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Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

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Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#71

Post by Steltek »

stefan_ wrote: post #53
jrockway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And yet here we are, lives still.. living? The FCC needs to do this much more, radio spectrum is a massively valuable limited resource and you either demonstrate technological excellence or you get out of the way of those who can. We can't have GHz worth of spectrum untouched because people don't want to upgrade their 1960s hardware and/or technology.

And behind the scenes, engineers were working quickly to identify and fix problems on what was previously reserved spectrum for a life safety system. It's also a quintessential public good; saying that it should be taken for private use is absurd and extremely short sighted.

Further, TDWR was developed in the 90's and has undergone upgrades since then. Don't dismiss it as some Apollo-era PDP-11 sitting in a closet somewhere just because you don't know what it is.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#72

Post by kevinastone »

teekert wrote: post #70
cyrialize wrote: post #66

If you're interested in learning some networking, I recommend Ubiquiti. If you want to save money, I recommend used Ubiquiti. My rationale for buying used is that basically normal consumers typically do not buy Ubiquiti enterprise products - so anyone who does is someone who has experience with technology and will take care of it well. I haven't had a chance to test this out yet, but I hope it works! I picked up an E…

I did the same (but I got a new EdgeRouter X), works nice. I do like that Unify integration though, so I might go for a USG after all (more expensive, can do less, but looks so nice in the controller!) I do worry about that need to do data collection that Ubiquiti has been showing recently. My network is deeply personal....

The USG is woefully under-powered. I'd wait for the UXG if you can...

https://community.ui.com/questions/Introducing-the-UniFi-Nex...

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#73

Post by Yizahi »

zxcvgm wrote: post #23

This is a really helpful guide to understand wireless networking. For in-depth reviews, I like to check out SmallNetBuilder [0] as they feature thorough tests and sometimes teardown of the wireless routers. Most "reviews" these days are pretty much just regurgitating the marketing spiel from manufacturers, which really doesn't help much. Recently, I also stumbled upon a Chinese site [1] which does similar teardowns,…

I highly recommend SNB portal, for all WiFi related stuff - current industry state and news (relevant to buying APs/routers), in-depth reviews, comparison reviews. I only wish they would ease off on Captcha usage, I sometimes need to click for minutes on bicycles and street lights over and over again.

I used it to upgrade from my overheating and low range Linksys to a strange rare but efficient Synology router and it was a very good buy in the end.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#74

Post by kalleboo »

ksec wrote: post #29

Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it. >Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner (early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware -- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E. We could technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their rout…

I was actually idly curious about why the latest iPhones got WiFi 6 but the MacBook Pro 16" didn't, from your (fantastic) comment I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset out and I guess whoever does the iPhone chipset (iFixit identifies it as "Apple/USI") doesn't have a 3x3 version?

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#75

Post by devwastaken »

In my experience all in one routers with WiFi at a consumer level will fail after a year, or have other problems. Typically it only fails on the wifi side, so I turn them into ethernet only and hook up an ubiquiti AP. They're configured through a phone app and a QR code, haven't had to worry about it ever again.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#76

Post by lotsofpulp »

devwastaken wrote: post #75

In my experience all in one routers with WiFi at a consumer level will fail after a year, or have other problems. Typically it only fails on the wifi side, so I turn them into ethernet only and hook up an ubiquiti AP. They're configured through a phone app and a QR code, haven't had to worry about it ever again.

I have not had to touch my AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule since first plugging them in, ~6 years ago. Maybe there was a software update once or twice.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#77

Post by ksec »

kalleboo wrote: post #74
ksec wrote: post #29

Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it. >Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner (early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware -- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E. We could technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their rout…

I was actually idly curious about why the latest iPhones got WiFi 6 but the MacBook Pro 16" didn't, from your (fantastic) comment I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset out and I guess whoever does the iPhone chipset (iFixit identifies it as "Apple/USI") doesn't have a 3x3 version?

> iPhone chipset.....

That was Broadcom as well.

>I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset

They did, as per iPhone. But Broadcom didn't have a WiFi 6 3x3 implementation then, and I guess Apple doesn't want to compromise to WiFi 6 2x2 ( 80Mhz ) implementation on 16" Macbook which would actually be slower ( On paper ) than its previous 3x3 WiFi 5 / 802.11ac.

All these is on the assumption Apple wants to continue with 3x3 WiFi. They could wait for WiFi 6E and call it a day. A 160Mhz on WiFi 6E gives you 2400Mbps on paper.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#78

Post by jonathanlydall »

This article's comprehensiveness is amazing and worth a read.

While I love WiFi for my mobile devices or occasionally when my laptop isn't at my desk, I can't recommend to people enough to prefer actual network cables for their devices which are in "fixed" locations, for example your normal work area for your laptop, or where your TV is with consoles or something like an AppleTV.

Once you move at least mostly to wires, you'll find that most (if not all) your network problems just go away.

If you're worried about aesthetics, my laptop has power, networking, screens and everything working through a single USB-C port, so my desk is quite pristine. Around TVs and their connected devices it's pretty much always super easy to hide wires.

Wireless is a shared medium with everyone in range who is also on wireless, it just can't scale like individual wires (very inexpensively) at 1Gb/s speed EACH. So put everything you practically can on wires, that way your airwaves remain largely open as they're only used by things like mobile phones or light browsing on laptops.

I understand that if you're renting then it may not be possible to do wires. My hope is that in the same way that most houses started being built to accommodate cable tv / telephone points, in the future they'll be built to accomodate network points by at least TVs.

Offices trying to be all wireless are almost certainly never going to be able to provide high speeds to everyone for the foreseeable future. Employees at their desks should use wired connections and wireless should only be used for mobile phones or people not at their desk for some reason (like being in a meeting).

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#80

Post by jlgaddis »

pedrocr wrote: post #44

Very good information to get great performance. It would be nice if it explained how much to go for for a given WAN speed and LAN requirements. The links I have are 100Mb/s symmetrical so spending 250€ on the recommended router would probably not help compared to the 70€ Archer C7/AC1750 I've installed in a couple of places already. It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to get based…

> It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support.

FWIW, OpenWRT has a "recommended routers" page [0].

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[0]: https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers

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