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A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

arstechnica.com

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Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#101

Post by aidenn0 »

willidiots wrote: post #34
lawry wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hardware, and what kind of settings do you need to seek to have a working roaming network? I've a Mikrotik router at home (very educational), and I've very often heard UniFi ap's can do it properly. Can I do it with Mikrotik aps? Will setting it up be hell?

In general see my response to grk, you can roam with any network that meets these criteria: 1. All APs use the same SSID 2. All APs bridge users onto the same subnet But the experience will vary from client to client in terms of how aggressively they roam. Many AP vendors offer knobs to "help" clients roam by kicking clients off at a certain signal threshold, supposedly triggering a roam: in practice, this just upset…

I switched from single to multiple ESSID when I found most laptops would not switch BSSID until they completely lost connectivity. It was a shame because both Android phones one iPhone I tried worked great under this setup.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#102

Post by emodendroket »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #82
woah wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference is you don't see people going around on forums saying "batteries suck because you have to charge them"

Sure you do: look at forums on portable tools with both battery and cord versions. The charging time (and necessary backups for continuous use), weight, and low power provided all are cited as weaknesses of batteries. The only advantages batteries have is increased portability and ability to provide power without existing infrastructure. Which is why we see batteries primarily limited to highly portable devices and b…

A lot of people choose wireless even for stationary machines because you don't have to bother running the cable.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#103

Post by emodendroket »

extra88 wrote: post #68
mrfusion wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is triband. Can you recommend one?

I had to google it, it sounds selfish when the trouble is caused by many neighbors having their own APs nearby.

Can't speak for anyone else, but that was not my problem.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#104

Post by JoshTriplett »

Klathmon wrote: post #42
willidiots wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

So on that note, do you have any brands/manufacturers/chipsets that you see as particularly good in terms of being a client? Its always a gamble when I get a new phone/laptop/device if it will work with the multi-AP setup I have in my house, and I'm really tired of getting something and bringing it home only to find it hangs on to the furthest AP for dear life.

> So on that note, do you have any brands/manufacturers/chipsets that you see as particularly good in terms of being a client?

As a client, the Intel wifi hardware works quite well, as does the software stack on top of it (at least on Linux). It helps that they're the ones who've written a fair bit of the wifi stack itself.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#105

Post by aidenn0 »

amelius wrote: post #89

The article doesn't seem to speak about directivity. Sending a narrow, directed beam of information could reduce contention issues, and reduce power requirements. But you'd need a more advanced antenna (probably an array), more advanced signal processing, and smarter software.

Directivity is great for open-space p2p links, but indoors it's much less useful as walls scatter 2.4GHz with aplomb.

There's also the small matter that a dipole is already close to the ERP limit set by the FCC, so most directional antenna setups are not legal

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#106

Post by wazanator »

willidiots wrote: post #9

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…

What security measures do you use to prevent someone from knocking a connected user off and redirecting them so they reconnect to an evil twin AP?

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#107

Post by stsp »

Filligree wrote: post #30
mckoss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read more (page 2) - there is a considerable discussion of channel congestion and interference due to over powered zones and large number of devices.

I did. It's still fairly superficial, and not the focus of the article. What I'm looking for is e.g. an explanation of how MIMO works, or why explicit timeslots were considered useful for 802.11n but not 11b.

I would recommend reading books instead of blogs if you really want to understand this stuff.

O'Reilly's "802.11n: A Survival Guide" is fairly OK.

If you read German, I highly recommend "Wireless LANs" by author Jörg Rech.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#108

Post by ShinyCyril »

coin wrote: post #87
nerdbaggy wrote: post #5

As 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.

There is a huge difference between MHz and mHz

Do you really think the person you are replying to doesn't know that already? I think you can take it as given that most people here know the difference between MHz and mHz and are perfectly capable of realising it is a typo.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#109

Post by coin »

ShinyCyril wrote: post #108
coin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge difference between MHz and mHz

Do you really think the person you are replying to doesn't know that already? I think you can take it as given that most people here know the difference between MHz and mHz and are perfectly capable of realising it is a typo.

I wouldn't be so sure. You can go pretty far without knowing what a MHz really means.

Edit: I've it megahertz written more as mhz than MHZ.

Re: A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks

#110

Post by jcastro »

grk wrote: post #33
willidiots wrote: post #29

Earlier 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...

I have a ubiquiti AP and as part of the set up it did a scan which picked my channels based on what it scanned and it seemed to do a decent job. You can go into the controller software to initiate a scan, though it will kick everything off the network for a few minutes.
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