71–80 of 242 posts
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I suppose the difference is that I don't expect my television to run on batteries, but I do expect it to work on wifi.
Why? TVs aren't very portable, carrying content over a wire makes much more sense.
Lots 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
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Have you ever built "moving" wifi networks (trains, planes), and do those have special challenges?
Yes and nothing special, as long as the clients and AP are moving consistent to each other. If the client is moving >10MPH relative to a fixed AP (i.e. you're driving past the AP in your car), Wi-Fi doesn't handle that well. Your movement creates Doppler shift in your RF signal, which Wi-Fi can't adjust for (vs. e.g. LTE which does).
[1] ∆f = f0 * (∆v/v0) = 2.4 GHz * (4.5 / 3e8) = 36 Hz (using 10 mph = 4.5 m/s)
Edit: I'm certainly not an expert in RF. I checked my intuition against the datasheet of a radio module I've been working with (RFM69HCW), and found in a footnote of an equation (on page 31):
> crystal tolerance is in the range of 50 to 100 ppm
Here's a link to that datasheet: https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Wireless/General/RFM69HC...
It seems that the Doppler shift (measured in PPM) would be well within 0.1% of the crystal's tolerance.
Edit #2: Doppler shift is 0.015 PPM; not 0.150 PPM as I originally stated.
My loved one went for a junior sysadmin job. They'd decided to remove all the wiring and use wifi for everything because of just the sorta hype mentioned here. Loved one pulled out a Palm Tungsten C and proceeded to crack all their WEP passwords there in the interview. Got the job too ... and the task of putting quite a bit of wiring back.
I tell my wife [a software dev like me]: "I love it when you talk nerdy"
My 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…
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Why? TVs aren't very portable, carrying content over a wire makes much more sense.
It's easier for most consumers to just put their new TV where they want rather than knock a bunch of holes in the wall (or ask their landlord to do the work)
I 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…
Does roaming devices between APs actually work? I reading through ubiquiti forums and it looks like they used to support it, but backed out of it. My specific usecase is moving around the office while being on google hangouts on my phone.
In the end if you have a problem with WiFi (e.g. not a default transparent walls and no interference) you will have a problem with it forever.
Wired ethernet uses CSMA/CD and it's one of the reasons it won the LAN networking wars of the 80's and 90's.