
| Anyway, Ubiquity and commercial gear in general just has
| better software and hardware design.
|
| * The UAP-AC-HD has been around for at least 5 years and
| still gets updates. Wifi is full of weird bugs so its
| impossible to release a new chip set bug-free. Consumer gear
| just doesn't get the same duration of support as commercial.
| * These access points are designed specifically for setting
| up networks with multiple APs and lots of nearby networks. *
| These APs are just access points and offload routing and even
| their UI to a router and management server. A lot of consumer
| gear uses/wastes a lot of RAM on their fancy management
| interfaces. * Exterior profile stays the same. Consumer gear
| companies spend a lot of time & money on marketing and
| redesigning the 'look' of their products which diverts focus.
| * Better management/software: All the Unifi APs use the same
| management server software which consolidates features and
| fixes. The software also has a lot of performance related
| features like disabling/limiting the _slowest_ speed enabled
| on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz network.
|
| Really the last point is a really big one; consumer gear
| (besides new consumer mesh networks) is often sold on having
| great range/coverage but these can cause the whole network to
| be bogged down by a single device operating in 802.11g or
| older mode. Commercial gear expects you to use multiple APs
| to satisfy coverage but has the features to prevent network
| degradation.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The reality is that these manufacturers aren't making their own
| WiFi chips. They all use the same few WiFi chips from the same
| few vendors.
|
| There is room for variation in how the products are
| implemented, but there's no real reason why a consumer router
| shouldn't be delivering the same high rates unless there was
| something else weird going on.
| labcomputer wrote:
| It's true they use the same chips, but board layout and
| connectors become important as you get to higher frequencies.
| Wifi antennas can be anything from PCB stripline to external
| whips.
| fest wrote:
| Vendors provide reference software for their chipsets. More
| often than not, the software provided by vendor is the bare
| minimum needed to prove that their hardware sort-of-kind-of
| works. It is by no means able to achieve the best performance
| out of a given system.
|
| Source: worked at Ubiquiti (not on networking hardware
| though).
| bri3d wrote:
| A lot of WiFi hardware implements a substantial portion of
| the stack in firmware or driver blobs.
|
| So even "the same few chips" can be manipulated to perform
| very differently. Stuff like retransmit, frame timing,
| power/gain control, and even tx/rxchain selection and MIMO
| configuration are often done in software and can be altered
| between suppliers. Additionally, vendor drivers often perform
| very poorly at the higher levels as well - the MAC level
| (associate/beacon/disassociate), the framing level,
| scheduling encryption/decryption, keeping track of associated
| clients, and so on, are also all often handled in software
| and can be optimized.
|
| Plus, once we reach the router level, we also get into the
| often abysmal IP stack configuration on consumer-grade
| routers.
|
| In short, there's a lot that can differ, both in IP-land and
| in chipset-land. Anyone who's "fixed" an ailing consumer
| router firmware by reflashing it with something else can
| understand the IP-land pieces, and a quick read through a
| driver written on the Linux SoftMAC stack (for example) can
| really illustrate how much goes on at the driver layer (not
| to mention firmware).
| mrfusion wrote:
| What is it? How is it different from wifi?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> I have around 70 wifi devices in my apartment. >> there is a
| ton of WiFi noise from other neighbors.
|
| Is there? I wonder if your neighbors are having similar
| problems?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Generally wifi noise "from neighbers" Comes from a bunch of
| independent radio groups that happen to use all of the
| specture. When you have a single AP home it doesn't matter if
| there are 5,000,000 devices on it to your neighbors it's when
| you get that second AP in another channel that's noise.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I see that the Wifi 5 access point that you write is more
| expensive than their Wifi 6 offering, and it's advised for
| outdoor scenarios.
|
| Which is the best router for long range and just few decices?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Any router with a directional antenna pointed in the
| direction you need.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| How far is long range to you?
|
| You might be better off to do a Station->AP wireless shot
| with a couple of Nanobeams if you're getting crap signal, if
| there is electricity where your signal is crap. If you'd like
| to use Ubiquiti, that is.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| just about 15m, but it needs to go through a wall. It's not
| even a big apartment, and the walls are not that thick, but
| as it's in 1 direction, I'll try to get a directional
| antenna as the other commenter advised. Also probably any
| long-range device will be better than the cheap Wifi 6
| Archer that I bought (although it was a great improvement
| for short range ping time compared to the Wifi 5 router
| that I had before)
| cbo100 wrote:
| If you manage get the signal from the AP to the device,
| just remember the device has to be able to talk back.
|
| If the device is low powered, this may still be a
| problem.
|
| A multi AP system allows the higher powered APs to talk
| to each other, and the lower powered devices to talk to
| the nearest AP.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| to be honest, any moderm AP will do the job. processing power
| increased by a lot recently and the spec is mostly just
| narrowing down what enterprise gear used to do for years as an
| "extra". e.g. wifi6 (ax) is just officializing beam forming
| that every premium ap had since wifi-n but was not part of the
| spec.
|
| praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-
| syndrome. Specially because your unifi AP is the only (few?)
| product on the market that requires a second appliance to work
| (and don't even get me started on running the controller on a
| vm with outdated dependencies, out of sync open source code,
| and broken mongoDB implementation) to not have more than half
| of the advertised features disabled (e.g. vlans, guest, etc)
| robocat wrote:
| > praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-
| syndrome
|
| I was responsible for a small office, and I tried a bunch of
| different big-brand expensive prosumer APs, and they all had
| troubles.
|
| I then tried Unifi gear, which wasn't as easy to set up, but
| it worked flawlessly and has done so for years. I've since
| used a few different Ubiquiti products in a few other
| situations and the gear has just run solidly with zero
| trouble.
|
| I have used other reliable gear: the Apple Airport was great
| but now discontinued, every Fritzbox I have dealt with has
| been fine, and I currently have a Mikrotic at home which has
| been reliable (albeit in a very undemanding environment). I
| am about to add a outdoors Ubiquiti AP at home.
|
| Maybe gear is more reliable now, but I recommend Ubiquiti to
| friends and it hasn't let me down yet.
| iagovar wrote:
| Mikrotiks are good, and they are cheap, but they are very
| hands-on in setup, you have to know what are you doing.
| stinkyball wrote:
| Which AP are you looking at for the outdoors ?
| zachberger wrote:
| I don't know about that. I use the second generation nest
| wifi and its struggling with the ~35 devices in my home.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| well, google consumer products are not exactly know for
| being "premium" in anything.
| vetinari wrote:
| Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug. There's
| a wide range of all-in-one devices on the market; pure AP
| bridges, not so much.
|
| And before you say, that you can configure all-in-one to work
| in bridge mode: yes, some of them. Many of them cannot, or
| have weird limitations when you do.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug
|
| I think OP means that you have to be running Unifi
| somewhere in order to get all the features from the AP. Not
| that it's just an access point and requires a separate
| router (which I agree, is a huge plus).
| jdeibele wrote:
| Surprised that there's no mention of Wi-Fi 6E, which is rumored
| to be in the Apple phones coming in the fall. Having the 6GHz
| band as well as 2.4GHz and 5GHz seems like you'd get a year or
| two of having lots of room for your devices.
|
| With work-from-home and online school, I had to move an Orbi
| satellite so Wi-Fi 5 was more evenly distributed. 6GHz will have
| even less range than 5GHz but having it and the other changes in
| Wi-Fi 6E could make a huge difference for offices.
| the-dude wrote:
| So, NYT dude is not very much impressed, but at the end of the
| article he says he is seeing dramatic improvements in latency of
| his light bulbs and garage door, which apparently took seconds
| with his old Wifi.
|
| That sounds odd.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Sounds like a placebo or he had terrible wifi before. Alexa and
| the old bulbs wouldn't be running Wifi6 so its just a newer
| router running in backwards compatible modes.
|
| The only Wifi6 device the author owns is probably an iPhone.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I'd be curious to know whether that's a wifi problem or a "your
| IoT devices are run by very small computers running very
| unoptimized software" problem.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It does. I have a hard time believing Wi-Fi itself could cause
| such a large swing in latency, but perhaps all those back and
| forth round trips do add up? Is WiFi 6 known for major latency
| improvements? Or is this just related to less congestion?
|
| It would be interesting to compare it to Ethernet usage of
| these devices.
| jolan wrote:
| Yes, WiFi 6 has a lot of major improvements to reduce
| latency.
|
| Intel has a good write up here:
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/wif.
| ..
| hfjtktkf wrote:
| > _seconds to turn on a light bulb_
|
| What a time to be alive! We truly are living in the future!
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| We used to have to take several seconds to walk over and back
| to a light bulb to turn it on. Now it's just as fast but we
| don't have to even stand up.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I've always felt that's why this kind of reporting is
| pointless. I don't care what some guy I don't know, who doesn't
| post his credentials, says about a technology that's very
| complex. I'd rather wait for Wendell Wilson to do a video and
| I'll watch it on Level1Techs channel on YouTube.
|
| This whole model seems pointless and strange to me. We no
| longer need "tech journalists" when you can have literal tech
| experts creating videos that cover all this stuff in far
| greater depth.
|
| I'd love to see the metrics on this article versus the best
| tech expert YouTubers.
| oblio wrote:
| > I'd rather wait for Wendell Wilson to do a video and I'll
| watch it on Level1Techs channel on YouTube.
|
| I watch a ton of tech Youtubers and I have absolutely no idea
| who those folks are. The world is a lot bigger than you
| imagine.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I know exactly how big the world is, thanks. The guy
| personally built a new workstation for Linus Torvalds and
| sent it to him.
|
| Maybe the world's a bigger than _you_ imagine.
| teddyh wrote:
| Wendell did a video with Linus Tech Tips a few years back,
| and they've collaborated a few times before and since, too:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsgI1mkx6iw
| azinman2 wrote:
| Most people aren't technical experts, so this has a much
| broader appeal using language and scenarios that's more
| familiar to everyday people.
| cbozeman wrote:
| That's not my point.
|
| My point is why should anyone listen to this guy. None of
| his qualifications are on display. Does he build out WiFi
| networks for a living? "He works for the New York Times" is
| not a qualification anyone should give a shit about after
| how they've conducted "journalism" since 2015.
|
| I want to hear from experts, not journalists. Maybe
| articles wherein journalists _consult_ with a range of
| experts and then convey those experts ' opinions _to me_ ,
| but I definitely don't care what a guy with a degree in
| journalism who happens to love tech has to say. I want to
| hear from people from work with these technologies from day
| to day.
|
| If you want to know about heart health, you ask a
| cardiologist, not a health journalist.
| FactCore wrote:
| I think the issue your ideal world of communication runs
| into, is that experts can't dedicate all of their time to
| public outreach. That's where journalists come in. If you
| want to know why your chest hurts a bit on the regular,
| you talk to your doctor. If you want to learn a few
| interesting facts about a heart condition, you read an
| article written by a journalist.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Most people have no idea how to evaluate YouTuber
| credentials, and they subscribe to outlets like the NYT to do
| the filtering for them.
|
| You're not the intended audience for these pieces so it's not
| weird that you don't find them very useful. Most people just
| aren't interested in the depth of detail that you are.
|
| Imagine if they replaced all the articles on topics you are
| just peripherally interested in with wonky deep-dives. You'd
| probably give up after the first few because you aren't
| equally interested in everything, and sometimes you just want
| a breezy high-level overview of what's happening.
|
| NYT is writing to audience that just wants to know whether
| they need a fancy new router or whether they should stick
| with their current one for a while longer. That's it.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I'm not debating the audience, I'm debating the
| qualifications of the person writing.
|
| I know Wendell is the real deal because Dr. Ian Cutress
| wouldn't have had him on AnandTech livestreams if he
| wasn't. I also know Wendell's the real deal by watching
| Level1Techs YouTube videos. I also know he's the real deal
| because he literally builds out networks for companies for
| a living (Wendell Wilson Consulting in Kentucky). I don't
| know shit about this NYT writer. His credentials aren't
| listed on the NYT website. Does he have a degree in
| business information systems? Electrical engineering?
| Computer science? I don't know. That's the whole point.
|
| I don't want to hear heart health advice from a "health
| journalist", I want to hear what an actual cardiologist has
| to say. Same with a "tech journalist". No thanks, I'll
| trust the opinion of someone who builds networks for a
| living when it comes to my network equipment.
|
| In the past, finding people with these qualifications was
| difficult, and then you had to find time to liaise with
| them. Now you can find some of the best people in the world
| and gain their insight just from reading or watching
| YouTube.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Anecdata, but I recently went to wifi6 and even though I didn't
| notice until now, I'm pretty sure our wifi lights respond
| quicker than they used to. It's maybe only a second or 2, but I
| remember being annoyed at how long they took sometimes before,
| and I haven't felt that way since I got this new router.
|
| However, the old router was a Google mesh and 1 of them
| definitely died slowly, so that could have been causing the
| delay for a while before it fully died on us.
| sp332 wrote:
| For a network that's already working fine, it's only going to
| make marginal improvements.
|
| Who's going to spend $230 on a new router for slightly faster
| lightbulbs?
| beart wrote:
| This comment made me laugh. My light bulbs turn on at the
| speed of electricity right now.
| hansel_der wrote:
| thx for pointing that out, you two made my day!
| josefresco wrote:
| Great, but my local ISP monopoly will be instituting data caps in
| 2022 (only after massive public pressure to delay) and therefore
| speed won't be my major issue but instead overall data
| consumption. In fact, I'm looking into routers (UniFi Dream
| Machine) to throttle devices in order to prevent them from
| streaming 1080/4K video.
|
| I don't need technology to increase the speed at which I exhaust
| my data cap, I need legislation to outlaw data caps and create
| ISP competition.
| cybrjoe wrote:
| Maybe someone more versed in UniFi will step in but from what
| I've experienced throttling in UniFi exists across the entire
| network, not just WAN egress traffic. It severely limits it's
| usefulness.
| josefresco wrote:
| Pretty sure from what I've read it allows per-device
| throttling. I'll try to dig up a link.
|
| Update:
|
| Throttling via groups: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to...
|
| While this isn't exactly "per device" throttling it looks
| like it can be used to achieve the same thing. I would most
| likely have a "low speed" tier that I assign to things like
| smart speakers, kids devices etc.
|
| I swear I saw some screenshots or maybe videos with a per-
| device throttle option but maybe I'm getting my routers
| confused.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| What's your local ISP's name?
| umeshunni wrote:
| Probably starts with an X and ends with a finiti.
| josefresco wrote:
| Yes. The only other option is a regional fiber network
| which requires thousands (if you're lucky) up front to dig
| a trench to your house not to mention a very high monthly
| fee (which I'd gladly pay).
|
| I routinely use between 1.4-1.8 TB of data each month. I
| have about 30 devices connected to the network at any one
| time, maybe 50 total.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| You should also keep an eye on idle data usage. I had several
| chromecasts plugged in around the house and discovered (with my
| UniFi setup) that they were each using about 500MB per day each
| just sitting idle. That's about 15GB per chromecast per month.
| Not trivial when you have several of them and a 1TB cap.
|
| More details: https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-
| your-chromecast...
| josefresco wrote:
| Agreed, unfortunately my router does not give me this data,
| so I have to go device-by-device. I'm hoping the UniFi Dream
| Machine will solve this both by allowing me to throttle, and
| giving me the data to address individually.
|
| I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon
| Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of
| advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer
| unused. That was an easy fix.
|
| Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was
| set to the highest quality.
|
| Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many
| devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or
| giving users control.
| willis936 wrote:
| I was strongly looking at a UDM this week. After reading
| through many testimonials: everything is not as it seems in
| unifi land. I went with an edgerouter-4 and will continue to
| use my R6700v2 as an AP. It's a fine AP but a godawful router.
| It took disabling default configs to hit gig throughput. Forget
| enabling QoS. The WAN DHCP client also shits itself once a
| month. Enough is enough. The networking kit should be a box
| that sits in the corner and does its job.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| Note that EdgeRouter is not a product in their UniFi line,
| the most commonly praised.
| josefresco wrote:
| > everything is not as it seems in unifi land
|
| Go on... A buddy of mine just dropped several G's on UniFi
| gear so I'm hoping he can tell me about any issues before I
| jump in.
| willis936 wrote:
| The UDM line is about a year old and many features are in
| the "to-be-implemented" bin. This is a vague statement and
| I don't have specific examples on hand. I just recall
| seeing references to them when hunting around. I don't have
| firsthand experience.
|
| The UDM can't be adopted by another controller: it needs to
| be the unifi controller. This really kills the upgrade path
| imo.
|
| One of my best metrics for deciding what hardware to get is
| to look through the 1-star reviews for realistic
| testimonials by reasonable users. It takes a lot of
| sifting, but it builds an okay picture. There are almost no
| complaints about the ER-4 compared to the UDM. I think I'd
| likely roll a pfSense box before jumping into unifi.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/product-
| reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_...
| anonymousab wrote:
| A bunch of my co-workers jumped on board, and with a good
| discount I gave it a shot as well.
|
| When it's working fine it seems marginally better for wifi
| connections than a standard cheap consumer Soho router.
|
| But that's the problem: it very often just doesn't work
| correctly. Port forwarding rules will sometimes, randomly,
| no longer apply. DNS issues will mysteriously crop up. Some
| clients seem to get a cut in downstream speed but not
| others (with or without enabling the setting to optimize
| channels). UPnP, if you choose to enable it, will
| mysteriously work for some clients but not others.
| Sometimes these issues will only happen for wireless
| clients, sometimes for wired, and sometimes for only a
| given port or AP.
|
| It often feels like a double-NAT situation, but somehow
| with a regular, basic, client-only topology. My co-workers
| have reported both these issues and ones I have never seen.
|
| The worst part is that you will go on the forums, sometimes
| find users with the same issue as you (and many responses)
| and then rarely see an official response beyond 'yeah
| that's a known bug, no eta'.
|
| I've heard nothing but praises from friends for their other
| hardware. It's just the UDM that seems strangely awful.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a
| decade ago now. The newer solutions focus on high desisty
| busness (local data need or call center/auditorium density) and
| newer direct high bandwidth device<->device connectivity.
| wp381640 wrote:
| Apartment buildings can have very noisy public spectrum which
| 6 will help with
| stagger87 wrote:
| Unless people are sharing access points, WIFI 6 doesn't
| really help with this use case. You wouldn't get to take
| advantage of OFDMA or MU-MIMO in this scenario. At that
| point it's basically 802.11ac with 1024-QAM.
| hansel_der wrote:
| i'd say the average house has only one wifi-ap and since 5ghz
| (AC) just barely pentrates a solid built wall, 2,4ghz-N is
| where the majority of wifi usefullness originates, which is
| even older ...
|
| but yea, cell confinement and directional interference
| optimisation is the way to go for high density applications.
| acdha wrote:
| > Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a
| decade ago now
|
| This is only true for small houses with certain construction
| materials, few devices, and an internet connection under,
| say, 50Mbps. The last year has been especially good for
| seeing how rarely that's true for most people, however. It's
| so easy to find people talking about how upgrading from a
| 10-year old access point or adding 1-2 more made a huge
| difference for things like call latency or contention between
| devices. Having everyone home and trying to work, attend
| class, or socialize online made dealing with all of that a
| priority.
| cromka wrote:
| By 2022 they may feel enough of the competition pressure from
| Starlink to abandon that idea. Hopefully yours and every other
| ISP out there.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| If starlink can maintain urban bandwidth, more power too
| them. But I think that 1/2/10,000 dishes per square mile will
| probably overwhelm the handful of sats flying over a town at
| any given moment. Starlink is no threat to wired services in
| urban areas.
| josefresco wrote:
| If the local regional fiber ISP gets their act together that
| will motivate them to run fiber to our region. Otherwise I'm
| not holding my breath. I may have to supplement my wired
| network with a low cost cellular based network.
| [deleted]
| zamadatix wrote:
| Pantiently awaiting
| https://www.netgear.com/home/wifi/routers/raxe500/ to actually be
| purhacasable so the 40-60 other wireless networks near me just
| "disappear". Already have all my non-wired clients upgraded with
| 6E m.2 chips, phones aside
| S_A_P wrote:
| I've an unusual layout in my house and WiFi placed in the middle
| of the home would not reach either side of the long narrow floor
| plan. I tried various mesh options including ubiquitis prosumer
| amplifi but that proved very unreliable. Before going full
| enterprise grade I tried the Linksys Velop WiFi 6 that has 2
| Access Points. It has been tremendous thus far. I have WiFi well
| out into my yard(live in country area on acreage) and aside from
| occasional hangs the system has been stable and covers the entire
| home.
| gumby wrote:
| I upgraded to a Wifi 6* router last month. We have Gb service. I
| could never get more than a few hundred Mbps from any of my
| devices on the 5 GHz bands but with ax I can get over 800 Mbps. I
| only have two ax devices and their performance is startlingly
| different (one gets about 400 Mbps but the other gets over 800).
|
| I do wonder how much of the issue is channel contention from my
| neighbors and how much is actual improvement.
|
| * Not mentioning brands because I don't want to look like I'm
| shilling. Anyway I only had a couple of dozen clients to test
| with, and only two (before and after) routers.
|
| Edit: I had "K" and "G" where I should have had "Mbs" -- thanks
| jeffbee and gratin for pointing these typos out.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You were getting a few hundred kbps per device on what kind of
| network? That's not even enough for CD-quality digital audio.
| That wouldn't have been acceptable performance even in the
| 1990s before 802.11.
| gumby wrote:
| Thanks, an absurd typo; fixed.
| the-dude wrote:
| That is amazing.
| gumby wrote:
| Two typos made it _extraordinarily_ amazing; if you were
| politely referring to those: I edited the post.
|
| However with the correct units I am astonished and gratified
| with the improvement.
| graton wrote:
| > but with ax I can get over 800 Gbps
|
| Can I assume you meant 800 Mbps?
| gumby wrote:
| Thanks, an absurd typo; fixed.
| haspoken wrote:
| http://archive.is/ukkYu
| ozborn wrote:
| Is anybody excited about Wi-Fi 6?
|
| I'm just not seeing a compelling use case for many residential
| users to upgrade given the number of legacy devices that don't
| support this protocol. More importantly, the impending release of
| WiFi6e routers that open up 6 Ghz makes me want to wait even
| more... That is a huge potential bandwidth increase.
| bjoli wrote:
| I am not excited, but I am happy that the 2.4ghz band finally
| got an update. 802.11n needed to catch up to ac.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Yep, not excited for Wifi6, i'll wait for wifi6e to upgrade. My
| AP-AC-HD works great.
| rektide wrote:
| > I usually have more than two dozen internet-connected devices
| running, including smart speakers, a thermostat and a bathroom
| scale. That appeared to make my home an ideal test environment
| for Wi-Fi 6.
|
| mu-mimo (802.11ax) requires client side support, since it's a way
| to make clients use different channels than the main channel they
| would have used pre-802.11ax. i'm skeptical this test actually
| tested mu-mimo, that the wifi 6 router was doing anything new or
| better.
|
| not impossible though. it helps that some pre-wifi 6 devices
| (802.11ac, 2014) started getting mu-mimo/802.11ax support but
| only on 5GHz bands. so some not fresh devices may have support. i
| believe anything with 802.11ax support on both bands qualifies as
| wifi 6. haven't found good links to support this though! i wonder
| when the first client 802.11ax devices emerged!!
|
| the Wikipedia reference is pretty solid:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I bought a house and recently bought a router for our Comcast
| service. I wanted to "future proof" so I bought the ASUS WiFi 6
| Router (RT-AX3000).
|
| Before at our apartment a little further down the road with the
| same Comcast service, we were always flipping WiFi on and off on
| our phones and tablets to reconnect because of hanging
| connections. I was blaming Comcast, but it's now clear to me that
| it was the router and not the connection itself. Our new router
| has never dropped my connection and I get a signal throughout the
| house. Streams start instantly and downloads are as fast as at
| the office. I can work from home via VPN and it's
| indistinguishable from sitting at my desk on a wired connection.
| mark-r wrote:
| I'd be happy to just have wifi that didn't lose its mind when you
| run the microwave.
| anamexis wrote:
| Don't you just need any wifi at 5 GHz for that? 802.11n (aka
| Wi-Fi 4) has been around for quite a while.
| ksec wrote:
| Ok, a few things.
|
| 1. WiFi 6 only improves / reduce congestions when all devices on
| the network are WiFi 6 only. As soon as you have older WiFi
| devices, the difference becomes negligible to non-existence.
|
| 2. WiFi 6 only improves / reduce congestions when all devices on
| the network support WiFi 6 _OFDMA_ , which while being officially
| part of WiFi 6, it was not mandatory. And if you have one that
| doesn't support it or does not have a firmware updated to support
| it, read point 1.
|
| 3. WiFi 6 _E_ will mandate all those optional features that were
| intentionally missed out on WiFi 6 due to all sort of technical,
| economical, political reasons. So in realty if you dont have all
| your devices as WiFi 6E, read point 1.
|
| 4. It is not clear whether 6Ghz support is mandated to be
| certified as WiFi 6E. On paper it seems to be the case, In
| practice most part of the world dont have 6Ghz spectrum ready.
| And I am not sure how FCC ( or similar ) clearance will work for
| a product that are already shipped on the market. Could we get
| new spectrum support via Firmware update? I am sure that is how
| US intends to deal with it since Intel are already shipping WiFi
| 6E product with label that support 6Ghz. I am just not sure if
| EU, UK, or other part of the world would allow or follow similar
| route. That has an implications on how fast WiFI 6E could launch
| worldwide.
|
| 5. Finally, there is only so much you can do with WiFi spec. If
| you have an extremely noisy environment nothing could really
| help. In an ultra packed City like HK, I could detect at least a
| dozen AP at any given time.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Wi-Fi 6 reduces congestion by directing traffic. There are now
| multiple lanes: car pool lanes for the newer, faster devices and
| a slow lane for the older, slower ones. All of the vehicles are
| also full of people, which represent big batches of data being
| transported over the network simultaneously._
|
| Nice car analogy; how will that play out in a crowded condo
| building, where neighbors around you have multiple routers with
| umpteen "lanes"?
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