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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

#231

Post by lucb1e »

Reason077 wrote: post #4

Oh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!

Is 6 even ubiquitous for you? I bought my first WiFi 6E device this year, specifically because I want it to be future-proof and work well outside of the house (like on a conference), but all other phones, laptops, desktops, and access points are on 802.11ac. It's going to take a while to reap those benefits at home, and that's assuming we ever get FTTH and want to pay for a 1gbps uplink in the first place (on LAN with WiFi 5 I currently get several hundred mbps, almost regardless of distance until it drops off the network completely, and our uplink is 40mbps, the fastest we can get on VDSL here)

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

#232

Post by lucb1e »

avhception wrote: post #13
LoganDark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Wi-Fi 7 AP and this confused some members of my family that didn't even know it went higher than 6. I thought it was pretty funny

My family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".

> They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably.

I was helping our neighbor with WiFi issues. They asked at some point if a "WLAN-Kabel" would solve the issue :)

The sad part is that they realized the mistake a minute later, and since I didn't say anything but just answered the question (I understood what they meant, no point correcting the technicality), they assumed that I was just laughing at them behind their back / internally. Turns out once again that tech is as much social as it is technical, and I really struggle with people who think everyone else is hiding something (they vote accordingly, let's say)

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

#233

Post by creatonez »

lo0dot0 wrote: post #115
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #105

I'd just like something that can manage 250m and a few large oak trees in between.

A drone carrying a fiber cable across the tree line. Battle tested.

Does the network automatically detect when birds have eaten the fiber cable and send out drones to fight off the birds and lay a new cable?

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

#234

Post by lucb1e »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #186

I recently had to change from wpa_supplicant to iwd to get around the 200 access point search limit. It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..

My phone uses wpa_supplicant v2.10-devel-11 (from late 2021 I think) and I see in NeoStumbler that the record is at 227 access points (from this vantage point: https://osm.org/go/0GAnN~St0?m)

The query for anyone else who has that app and is curious:

    > .he on
    > select reportId, count(id) as c from WifiAccessPointEntity group by reportId order by c desc limit 10;
    reportId|c
    123|227
    > select * from PositionEntity where reportId = 123; -- find where this was
Are you sure it's a wpa_supplicant limitation? It sounds like a very arbitrary number, not even 2^8=256 or something, so like it should be trivial to find and chance that constant limit in the source code, if this limit exists

Edit: a quick grep through the source code (`grep -rE '[^0-9]200[^0-9]'`) doesn't reveal anything that looks very promising at first glance. I'm curious what you're running into now though

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

#235

Post by Dylan16807 »

eigen wrote: post #213
ponector wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get an additional phone with a screen, 5g radio, ram and everything for $150. An additional radio should not raise the price for another 300.

I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.

A non-linear cost for a small fraction of the phone. A slightly larger PCB with two more layers is about twice the price for the PCB, more antennas is a couple dollars, a one lane PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC. And if it shrinks your battery 10% you save money on that part.

I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.

Edit: fixed the pcb wording

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

#236

Post by martinald »

dragontamer wrote: post #227
mort96 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effectivel…

Yes exactly. Also with MLO (bonding eg 5GHz and 6GHz) together on WiFi 7 you could get 480MHz of spectrum, which would allow many gigabits quite "easily".

Only problem is firmware support etc is somewhere between non existent and very poor in general for MLO, which is a shame as it's definitely a great feature in theory.

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

#237

Post by mmooss »

entrope wrote: post #164
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…

I can't speak to your specific setup, but if the two SIMs use different carriers then they will often need to use different frequencies. A phone could in theory use twice as many radios, but the emitted power limits would be the same, so you'd have reduced range or throughout for each (plus additional size, weight and power for the second radio). Access points have different SWaP budgets than phones. When I travel, I…

> the emitted power limits would be the same

Dumb question: If the limit is L, why do regulators care if I have one device with two radios each outputting L or if I have two devices each with one radio outputting L. Either way, total output is 2L.

What is the objective?

* To limit range? Then regulators shouldn't care about 2 radios in one device outputting L, as long as one radio doesn't output 2L.

* To avoid cooking nearby electronics and people? How do they account for the unpredictable, theoretically limitless number of devices in an area? What about someone working in a cell phone store or passengers on a Tokyo train at rush hour? Do regulators just set L low enough that any realstic number of devices together is safe?

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

#238

Post by ValdikSS »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #116

Stop chasing everything. Stop and give me true open source repos for the Wi-Fi chips and drivers so the already well-established community can care for my router for the next 20 years. Force this into the spec. https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....

There's only 1 (one) all-open chip I know of: ath9k ar9271 802.11n 2.4 GHz from 2011.

Atheros (now Qualcomm) released its firmware source: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

I have many, many these dongles :)

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

#239

Post by rr808 »

beAbU wrote: post #106
rr808 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.

Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit. A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.

For me it is good but I'm in an apartment with 300mbps internet so not really pushing it.

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

#240

Post by bobmcnamara »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #150
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 consume…

Radio desense is a thing, though you'd probably still come out ahead.
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