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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

#221

Post by mook »

bjackman wrote: post #123
bordercontrol wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless. Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life. Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.

Interesting, I don't really have downtime with my OpenWRT setup. Probably because I don't really touch the setup once it's there, other than occasionally doing the firmware updates.

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

#222

Post by UltraSane »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #207
UltraSane wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice is normally done using VoLTE now.

Not for everyone in many places. Many carriers still only allow VoLTE for a limited alow-list of phone models. Any customers of those with less popular models still gets dropped to 3G calls.

In the US all 2G and 3G has been shut down and VoLTE is the only way voice calls are done on 4G and Voice over New Radio on 5G

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

#223

Post by lucb1e »

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.

On layer 2? I guess that would require a virtual network. For layer 3 and above, everything has an IP address so use that?

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

#224

Post by dragontamer »

jychang wrote: post #216
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…

The real reason why 5G and Wifi are separate is because one is licensed spectrum, and the other is unlicensed spectrum. I'm not talking about legal differences- laws can always be changed- but rather how bandwidth is allocated. The biggest benefits of cellular comes from: Verizon owns/controls channel ↓ gNB decides: "You transmit here." "You transmit here." "You get 20 MHz." "You get these time slots." Wifi needs to…

And furthermore, the unlicensed spectrum problem is complex. "Anyone transmitting" includes Bluetooth devices, and Zigbee, and many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec.

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

#225

Post by lucb1e »

devilbunny wrote: post #143
rr808 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

for anyone else wondering, that new acronym means coax

> MoCA (stands for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) is a technology that uses the existing coaxial cables

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

#226

Post by lucb1e »

bjackman wrote: post #124
rr808 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.

Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow. You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.

And how stably. Ours works amazing if you ignore that it duplicates packets 2-3 times for no reason (netting a few hundred megabits, many times the speed that VDSL is able to deliver here), but then it will die for a few minutes roughly once or twice a day, unpredictably. Thankfully we only need it for the bedroom and everything else reaches from a centrally hung 'router'. When it's down again, we briefly switch to mobile data or the poor signal we get from downstairs or we, y'know, get out of bed or turn off the phone and go sleep, depending on the time of day :-)

It's a strange pattern and I'd be interested to solve the mystery. Not many powerline debugging tools available though, not to say none

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

#227

Post by dragontamer »

mort96 wrote: post #220
martinald wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it supports (on WiFi 7) 320MHz channels. So there is double the bandwidth. 5GHz only supports 160MHz channels.

Wouldn't it make more sense then to ask about high bandwidth channel support rather than frequency support? It's not the frequency that's important here.

Higher frequencies support higher bandwidths though.

I don't think the 2.4GHz band even has 160MHz free, for example. Literally impossible to support because 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz is all you get (100MHz or so).

5GHz isn't much larger than 160MHz. Like it can fit but some number of channels is better for everyone.

6GHz band is like 5.9GHz to 7GHz or something stupidly wide. Because of the new wider band, you can effectively have larger channels with fewer problems.

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

#228

Post by lucb1e »

nntwozz wrote: post #208

What about latency and jitter? I still get more ping in Counter-Strike on Wi-Fi than on Ethernet. …even in pristine conditions, excluding perfect lab conditions.

That's the point of the article, that WiFi 8's point is lower latency and more reliability?

> Instead, the organization is focusing on improving the reliability [...]. The stated goals of Wi-Fi 8 include a 25% increase in throughput at different signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) levels, reduce latency by 25% for the 95th percentile scenarios with latency, and decrease MAC protocol data unit loss (MPDU) by 25%.

Jitter not explicitly mentioned but high jitter is low reliability so it's an implicit goal. It'll simply be more stable when there are 25% fewer retransmissions needed anyway (of course that's just a goal under some assumed scenario, but say that it's 5% in your setup or whatever)

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

#229

Post by jibal »

Zambyte wrote: post #152
tetrisgm wrote: post #68

Less latency is excellent news. This is the main reason why gamers still prefer Ethernet.

Consistent latency is generally more important for gaming than low latency. If I had to pick between a baseline of 8ms but with enough spikes to > 200ms to bring the average to 30ms, or a consistent 90ms with no spikes or dips, I would certainly choose the latter.

Hey, that was a great comment about homoiconicity and {code} in C. It's nuts that it got killed, apparently because you said you used an LLM. HN (among others) is in the grip of hysteria on the issue.

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

#230

Post by lucb1e »

cogman10 wrote: post #142
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.

I don't change phones every 3 years though, and my current AP/router is 8 years old. The only reason I got a new one is that I didn't have one with a VDSL modem built in, which we needed in our new flat. If the first devices ship in 2027 then widespread adoption is probably more like 2033 for people that routinely upgrade for fun and 2038 (or 2³¹ unix time) for those who aren't into tech
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