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Posted by homebrewer 2 days ago

Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)(www.wiisfi.com)
249 points | 62 commentspage 2
Neywiny 13 hours ago|
Good to see the subjective adjectives in the RF world are here too. Except they're not the same ordering, as EH is before UH for WiFi but after in RF
ece 3 hours ago||
Informative page, but the most common speeds with 2x2 MIMO probably were (in Mbps):

Far (QPSK) 4(20Mhz)/5(80Mhz)/6(160Mhz)/7(320Mhz): 28.8/130/288.23/576.47

Near (64QAM) 4(20Mhz)/5(80Mhz)/6(160Mhz)/7(320Mhz): 144.4/650/1,441.17/2,882.35

Not bad for throughput increases, though most of the increases come from more spectrum, and the reliability comes from more MIMO antennas/streams. I've had WiFi 4/5 2x2 routers and something tells me I won't see much more than what's listed above for 7. Buying a 4x4 does get you a generation of throughput in advance pretty much, if you need it.

WillPostForFood 11 hours ago||
I was on top of G, started to lose track after N.
Dylan16807 9 hours ago||
I hate how they did this big rebrand to simplify things and then immediately ruined it with 6e and 7.

Okay, we have wifi 6, now we're adding 6GHz. How do you know if you have 6GHz? You check if it says 6...e. And is wifi 7 an upgrade to that? Lol who knows, depends on the individual device specs. Check if it says tri-band, that will tell you it supports 6GHz... OR that it can support two simultaneous networks on one of the other frequencies.

ibatindev 12 hours ago||
Once again, IEEE 802.11ah -Wi-Fi HaLow-, completely forgotten. This one would be perfect for all the lights/sensors.
walrus01 11 hours ago||
Latest-gen zigbee stuff and zwave 800 seems to have already thoroughly occupied that niche for a great deal of home and office automation equipment.
Avamander 11 hours ago||
There aren't any usable chipsets with usable drivers for 802.11ah unfortunately.
blindriver 10 hours ago|
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the more APs you have, the worst off your life gets. That's because the way clients connect to a particular AP is done client-side and you have no control over it or visibility. So, no matter how you fiddle with it, your client may connect to the AP that is 40 feet away and on another floor rather than the one that is 10 feet away with a perfect line of sight. And you won't know why. This is the problem I had with my house and had to decrease the number of APs to get over better reliability and performance.
jauntywundrkind 10 hours ago||
There's band steering. You absolutely do have control, if you opt to do so.

On openwrt, DAWN or usteer can both help your APs to get sounding maps from clients and to tell them which AP to join. Looking at the sounding maps is very fun data to see: highly tecommend! The settings aren't the world's greatest but they are pretty good starts! https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dawn

Multiple APs are really nice because you can turn down the AP power, ideally, as you add more stations. Unfortunately I don't think you can tell a client to be quieter though; someone's laptop can be at 200mW tearing the hell out of the spectrum when everyone else is nicely conversing at 10-20mW.

toast0 7 hours ago||
My experience with DAWN wasn't great. Some of my clients don't like the extensions you need, so I had to go back to no roaming extensions and just hoping clients make good decisions and tuning ap power levels to help.

Might try it again though, I'd love for it to work. And I was also dealing with some baseline wifi instability that I think firmware updates has resolved.

mc32 9 hours ago||
From what I hear, Macs are stickier and Windows clients more promiscuous. So a Mac will stick with an AP further out when you have one near, on the other hand a Windows client can go back and forth between APs -which can sometimes be a problem too.