(www.xda-developers.com)
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
When I travel, I try to use an eSIM that uses a network my home provider partners with. This seems to improve the chance that voice and data over LTE or 5G NR work simultaneously.
Dual SIM Dual Standby (two or more SIMs, one radio) is cheaper, less battery, less space, and usually good enough. It's literally a few dollars, not 200-300.
DSDA in 5G is rare, and I can't reliably find a phone that can do it in EU or US (I can find higher end chipsets that can do it, but phone vendors don't seem to follow through with it). Usually it's 4G+5G or 4G+4G.
Support for VoWiFi is a bit weird. Some operators don't allow it outside of your region (for example, the EU), some others will allow it and even bill you as if it were a local call made from your country.
Also, although it's in theory made only for working through WiFi, seems like if you have a second SIM or eSIM with a data plan (for example, a travel SIM local for the country you're on vacations) and some combination of phone and/or operators, it can use the second SIM as the data provider for WiFi Calling.
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.
no. Too expensive.
So yes, it's "too expensive" because it's higher than $0, but it's not "too expensive" as in it would cost a lot.
It's under 5G standard but for non-cellular connectivity that means you can use it without base-station like Wi-Fi direct. It's geared toward IoT but its data rates are from 1 Mbps up to 1.3 Gbps depending on the operating frequency and the type of modulation being used [2].
[1] DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G (30 comnents):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905644
[2] Technology: DECT NR+ [pdf]:
https://www.vdma.eu/documents/d/group-34568/technology_dect-...
Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.
Really there should be a world wide 900-1000MHz ISM band.
If you need consistent MB range traffic for cameras I wouldn’t advise it but for low (5kbs) traffic it can be attractive. A few thousand bits can encode quite a bit of information. Don’t be fooled by the “kbs”.
I was so excited when I discovered it a few months back after struggling for years to set up reliable wifi for outdoor robotics, only to realize we can't have nice things. The struggle continues.
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?
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
It will still try to roam, it will still cause issues.
A lot of the roaming logic is in the clients. Newer android and iOS versions have gotten better but there are tons of old and new devices with poor roaming logic and capabilities.
That said, in theory at the level you're asking for it'd be acceptable to run the system as a single frequency network by using the AP locations as remote radio heads and just not telling the handhelds that there are multiple APs in listening range.
I'd probably aim for using the wifi support mechanisms to dynamically fake nearby APs as "mimo antennas" from the POV of the handheld, but not doing so would also suffice, just transmitting from the one AP that's nearest to the specific handheld/client would already basically do the trick and could probably run with hacked firmware on commodity AP hardware basically turning the entire setup into a soft-MAC with that very software juggling the army of radios.
The setup btw. would not have the clients aware they're dealing with more than one radio on the other side.
You could be forced to ask/ping the client from multiple APs one after another if you've not heard from it in a while and it moved, but otherwise, you just rely on hearing it from multiple APs and tracking it so you don't have to make APs across the facility speak up and risk interrupting other clients that try to get a word in.
Oh, and ban by building ordinance usage of any other Wi-Fi on the channel your doing this on, or that's gonna eventually get you problems with congestion.
The AVM Fritz product line of consumer modem/routers all include a DECT modem for registering extra handsets for voice but they have their own proprietary handsets that support TCP/IP over DECT for things like audio streaming or sending extra media like a caller photo.
Your old devices won’t magically get more reliable because WiFi 8 comes out. You will benefit from this after it comes out by migrating to WiFi 8.
Meanwhile, you can benefit from existing reliability enhancements by upgrading to WiFi 6.
If your response to that is ‘I can’t use WiFi 6’ then presumably the putative benefits of WiFi 8 are even more remote.
I feel like a lot of the problems people try to solve with wifi and dozens of access points could be better solved by a 450MHz-ish transceiver up on the roof with a downfire turnstile, and 9600bps radio modems in everything.
I'm going to embroider some red hats, going to put on them "MAKE SLOTTED ALOHA GREAT AGAIN".
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 higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
RF is a weird world.
Sometimes we forget that for the communication to be reliable, signal must flow both ways. Clients will happily connect to far away APs, but won't be reliably heard back.
Solution is to use more APs and lower their radio tx power. A lot of customers push back on the approach because they have only one gaming router monstrosity in their country home and it works perfectly, not understanding that their downtown office with 150 devices have nothing in common.
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.
DECT is a much, MUCH more old, simple and robust protocol. Modern signal processing tech can get you insanely far there.
We have industrial SIMs with our own APN and get a IPSec tunnel to the Telco where we have a dedicated network to see our devices.
But they do use commercial wi-fi devices, albeit with a focus on configuring security correctly.
I do kind of want to play with this.
For example, Wifi 7 doesn't make actually useful MLO mandatory. So most wifi router manufacturers - even Ubiquiti - don't implement it! What's the point of adding something to the standard if it's optional.
Ideally, the standards body should make expensive stuff mandatory- then prices will come down as soon as everyone is building it, due to economics of scale.
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 standard (early 2030s per the article)?
It would be nice if all laptops were suddenly equally capable to WiFi and cellular connections.
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 all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
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 able to bond another band with it.
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.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?
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.
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.
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.
Rock solid and reliable networking =)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
The more clients you have on the same channel, the less bandwidth they all get (effectively). Using wires where you can will improve wireless for everyone else, including your neighbors.
Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS).
Works great!
Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
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.
So my only choice was to purchase a third-party router/WiFi. I did not want to make the network more complex, but if my ISP router couldn't provide WiFi, it would need to happen.
So now I have a working WiFi 7 router, and my ISP's device is permanently in Bridge Mode. I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of little cable staples, and I nailed up an Ethernet cable from the router to the bedroom. There are 3 desk positions in here that can be reached by Ethernet cable.
Unfortunately, if I am out on the balcony, I normally need to use WiFi, because I can't fully shut the door when a cable is snaking out of it. Also, I picked up a little USB-C-Ethernet dongle for my phone, if worse comes to worst. The bandwidth is great; besides, my downstream is only 100Mbps, so who needs overpowered LAN bandwidth?
I still get more ping in Counter-Strike on Wi-Fi than on Ethernet.
…even in pristine conditions, excluding perfect lab conditions.
Wired switches have dedicated physical cables linking to each client and can buffer packets per-client, buffers that can be flushed at optimal times.
If you could guarantee that (1) you were the only client on the access point and (2) there was zero interference from any nearby access points, then I’d expect the latency/jitter to be comparable. But that’s basically impossible unless you’re inside a faraday cage with direct line of sight.
People who are experts in wireless, when they have the choice, will always pick wired communications where feasible, if latency and jitter matter.
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.
Unfortunately IMO WiFi router brand selection is getting increasingly small. I have no issue or problem with using UniFI myself. But it is not something I could recommend to family and friends as they don't know how to set it up. Eero is not available to much of the world outside US. I just wish Apple revive its AirPort Express business.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/advancing-connectivity-with-wi-fi...
There is about 3.. Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Together they control I believe 100% of wifi chips used in routers and APs. Often it's sold as a package / system on chip so it's also the main cpu.
On the client side there is a little bit more competition but not much.
I am also not sure of their exact market shares but I would suspect one or two are probably steering the majority of the "standards". I'd suspect Broadcom and Qualcomm to have the most influence.
But I agree, Broadcom and Qualcomm are the heavy hitters.
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.
One of the core features (MLO) is currently mostly scam. APs/Clients negotiate the protocol (and it shows up in the status) but doesn't it to either increase robustness or bandwidth (by combining/switching between two frequency bands).
Also the driver quality is a huge mess.
(We tested it using the latest generation Cisco Enterprise gear but also with Prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti or TP-Link)
But honestly: we need WiFi-8. It finally brings infrastructure-controlled roaming which is super important for any VoIP service.
Aren't devices with Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200/BE202 are supporting that?
As well as latest Samsung phones?
But they are the best cards around if you want to play with Wifi-7 on Linux. But always go for the latest wireless-next kernel + firmware blobs. Also they are not compatible with AMD mainboards (go for Qualcomm then).
802.11 r/k/v exists
We basically miss all data (received stations/signal levels from both sides, Bit Rate errors, etc.) for making roaming decisions and then to softly connect them to an AP you want them to be on.
Enterprise WiFi is currently mostly "This is a list of APs you maybe can connect to.. have fun.. if you can connect we pre-seeded the AP with some crypto data, so it doesn't take ages to negotiate. Here's your (more or less friendly) disassoc. Fuck off bye."
It does somehow work for stationary setups - but as soon as you have mobile traffic (like walking around or machines moving) with multiple APs the quality hits the shitter brutally.
Currently this gap is being filled by industrial 5G with dedicated frequencies. It's crazy expensive.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
Your router does not respond. Turn it off and on.
This comes close: https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/
Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
That's how I read it at least.
It would be nice to have fewer than 200 access points in range..
So it is getting faster (in both senses) and doing so in scenarios that actually matter.
Modern wifi is fast enough that using cables is often not required.
I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-)
B is defacto for storage…
Like seamlessly switching between Wi-Fi, nG, Bluetooth, satellite, pigeons, cans-and-wire.. and still having a stable global address? (that you could change later of course)
Most improvements on that front has been happening on the application layer, where the app attempts to retain functionality even though the underlying network conditions are changing, to various degrees of success (mostly not that great).
Shouldn't that be our end goal with all this tech?
No. Just no. That speed is only possible when standing at a Nevada test range, in late spring, on a ladder, holding the router above your head, with a black cat sitting on your left shoulder. Any minor change from those parameters and your speeds will be 30% the theoretical maximum ... maybe 50% if you can only find a grey cat.
The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.
My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
So having the 5-6 AP is not the problem, then shouting at max power is the problem. Especially “gaming” routers tend to do this.