91–100 of 109 posts
Anyone know of a similarly excellent resource for understanding wired networking? CAT specifications, how to pick high quality switches/routers etc.?
Beej's guide will help you with understanding networking overall, I don't think it would help you choosing switches/routers specifically.
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the more APs you have, the worst off your life gets. That's because the way clients connect to a particular AP is done client-side and you have no control over it or visibility. So, no matter how you fiddle with it, your client may connect to the AP that is 40 feet away and on another floor rather than the one that is 10 feet away with a perfect line of sight. And you won't kno…
There's band steering. You absolutely do have control, if you opt to do so. On openwrt, DAWN or usteer can both help your APs to get sounding maps from clients and to tell them which AP to join. Looking at the sounding maps is very fun data to see: highly tecommend! The settings aren't the world's greatest but they are pretty good starts! https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide…
An impressive attempt to summarise Wi-Fi which is a very deep topic. However I think the executive summary already missed the most critical thing about Wi-Fi: only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions. It's a shared medium and it's not even half duplex, unlike the dedicated full duplex you would typically get with an ethernet…
> only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions. Not true with newer standards: > Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is a multi-user wireless transmission technology that divides a single Wi-Fi or cellular channel into smaller subcarriers called Resource Units (RUs), allowing multiple devices to transmit data si…
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What benefit does 4x4 give you? I haven't seen a single client station with more than 1x1 or 2x2. Do you have so many clients that transmit concurrently?
From the article (which is long): > But as a very significant bonus, the 'extra' antennas if there is a mismatch in MIMO levels between the client and router do not go unused, but are used for 'diversity' and 'beamforming', which extends range, and improves speed at range. You don't get higher max speed, but you do get better performance in general. I hadn't expected it to be drastic - I had thought it would be more…
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Due to boring circumstances outside of my control, I have to use WiFi for the most part, so I've got quite some experience with making it run optimally (or rather, as optimally as I managed to, not as optimally as I would like it to). And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not…
Have you thought about using powerline devices? I’ve successfully used them in place where running my own cable wasn’t a possibility, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it. https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-a-powerline...
An impressive attempt to summarise Wi-Fi which is a very deep topic. However I think the executive summary already missed the most critical thing about Wi-Fi: only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions. It's a shared medium and it's not even half duplex, unlike the dedicated full duplex you would typically get with an ethernet…
> only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions. That’s not correct. You and your neighbor can use the same channel at the same time. On your network, the transmissions of the other network appear will appear as noise. As long as the other devices are far enough away, however, your devices will still be able to make out their own…
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how many spatial streams are you using (2x2, 3x3, etc) and are you using an 80 or 160 MHz channel? If you have a set of full capability 802.11be clients you'll see the best performance with a 3x3 AP and 160 MHz channels.
160hz channel & 2 spatial streams. It's unfortunately consumer grade tp-links so while they have actually been pretty good...you don't get a lot of knobs to tweak. Still need to try MLO at some stage and they're currently acting as a bridge so (i.e. wifi backhaul) so think it might get better once I've laid fiber backhaul between them
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There's band steering. You absolutely do have control, if you opt to do so. On openwrt, DAWN or usteer can both help your APs to get sounding maps from clients and to tell them which AP to join. Looking at the sounding maps is very fun data to see: highly tecommend! The settings aren't the world's greatest but they are pretty good starts! https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide…
Band steering doesn't work great. Neither does minimum RSSI. It's completely client-dependent and it's a headache. The best solution is to always minimize the number of APs you have with as little overlap as possible because of how unpredictable client behavior is. Like I said I have a very bad problem with line of sight APs are ignored for further away APs, and no amount of fiddling is helping.
Agreed that signals like RSSI are device dependent. And open source software like DAWN is not the best at adjusting to this automatically. But in principle, most devices will give your AP a sounding map on request, and most clients will obey instruction to move to a different AP. Even really bad devices have generally worked ok for me at this.
The counter advice if use the minimum number of APs leaves pretty large zones of bad reception, and still already accepts the problem of roaming for many people. It's my hope that open source et al get better, get more competitive with what is clearly possible, especially given that we seem so well positioned to have control that could make good decisions here. To give up, when we have so much rich data & options, does not tempt me.
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160hz channel & 2 spatial streams. It's unfortunately consumer grade tp-links so while they have actually been pretty good...you don't get a lot of knobs to tweak. Still need to try MLO at some stage and they're currently acting as a bridge so (i.e. wifi backhaul) so think it might get better once I've laid fiber backhaul between them
Would recommend one of the ubiquiti 3x3 802.11be APs for better performance. The U7 Pro or similar. The unifi controller software is a monolithic package you can install on a bare bones debian system. Wifi backhaul definitely also a problem as using any kind of wifi-to-wifi extender stuff will cut your throughput a lot, keep in mind that all 802.11.whatever is a half duplex medium.
The ones I have seem to be 2x2...with backhaul on wifi the 1.3 I'm seeing is probably just 1 then.
Aware of ubiquiti popularity in homelab circles. It's not for me tbh.
I've been through a couple of iterations of wifi gear - including a mainland china no-english Xiaomi...that was an adventure.
At this stage I don't think I'm tearing it out and buying new. "slow" gigabit internet on mobile device is an annoyance to my perfectionist side but I'll survive. And with a bit of luck adding fiber backhaul gets me above internet speed.