Excellent article. Thanks.
A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
51–60 of 242 posts
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it absolutely does, but it is dependent on the station (the client) doing so. One of my gripes about Wi-Fi is that it delegates too much to the station - your experience is thus dictated by whoever wrote your phone/computer's Wi-Fi chipset driver, and how they interpret the standard. Any Wi-Fi network supports roaming on the network side, you just need all of your access points to use the same SSID, and to dump u…
Should I set channels on the APs in some specific way? We're using mostly apple hardware + ubiquiti APs, and to be honest I expected everything to "just work" with the defaults...
You should make sure the APs don't interfere with each other. The automatic channel selection didn't work well for me. I had to manually set my two APs at each end of the 2.4GHz spectrum. It's also a good idea to turn on wide band channel. If you have an Android device somewhere you can download wifi analyser to make sure the channels don't overlap.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked a place that did roaming from one AP to another one on a train in Norway in the early 2000 / late 90s, think we was the first in the world to do it. To don't have a huge network drop we used a VPN connection on the client computer so it had the same IP while jumping from one wifi over to the other one.
Can you not sue modem providers for false advertising? America is a litigious country, I wonder why this hasnt happened? I filed a FCC complaint on Frontier delivering 10th of their speeds. They gave me an upgraded connection that gave me full 30Mbps within a week. The only way Corporations are going to learn how to back off is when they have to pay for their mistakes.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Or maybe the phone app I'm using misorderered...
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#54Lots of legacy tech is also one of the reasons why Wi-Fi sucks. If you do one thing today, disable 802.11b on your router. 802.11b beacons alone can completely jam a 2.4 GHz channel in dense deployments, exasperated by those ISPs that broadcast their own SSIDs from your home router.
I wrote a more in depth blog about this at https://r1ch.net/blog/wifi-beacon-pollution
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#55I build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions. To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental chal…
I've got a weird problem at my home where WiFi connection on my laptop gets really bad as soon as some particular other laptop connects to the WiFi. Reconnecting fixes the issue. Any idea what might cause this or how to gather more information on potential causes?
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#56There is a German tech saying that goes "Wer Funk kennt, nimmt Kabel" ("Those who know wireless, use wires").
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#57My day to day happiness quotient shot up the day I ditched my wireless wifi and ran Ethernet cables through my spaces. I'd realized I was constantly noticing wifi issues, and an apple mbp I use for email seems to drop wifi every half hour. But no longer, with them all wired up! Realizing there are USB3 to Ethernet gadgets really hits home how our modern technology is market-driven-dumb and anti-consumer: all modern l…
I splurged on one of the expensive tri-band routers and honestly now the wireless is good enough that I don't care.
What is triband. Can you recommend one?
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#58I think it's getting Bits and Bytes a little mixed up. You can expect about 1/10th speed?
Most file transfer dialogs I've seen ("real world"?) display transfer rate in Bytes. Advertisers use bits, that little marketing wave can actually explain the speed drop to 1/8th of the "advertised" rate.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#59As somebody who deploys high density wifi for a living I can agree that WiFi sucks. 5Ghz is already super crowded and it's only getting worse. The new LTE over 5Ghz is going to kill 5Ghz I think once it becomes deployed. Some of the cameras in arena run on 80mhz 5Ghz frequency that hop around and can't be channel planned. They are the worst.
At least it doesn't penetrate walls, so if you are inside and have a 5GHz router you can be fairly sure of empty channels.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I splurged on one of the expensive tri-band routers and honestly now the wireless is good enough that I don't care.
I used to live about 1/4 mile away from any other houses, and I never got why people always complained about wifi. In my experience it always worked well, was fairly fullproof, and had fast enough speeds that it was never an issue. 2 years ago I moved into a condo that has 25 wifi APs within range of me right now. Now I get it. Getting one of the high-end tri-band routers as you said did help, but it's still a diffic…
I never heard of a tri-band router before. It's a misnomer because there is no third band, it just means it can handle 2.4GHz but will use two channels of 5GHz at once. There have been other routers in the past that used more than one channel but it sounds very selfish to use in a dense apartment/condo living situation.