[HN Gopher] From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey
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From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey
Author : tymscar
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-11-01 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.tymscar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.tymscar.com)
| tripdout wrote:
| > Running iperf server on the router itself creates CPU
| contention between the WiFi scheduling and the iperf process. The
| router's TCP stack isn't tuned for this either. Classic mistake.
|
| Can you elaborate on this? I don't know much about WiFi so I'm
| curious what CPU work the router needs to do and what wouldn't be
| offloaded to hardware somehow (like most routing/forwarding/QoS
| duties can be).
| mattlondon wrote:
| I had a similar issue but on unifi gateway lite after upgrading
| to 1gig fibre, I couldn't get above about 250-300mbps, even
| wired. Everything looked good in the unifi _app_. Turns out in
| the unifi web UI there was a "use hardware acceleration"
| checkbox for the gateway that was unticked and not even visible
| in the app. Ticked that and now I am getting 900+mbps
|
| I also sometimes have alerts saying more than one device is using
| the same IP address (DHCP issues) but it won't tell me which
| ones! At least give me the MAC addresses!
|
| Unifi's stuff is great, but the software is sometimes
| infuriating.
| scrps wrote:
| Other trap is some of the unifi features, IIRC their IDS is one
| of them, will cut throughput if you are running it.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm lazy so I just fire off the occasional speed tests using
| Ookla.
|
| It doesn't _really_ seem to matter what channel width or
| frequency I use, I tend to get around 600Gbps from my iPhone (17,
| pro).
|
| When you make it a point to ensure you're on the correct AP, line
| of sight from a few feet away, sometimes I break 1Gbps. I was
| surprised, watching TV the other day, to randomly get a 1.2Gbps
| speedtest which is one of the faster ones I've seen on WiFi.
|
| (10gbps internet, UDM Pro, UDM enterprise 2.5Gbps switch for
| clients, PoE WiFi 7 APs on 6ghz).
|
| Honestly, I'd say overall 6ghz has been more trouble than it's
| worth. Flipping the switch to WPA2/3 as required by 6ghz broke
| _all_ of my clients last year, so I had to revert and now I just
| have a separate SSID for clients I have the energy to manually
| retype the password into. 6Ghz pretty much only works line of
| sight and from a handful of feet away. There were bugs last year
| in Apple's "Disable 6e" setting so it kept re-enabling itself.
| MLO was bad, so it would stick to 6ghz even when there was
| basically no usable signal.
|
| Over the course of the past year, it's gotten pretty tolerable,
| but sometimes I still wonder why I bother-- I'm pretty sure my
| real world performance would be better if I just turned 6ghz off
| again.
| manquer wrote:
| >> get around 600Gbps from my iPhone 17
|
| !
|
| What kind of magic iPhone you have? I don't think there is any
| device to achieve anything close to that today[1]
|
| ---
|
| [1] The recently(2024) record is claimed to be at 938 Gbps but
| it is only to a 12cm distance[2]
|
| [2]
| https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196331/1/938nbspGb_s...
| vardump wrote:
| Obviously he/she meant 600 Mbps.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| I just tested 1700mbits/s from my iPhone 17 PM in the next room
| over from my Ubiquiti E7 and I don't even have MLO enabled.
| Something's very wrong if you're only getting 600mbit.
| ukd1 wrote:
| I get consistently ~1.3-1.6gbps on fast.com with similar setup
| (10g fiber, UDM Pro, E7, etc). I think where I live there are
| very few / zero folks on 6ghz...so, win.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > Set transmit power to High
|
| Do NOT do this if you live in a densely populated area (e.g.
| apartment complex). You'll create noise for yourself and
| everybody else. Classic prisoner's dilemma - a few people could
| be assholes and profit from it, but if everyone's an asshole
| everybody suffers.
|
| General rule on TX power: start on low and increase only if you
| know (or can confirm) it helps. Go back down if it doesn't.
| neilalexander wrote:
| This may not help if you can't control your environment. You
| will often benefit from nearby routers hearing you and each
| other if you are forced to share a channel with them, as that
| is what enables the carrier sensing to work correctly.
| Otherwise neighbouring APs that can't hear your quieter use of
| the channel may shout over your devices rather than backing
| off, creating collisions and resulting in retransmits.
| eqvinox wrote:
| You're describing the situation where the prisoner's dilemma
| has already gone wrong, with someone else not-nice shouting
| over you trying to be nice.
|
| In other words: you don't need carrier sensing to work if
| you're not getting drowned in noise to begin with.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why do people need 2.5Gbps internet access or 1.7 Gbps on a home
| wifi network? What are folks doing at home?!?
| vardump wrote:
| To transfer files? Like large virtual machines, huge video
| files. Backup their files quickly. To support a homelab to
| learn new skills. To stream uncompressed video. To download 300
| GB monster games.
|
| Some people can manage with slow network speeds at home, even
| though 100 Gbps single mode fiber is perfectly doable nowadays.
| And it's reasonable, because new SSDs do almost 120 Gbps.
|
| 1 Gbps made sense 20 years ago when single hard disks had
| similar performance. For some weird reason LAN speeds did not
| improve at the same rate as the disks did.
|
| But then again, I guess many could also still manage with 100
| Mbps connectivity at home. Still enough for 4k video, web
| browsing and most other "ordinary" use cases.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the
| same rate as the disks did.
|
| When it comes to wired, sending data 15cm is a very different
| problem than sending it 100M reliably - that and consumer
| demand for >1Gbps wasn't there which made the consumer
| equipment expensive because no mass market to drive it down,
| M.2 entirely removes the cable.
|
| I figured 10Gbps would be the standard by now (and was way
| off) and yet its not even the default on high end
| motherboards - 2.5Gbps is becoming a lot more common though.
| threeducks wrote:
| A few things come to mind:
|
| - Games (400GB for Ark, 235GB for Call of Duty, 190GB for God
| of War)
|
| - LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp at 690GB or Kimi-K2 at 1030GB
| unquantized)
|
| - Blockchains (Bitcoin blockchain approaching 700GB)
|
| - Deep learning datasets (1.1PB for Anna's Archive, 240TB for
| LAION-5B at low resolution)
|
| - Backups
|
| - Online video processing/storage
|
| - Piracy (Torrenting)
|
| Of course you can download those things on a slower connection,
| but I imagine that it would be a lot nicer if it went faster.
| yatopifo wrote:
| I can't comment on the internet, but high-bandwidth wifi helps
| with VR streaming quality.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| To not bottleneck the mechanical hard drives in their NAS, or
| to download games at a reasonable speed.
|
| Or even just work stuff, I've had to shift around several TB of
| 3D assets for my job while working from home.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Running $60 Mikrotik HEX S 2025 and getting 1.2 Gbps on a "1G"
| connection !
| throwworhtthrow wrote:
| It's wasted effort in the US, since the 2025 budget bill directs
| the FCC to sell off much of the 6GHz band on which WiFi 7
| depends.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/trump-and-congre...
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