Technology

Yeah your wifi sucks dude. Or your area.

It's pretty much impossible to get decent wifi in a dense urban area where there's competing signal.

The channel has to be clear before any station can talk. So if there's another ssid or another router on the same channel, you're waiting for it.

More devices on the wireless (including your neighbors wireless, if you're on the same channel) means more waiting. More waiting means slower speed.

Add to this that most AX+ gear is defaulting to 80MHz channels and avoid UNII-2 bands (for good reason), bringing us back to 3 usable, non-overlapping channels on 5GHz.

And when you double the channel width, you double the noise with no increase to signal, cutting your SNR (signal/noise ratio) by a good 3dB compared to 40MHz and 6dB compared to 20MHz. The increase in potential speed simply isn't worth it for the drop in overall quality for a lot of people. But it's the default, and most people don't know or think to change it.

Add to that, that a lot of consumer gear defaults to a static channel. Or says "auto" but really just sticks to one channel. Xfinity routers are notorious for this.

Also, no broadcast/multicasr suppression and enabling legacy rates, also default behavior on a lot of consumer routers and sometimes even unchangeable. Legacy rates (support for circa-2000 802.11b) define the minimum speed that is allowed (usually 1Mbps), and that speed is used for all broadcast and multicast. And these get said by the device and then repeated by the router.

Now we also have smart speakers (like Sonos and Google) that use multicast to make multi-speaker groups. That destroys the wifi. Worse, if your neighbor is playing music and you're on the same channel. It'll destroy your wifi.

Printers and their drivers like to spam multicast too. Even if they're wired, because its still the same network.

Old unused port forwards too. Your router will keep looking on the wire and wireless networks for the destination, using ARPs (which are broadcast traffic). If the IP is offline, it can spam the network looking for it.

If you want good wifi, find a clean channel and thoroughly understand https://www.wiisfi.com/. It is by far the best deep dive on wireless and many of its flaws.

What it doesn't talk about is shit mesh systems. You want a decent mesh it must be tri-band with a dedicated backhaul. Even that is gonna slow down if you've got multiple hops between device and gateway. Much better to wire in all the endpoints.

But if you've got a clear channel and good, well-configured hardware, and good placement...you can get good speeds on wireless.

But you really should still use a wire (or something like MoCA or Powerline if that's not an option) for anything more than light browsing and streaming services (not realtime!). Wireless is prone to latency and jitter and some applications (voice/video, work VPNs, gaming) are far more sensitive to that than others.

Edit to add: it doesn't help that we're conditioned to think 3 or 4 bars of wifi is "good enough". Speed and stability drops off very quick with signal, and that only really reflects SNR.

Your weak signal clients are also sending/receiving data much slower and probably retransmitting more frequently, which will occupy more channel time and reduce performance of your other devices.

This also extends to old devices (like an old printer or digital photo frame or w/e), even if it has a good signal. The router slows down to talk to them, which occupies more time, which slows down everyone else.

And the same rule applies to being on the same channel as your neighbor, if they have an old/weak device.

And also, if your phone/laptop can hear the neighbor but the router can't...your phone is still waiting for the channel to clear from both sides, and likely hearing the router and the neighbor talking over each other.

Eeros like to put all mesh nodes on the same channel and I hate that. That greatly limits the scalability of the environment, since all devices throughout the house are sharing the same airtime.

Tl/Dr: speed is a function of time. Time is a finite resource and you have to share it with all your devices and potentially your neighbors devices too. Think of 1 second of wifi as a pie. We can't "make more pie", only make smaller slices of the pie we have.

This just reaks of someone who's never had good hardware.

A properly rolled out network can supply reliable wifi that's just as reliable for consumer and even prosumer grade tasks as hardline.

Hell even recent improvements to wireless backhaul has basically obsoleted the need to run a cable to every single room you want reliable Internet in.

Unless your doing something that actually NEEDS the speed cables provide over wireless then there's no real benefit other then it being cheaper.

Just stop being 60 dollar shitty all in one routers.

Hmm opposite for me. Wifi has gotten better and more stable.

Speed is not the only variable here, stability is too, and over the years, if anything, WiFi has become more unstable if anything, going from „I get internet outside my house” to „don’t lean too much towards the wall in my bed, otherwise the 0,50 Mbit is gonna become even less”.

Really? My phone easily connects to my WiFi everyone in my apartment, from couple floors below it and through the ceiling. I have the router in a wall box. For me with WiFi 6 it just got faster, I didn't notice any stability issues.

Same thing happened with 5G, claiming that categorically new stuff would be possible with 5G that just couldn't be done at all with LTE. IoT and VR were buzzwords thrown around as simply demanding 5G and utterly impossible without it.

Then 5G came and it was welcome, but much more mundane. IoT applications are generally so light that even today such devices only bother to ship with LTE hardware. VR didn't catch on that hard, but to the extent it has, 5G doesn't matter, no cellular modems and Internet speed is too slow to support anything directly even with 5G.

Same is happening in pretty much every technology with AI right now, claiming that AI absolutely requires whatever the hell it is they want to push. Trying to lean hard on AI FOMO to push their tech.

I‘m convinced it’s an excuse. They‘re stuffing everything with „AI“ right now to justify the erratic spending spree while scrambling to find actual use cases that actually transform entire industries so they can keep bullying us out of our wages and jobs.

As a software developer, when I read that sentence, I heard "We want WiFi 8 to continue to improve the standard and be faster, but that's not a very sexy sales pitch, so we're gonna pitch it as if AI is the only reason we're developing better infrastructure."

AI is currently a clustered mess of retry back off loops. The connectivity ain’t the issue.

I would suspect they're thinking of robots with "brains" that are separate from the physical chassis, perhaps in a cloud server somewhere. If you've got a factory full of robots tromping around under wifi guidance you'd want that to be a reliable connection.

Yeah word salad especially if there is progress to have local model running on your device rather than the privacy nightmare of the cloud based solutions.

EasyMesh exists. But not many companies implement it.

You forgot about NANA-SWIFI-EXT-5G and NANA-SWIFI-EXT-6G

Why do you want people to see through your walls?