Live data from Hacker News

Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

duckware.com

81–90 of 91 posts

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#81

Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out there?

> Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off?

Yes, they still phone home. I don't believe there's an option in the UI to turn it off -- I just blocked the AP's access to the Internet on my firewall.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#82
> 650 → 390: MAC efficiency > there are 'housekeeping' packets that MUST be sent at the SLOWEST possible modulation

True, but it's actually the slowest supported/enabled modulation, which can be increased. In a crowded 2.4GHz environment (1Mbps min. modulation), raising it to 12Mbps or more can cut 50+% fluff (SSID, ARP, data broadcasts..) down to > 2166 → 1083: Client MIMO > You must use the minimum MIMO common to both devices

MU-MIMO should enable the router to split its numerous MIMO channels to multiple devices with less MIMO channels. I have no idea whether it actually works.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#83
post #53
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.

[deleted]

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#84
post #4

I 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.

So much confusion in the comments. AFC will be operated by private 3rd party companies. FCC does not have the data unless they ask to private companies in the case of interference issues. Location information is needed to determine channel availability which is highly dependent on the location.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#85
post #11
post #4

I 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.

I agree that it's very unclear why that is required. The source IP (v4 or v6) address for the record update, along with the timestamp of update, is already sufficiently identifying, and would be obtained even offhand in a query process to check a given area for interference issues. The requirement to use GPS also practically mandates that these routers HAVE a GPS receiver inside. My biggest worries relate to the cost…

FCC rules do not require usage of GPS. It could be any technology, details TBD. Higher accuracy returns more available spectrum.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#86
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Do you think there will be non-pro? I know the current USG runs very hot indeed...

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#87
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]. --- [0]: https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers

I know. Unfortunately that page doesn't actually recommend any routers as that section is no longer maintained.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#88

The article is really great, but I hoped it would touch more on extending the wireless range. Are there any good comparable articles out there?

He talks a bit about the channel width/range relationship in appendix H: https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html#channelwid... There's some more in appendix I

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#90

Buy a router that supports flashing openwrt. It is very transparent to debug and supports lots of features in addition to adblock, monitoring, etc at the router level.

I also like ddwrt. But I didn’t see it mentioned in the long article, which is mostly about the wireless channel. Can you recommend a recent router (or brand) that supports ddwrt?
Post reply on HN