He's testing performance with cheap laptops and blaming the adapter? Pushing data isn't free. If you have a bad CPU or memory architecture or even bad drivers, you're not going to get network rated speeds. This has been true for wired as well since the beginning of ethernet.
A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
91–100 of 242 posts
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#92My 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…
> all modern laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore! Surely things haven't gotten this insane outside the iFruitbasket? If so I'm going to have to stock up on upgradeable refurbished laptops...
Usually it's just a factor of the thin-ness of a laptop. Ethernet is not a small port and laptops that aren't heavy duty ultrabooks are regularly thinner than one, even at their thickest point.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#93It also sucks from the security point of view even the problems could in most cases be fixed with solutions known to the current state of cryptography: https://github.com/d33tah/call-for-wpa3
* True, but I doubt anybody is going to sniff my wireless, force me to de–auth and capture the 4–way handshake which she saves to crack offline in the comfort of her home, using cloud computing or gpu's. [0]
* The WPS attack doesn't work with every router that supports it, but allows for an easy way to compromise most modern routers. [1]
* RADIUS/EAP-TTLS is still rock solid. We all know WEP has already been broken and forgotten.
[0]: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Breaking_WPA2 [1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uJE5YYSP-wHUu5-smIMT...
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Right, and you accept a degraded experience for the portability. The speaker built into your phone isn't as good as stand-up speakers either.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, it's better "in all aspects but mobility"? You're kidding. You may as well complain that batteries suck because the only advantage they have over just plugging something in is portability.
I mean, isn't that true and why almost all of our electronics plug in?
It's true, but it's so obvious, and obviously the entire point of the technology, that I wonder why anyone would bother remarking on it.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#96Earlier 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…
Hm, I'm not quite that isolated, but I do live in a single-family home, so that might explain it.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#97I 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…
Which router do you recommend? Is the 5G band consistently worse than the default (i.e. constant connection drops) or is that just my experience?
My phone doesn't do 5GHz, but other than that, 5GHz is significantly better until you get about 3-5 walls between you and the router.
In general, 5GHz is way better for apartments (less channel congestion, apartments are usually smaller than houses), and 2.4GHz is better for non-urban houses (better wall penetration).
For urban houses (I can see 15+ 2.4GHz networks from my living room; in a larger city it could be worse), the best bet is to have 2 or more APs and connect them with ethernet if possible, and powerline otherwise. My cable internet comes in the house in the corner of the house, and is under a different roof a-frame than the rest of the house (a previous owner built living space above the garage), so I can't run ethernet through the attic, and I use powerline adapters; there's a separate subpanel for this area too, but I still get minimum 30Mbps over the powerline, which is good enough for web/e-mail.
My next step is to see if any outlets under the main roof get good signal over the powerline, and then run ethernet throughout the attic; then I can have several routers throughout the house.
I use TP-Link APs running OpenWRT; they are cheap and OpenWRT lets you adjust the power down. If you aren't cost-constrained, I've heard almost nothing bad about Ubiquity.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#98Earlier 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.
What is triband. Can you recommend one?
It uses 2 5Ghz channels and 1 2.4ghz channel.
I bought this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> 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).
Perhaps current-generation WiFi has more of an issue with that, but I've helped build systems that used a much older generation of WiFi in an ad-hoc (no AP) mode between nodes with a speed differential of Mach 1 (between a rocket and the ground). It worked fine, and lost almost no packets over the course of the flight.
Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
#100Earlier 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...
If you option-click on the wifi symbol in the macOS menu bar, there's an option to access various diagnostic tools. One of them gives you channel recommendations as well.