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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

#281

Post by PaulKeeble »

bana-io wrote: post #280
PaulKeeble wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its not really implemented yet. The various router vendors are still working on fully implementing the chipset and there is trickle of patches still coming from Filogic development on the chipset making there way into the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT.

There is also the issue few client devices implement at this point as well and certainly nothing that is mobile in nature on the sales pitch of "it costs power".

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

#282

Post by Dylan16807 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #265
Dylan16807 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wi-Fi should be able to do it. Dense 5G uses similar bands after all and they'll go through a couple walls.

The issue is that Wifi offers no reliability guarantees and does not scale when number of nodes grows beyond a relatively low number. So when number of nodes is large and you want to perform critical tasks (e.g. control robots, machinery, etc remotely) Wifi does not work.

There's no good reason it can't handle even more nodes, especially since you can have over 50 separate channels. Central control of the frequencies helps somewhat with density but not that much. We can and should fix those flaws.

I don't think I trust 5G for sub-second critical tasks either...

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

#283

Post by dzhiurgis »

BlackRabbit1 wrote: post #59
euduhdhbene wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs). Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah

Difficult within the EU due to ISM limits. Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.

Kinda explains why starlink router doesn’t integrate it. Would be perfect for cameras around small farms.

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

#284

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

Or you can only use 2 sim cards at a time even tho both can connect over wifi calling.

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

#285

Post by lucb1e »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #250
lucb1e wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wher…

It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.

Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file).

If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems radical

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

#286

Post by dragontamer »

mort96 wrote: post #279
dragontamer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Focus???

These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.

The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.

The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.

Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading

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

#287

Post by bjackman »

lucb1e wrote: post #226
bjackman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Yeah I get occasional dropouts in the setup I installed at my mum's place too.

And yeah it's just a bit of a weird black box, and also fundamentally it's exploiting a nontrivial system to do something that had little relationships to its design goals. I don't know anything about electrical systems but I assume there is all kinds of random shit that can disrupt Powerline links while still being fully within the design envelope of the power system.

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

#288

Post by bjackman »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #184
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…

> interference motivation I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?

Correct, it was a typo that I only spotted after I lost the ability to edit.

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

#289

Post by thomastjeffery »

lucb1e wrote: post #285
thomastjeffery wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ostensibly a configurable variable (bss_max_count). I bet your phone's system has done so. I'm talking about my laptop and NixOS, and I was definitely getting limited to 200.

Huh, why did I not see that variable in the grep results... ah, that line didn't match because I negative matched 0-9 but not 'nothing' (end of line in the config file). If it's just a configuration variable though, why bother migrating away instead of configuring it? Or even opening a ticket upstream that the 200 APs limit is causing issues if you would want to go that far. Ditching the software altogether seems rad…

Unfortunately, NixOS makes it impossible to configure while NetworkManager is installed. This is because bss_max_count is a runtime var, so you have to use wpa_cli instead of a config, which requires a socket in a dir that NixOS conventionally keeps empty. I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix.

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

#290

Post by entrope »

mmooss wrote: post #237
entrope wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cookin…

Usually, the exposure limit is based on an active phone next to an ear. RF field strength falls off with the square of distance, so a phone on each side of your head is most dangerous to the respective ear and bits of your brain close to your skull; each phone is considered acceptably safe to the middle of your brain and the opposite ear.
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