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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

#191

Post by georgeburdell »

abtinf wrote: post #158

Dumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)? Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible. Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers? This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G sta…

My semi educated guess is because different kinds of people sit on the two different standards boards, so you get siloed specs with the cross sharing of some good ideas. You could ask a similar question about HDMI vs thunderbolt.

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

#192

Post by MayeulC »

I read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree?

Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see how Wi-Fi 8 handles that. Via the wired backbone?

From my understanding, the ideal solution for roaming would be that all APs identify as the same BSSID, and decide between them who answers a client, while sharing state. Scaling such a system may be hard in crowded environments.

Anyway, I updated to a Wi-Fi 7 router, and it runs warm enough.

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

#193

Post by cookiengineer »

wildzzz wrote: post #132
cookiengineer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LoRa is quite nice for this in the lower frequency bands, and the bandwidth should suffice for this sorta thing. And the tech is super cheap to build and maintain, both hardware and software is open source.

LoRa is dialup speeds at best. Fine if the clients are basically wireless terminals but useless if you need to send photos or look at webpages.

Maybe read grandparent's comment again? They were talking about using DECT as an alternative and about string encoded EAN codes, not about watching YouTube in 4k.

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

#194

Post by sroussey »

MayeulC wrote: post #192

I read trough the planned improvements a while ago, and came to the conclusion that most would be mostly useful in ultra crowded environments such as stadiums, etc, so not very useful for a consumer. Would you agree? Roaming improvements are nice, though in practice most firmwares already implement something similar AFAIK? OpenWrt & Ubiquity Unifi devices do, though there is no cross vendor protocol. Curious to see h…

Ultra crowded environments would include any apartment building in the city.

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

#195

Post by fc417fc802 »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #170
abtinf wrote: post #158

Dumb question: why not drop/deprecate the WiFi standards and adopt 5G/6G across the board (operating on different spectrum depending on configuration)? Naively, I would assume that would save money on the BOM and make devices more flexible. Again, naively, why not build and sell consumer-grade 5G access points/routers? This new WiFi standard is far enough out (2028) that it seems reasonable to fold it into the 6G sta…

How would I connect to my own network? Wifi and cellular solve different problems.

That's purely a software problem that stems from typical usecase. There's no technical reason preventing phone users from selecting the network to connect to. It's just that currently a SIM serves that purpose.

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

#197

Post by bigfatkitten »

mschuster91 wrote: post #46
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…

> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better. Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a hig…

This has been a solved problem in the land mobile radio world for a number of decades.

You have a bunch base stations forming a logical channel with a single uplink frequency, and either a single downlink frequency on which every base station is precisely synchronised in frequency and time (simulcast), or multiple downlink frequencies (a multicast system).

A comparator selects, or votes, the highest quality signal from the base receivers based on either lowest noise or lowest BER, and then repeats that through all of the base transmitters simultaneously.

At the same time, in a multicast system, the mobile scans for and selects the base transmitter with either the highest RSSI or lowest BER.

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

#198

Post by mort96 »

martinald wrote: post #153
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…

What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support). You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast. If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be a…

Why would 6GHz make such a difference compared to 5GHz?

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

#199

Post by crote »

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…

> We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point

Those two are the same thing, though!

Literally nobody is hitting those insane theoretical transmission speeds. Heck, most access points don't even have the uplink for it. So why bother? Easy: because it provides you margin. A 10Gbps link degrading to 100Mbps due to poor signal quality is a lot better than a 1Gbps link degrading to 10Mbps when you are trying to achieve that 20Mbps connection. The expectation is that your signal will degrade, so it is all about starting with a good-enough spec that you'll still have a reasonably-usable connection left at the end.

It's a similar story for multi-client connectivity. A 10Gbps link might sound overkill for a 500Mbps residential internet connection, until you've got legacy and poor-signal-quality clients taking of 95% of the airtime for 5Mbps of data. Being able to still get enough data through that remaining 5% airtime to saturate your internet connection is incredibly useful.

And before you praise DECT too much: its 2020 revision allows for a 1.2 Gbit/s transfer rate, with all the fancy stuff like MIMO and beamforming you might know from Wifi. Quite excessive for a few simple phone calls, wouldn't you think?

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

#200

Post by burnte »

tecleandor wrote: post #169
BatteryMountain wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consume…

An additional radio would raise the price of your phone for at least another 200 or 300 dollars. Try to enable VoLTE if available for your operator. That makes the phone use the LTE connection for voice and don't drop the Internet connection while you talk.

The chips cost under $100 even for top tier modems from Qualcomm.
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