Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
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Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#2Awesome reference! Looks like someone took notes over a nice span of time and compiled them into a tech guide for WiFi.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#3Awesome reference! Looks like someone took notes over a nice span of time and compiled them into a tech guide for WiFi.
Yeah, this is really cool. WiFi hardware is one of those things that I find even a lot of more "techy" people like you'll find on HN view as a black box. It's awesome when someone aggregates a bunch of information and then shares it so that we can all develop a better understanding.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#4I can't say that AFC excites me:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf
Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use.
It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#5I can't say that AFC excites me: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use. It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
Surley the FCC could just publish a data file that clients download and lookup their frequencies.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#6Wi-Fi 6 looks promising for people with really fast Internet connections that are not capped. For capped internet connections it's almost irrelevant. In my experience, it just reaches the cap quicker and ends up in charges or having to carefully manage things to not reach the cap before the end of the month. I downgraded my connection from 350mbps to 200mbps as I was breaching the 1tb cap too quickly (Comcast). I can't imagine having a 1gbps connection with a 1tb cap. It might last a week or two before getting hit with massive overages. It's been nice not having this problem the last few months, but I don't expect to upgrade my router anytime soon. There's simply no service here that would warrant it as Comcast has a monopoly.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#7I can't say that AFC excites me: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use. It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
Surley the FCC could just publish a data file that clients download and lookup their frequencies.
They tried the honor system, it was called DFS. According to Wikipedia: "Prior to the introduction of Wi-Fi, one of the biggest applications of 5GHz band was the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. The decision to use 5 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi was finalized in World Radiocommunication Conference in 2003; however, meteorological community was not involved in the process. The subsequent lax implementation and misconfiguration of DFS had caused significant disruption in weather radar operations in a number of countries around the world. In Hungary, the weather radar system was declared non-operational for more than a month. Due to the severity of interference, South African weather services ended up abandoning C band operation, switching their radar network to S band."
TWDR is a high-resolution doppler radar that measures winds on airport approach paths to detect wind shear and microbursts. It's a life-critical system. It would be nice to use the bandwidth for WiFi, and the FCC made every opportunity to allow it, but WiFi vendors didn't play nice.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surley the FCC could just publish a data file that clients download and lookup their frequencies.
They tried the honor system, it was called DFS. According to Wikipedia: "Prior to the introduction of Wi-Fi, one of the biggest applications of 5GHz band was the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. The decision to use 5 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi was finalized in World Radiocommunication Conference in 2003; however, meteorological community was not involved in the process. The subsequent lax implementation and misconfigurati…
I don't disagree with you but I am not sure the FCC cares that much about weather sats. They happily auctioned off 24GHz spectrum.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/5g-networks-will...
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#9I can't say that AFC excites me: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use. It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
To me it sounded like that was only for APs that would be used outdoors? The "for indoor use only" APs for home users I don't think would need to have AFC.
Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions
#10I can't say that AFC excites me: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use. It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
Perhaps to create more accurate databases for WiFi positioning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
Or potentially to help make the spectrum allocation in an area more efficient? Maybe that information could be used to help position those point-to-point microwave networks mentioned in the article.