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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

#271

Post by Zambyte »

jibal wrote: post #229
Zambyte wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I did put a decent amount of time into that. I couldn't get any model to one shot a truly homoiconic C, it took some coaxing, even from SOTA models. Maybe I caught a length based flag or something too, since it was fairly long. Oh well, I tried.

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

#272

Post by avhception »

lucb1e wrote: post #232
avhception wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really doesn't help that a part of our attention-economy has hopped on the "what (the government/big tech/car company) doesn't want you to know!11" bandwagon and constantly feeds into this notion that there is this great ominous evil cabal working against you.

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

#273

Post by roryirvine »

lucb1e wrote: post #219

Am I understanding that graph about "distributed-tone resource units" correctly that WiFi is finally going the way of Bluetooth frequency hopping? Ever since I found out that this is possible, it seemed like the obvious better choice because it divides the spectrum across everyone equally with no configuration, whereas on WiFi you (or your router) always had to choose one channel to work on and hope for the best. It…

FHSS was actually used by the original (2 Mbps) 802.11 radio modems in the mid 90s. It wasn't until 802.11b/a came along a few years later that the world moved to DSSS (along with other innovations such as, er, proper intercompatibility between different vendors' kit!).

AIUI, DSSS was necessary to make use of the full channel bandwidth, but FHSS is more resistant to interference so might be good for the warehouse use case mentioned in another top level comment.

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

#274

Post by ValdikSS »

fithisux wrote: post #257
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....

WiFi should be like Bluetooth. One stack with generic drivers.

Yeah, somehow nobody invented HCI for Wi-Fi chips. USB has it, Bluetooth has it, but not Wi-Fi.

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

#275

Post by numpad0 »

tecleandor wrote: post #173
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the major US carriers, since they shut down 3G, VoLTE is the only way calls work. Which meant that a non-VoLTE-but-4G-capable device can no longer make 911 calls. I was using a Samsung S5 running LineageOS for a while with Google voice for calls, but the no 911 thing is one of the main reasons I finally moved to a different phone. The S5 supports VoLTE but only with stock firmware.

Auch, wasn't familiar with that, haven't been in the US for a while. At least around here (EU) is not enabled by default on phones you buy off the shelf. I'm not sure about phones bought from the carrier.

LTE was originally designed as a data-only upgrade to 3G. It became the full on successor to 3G, but launched with voice spec left as TBD. It eventually got defined, but ended up being a cursed nonstandard SIP-VoIP software thing, and so a lot of carriers and networks implement whitelists for VoLTE phones to manage anxieties around it.

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

#276

Post by matt-p »

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…

Two very different ideas at play, I agree. Only easy to argue in hindsight that it should of more tightly specified everything to aid better roaming.

Wi-Fi: general-purpose, massively interoperable LAN radio → let the client make decisions.

DECT: purpose-built cordless mobility system → tightly specify the radio, handset/base-station behaviour and handover mechanisms.

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

#277

Post by martinald »

toast0 wrote: post #215
agumonkey wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anybody tried fiber network / hubs at home ?

It works, but kind of inconvenient for things that aren't desktops... or you need a switch with sfp to act as a media converter everywhere you have devices. And I have cat5 in my walls that was installed 25 years ago (way before it was my house)... That gets me to 10g everywhere I tried, so no reason to pull anything else.

The switches are very cheap though. I put fibre in my house (simply because the cable is far far thinner and easier to retrofit under carpets etc).

I got a few 2.5Gbit switches which have 4 2.5Gbit ethernet ports and 2 10Gbit SPF+, they cost around $30 off AliExpress.

I don't actually have any devices with 10gigE but it's not a huge amount more for 10gig ones (and no doubt will get a lot cheaper with the new lower power 10gige chips).

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

#278

Post by avhception »

mschuster91 wrote: post #118
avhception wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no RF expert, and we're not a big company. I wear many hats, from DBA to local WiFi expert. And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail.

> And while there are certainly limits to what can be achieved without dedicated experts, I want to stress how DECT in the very same scenario just delivers unwavering reliable operation without me ever giving a hoot about RF interference or 802.11k or r or any other implementation detail. DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.

In a way, that was my point. There is a market gap for a simple and robust 20 to 50 mbit, IP capable tech.

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

#279

Post by mort96 »

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…

Well you can run any bandwidth at any frequency, I get that the WiFi specs define set bands which include both a center frequency and a bandwidth but it's a bit weird then to focus on the frequency when the bandwidth is what matters isn't it? I assume there are products which can operate on frequencies around 6GHz but which don't support the extreme wide band channels?

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

#280

Post by bana-io »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #96
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…

I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.

> What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware

I think this is spot on. On a Banana Pi Pro 4E, the vendor supplied image which carries custom patches supports MLD/MLO, yet when I try the latest upstream OpenWRT it doesn't work. I've not had too much time to investigate the reason(s) why.

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