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Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

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Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#141

Post by smashed »

ksec wrote: post #67

In typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7. Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to…

Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors.

There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.

On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#142

Post by cogman10 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #120

> " Wi-Fi 8 is expected to be finalized in 2028 " So we should see mainstream consumer device adaption by 2030 (not much point in having a wi-fi access point that implements pre-finalized Wi-Fi 8 if none of the client devices do) and prices become reasonable maybe by 2032? The tech is cool but it's hard to care about something that far in the future.

Wifi is a weird one, consumer devices arrive very quickly (often times before the standard is finalized). You can expect devices as early as next year.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#143

Post by devilbunny »

rr808 wrote: post #102
bjackman wrote: post #41

I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!) There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me. Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was…

Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.

As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.

People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#144

Post by _joel »

bordercontrol wrote: post #122
bjackman wrote: post #41

I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!) There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me. Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was…

Try OpenWRT if you want a good OS for routers. No need to change hardware.

I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#145

Post by cogman10 »

smashed wrote: post #141
ksec wrote: post #67

In typical WiFi fashion, for all the WIFi 8 features to working perfectly and debugged we have to wait for WiFi 9 [1]. This was true with WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFI 7. Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to…

Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors. There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu. On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.

Client side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#146

Post by jameshart »

afavour wrote: post #48
abhinavk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ensure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.

Easier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.

Sure, but then this becomes a bit of an irrelevant comment on a discussion of how WiFi 8 will focus on increasing reliability.

Your old devices won’t magically get more reliable because WiFi 8 comes out. You will benefit from this after it comes out by migrating to WiFi 8.

Meanwhile, you can benefit from existing reliability enhancements by upgrading to WiFi 6.

If your response to that is ‘I can’t use WiFi 6’ then presumably the putative benefits of WiFi 8 are even more remote.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#147

Post by agumonkey »

blfr wrote: post #33

It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible. Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.

anybody tried fiber network / hubs at home ?

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#148

Post by smashed »

Razengan wrote: post #95

Are we not yet at a point where we could have a truly global network that uses multiple technologies and mediums to keep a user always connected? Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)

It's possible using overlay networks but other than that there has been no progress on that front. The routing table updates would overwhelm the system. Ipv6 does nothing to address device roaming. There is multipath TCP but I have never encountered anything using it.

Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#149

Post by smashed »

cogman10 wrote: post #145
smashed wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till you see the number of actual chip vendors. There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu. On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.

Client side don't you just add Realtek and Intel? I don't think almost anyone else does wifi chips.

Yup. I might have forgotten Marvell in the list but yes, that is pretty much it.

I am also not sure of their exact market shares but I would suspect one or two are probably steering the majority of the "standards". I'd suspect Broadcom and Qualcomm to have the most influence.

Re: Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

#150

Post by BatteryMountain »

avhception wrote: post #23

We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam. I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some…

Here's another one for you: today I found out that my dual-sim android phone has a single radio that is shared between the two sims. So when you are on a call, the 4G/5G doesn't work on the other sim, likewise, sometimes the the voice sim is unavailable while the other sim engaged with 4G/5G things... which is just stupid. Can't they just add two radios/chips (like many wifi AP's....)? So the whole setup on a consumer phone is actually quite unreliable because of reusing a single radio. I thought it was my buggy code, but nope, just the radio being shared and the mobile operator seeing the sim as offline. Crazy.
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