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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

That is plenty fast, for practical use the only parameters worth discussing when it comes to wifi is connection stability and range.

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That's like, your opinion man. With 802.11ac on 5GHz, on a mac laptop, I consistently get about 800-1100Mbps. That is gigabit speed. And it's everywhere in the house and yard because I have the appropriate number of APs configured with the right signal power and antenna gain. I have no need for cables anymore on my laptops in any situation where I need speed, and there are many such situations. All my files at home are on a network share. No problem, wifi is fast.

I feel people have only used badly configured crappy consumer APs on crappy laptops (without MIMO) and don't understand that wifi doesn't have to be slow and unreliable.

I feel that you are sugar coating it a tad bit much...

"A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks": https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-e...

72 MB, which isn't the real world speed, as stated, isn't a lot. Thats only 9 actual megabytes a second. Now download any sizable source code project, or, upload many small changes. Or, even just a movie from itunes or something.

Good routers can go over 100Mbps, easily, and I would never think that 'less' speed is 'okay' in a world where increased speeds are just a requirement of technology over time, and usage, of said technology.

When I can, I use a cable (and an adapter so I can use Ethernet with my MBP). I've achieved up to 100Mbps on Wi-Fi at home but the problem has always been variable latency. Any kind of interfere from the dozens of other Wi-Fi networks in the area seems to have an effect, so I always plug in if I can.

> I've achieved up to 100Mbps on Wi-Fi at home

Note that I said 800-1100Mbps.

> but the problem has always been variable latency

Symptom of crappy consumer equipment.

> Any kind of interfere from the dozens of other Wi-Fi networks in the area seems to have an effect

Well yeah, that is why I use 5GHz which doesn't penetrate walls very well so I don't get any interference.

I am running virtual machines with iSCSI storage over 802.11an... It's fast enough even for that. (Well, there's latency, but good enough for my development boxes.)

i'm interested in your setup. are you using macos or another bsd? what kind of ap's do you use? what does your mesh look like? special antennas? thank you.

My setup is actually very simple. Actually I have several setups in multiple locations. I use Mikrotik[1] APs managed by Mikrotik controller (so centralized management for all APs). Look for the ones that support dual-concurrent tripple-chain 802.11ac like hAP ac or wAP ac. I use 5GHz everywhere although I do have 2.4GHz also. There is no interference on the 5GHz band as it doesn't penetrate walls (YMMV). I use a lot of APs, usually one AP per room if I want 5GHz coverage in that room.

The power used is very low. More power just means more interference. The bottleneck is the transmit power on the client, which is very low. More power on the AP just make everything louder. I've set up power level based on this document: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203068. Unfortunately only Apple documents this stuff, but works pretty well for everything AFAICT.

I don't have any special antennas. If you need to cover a large space with a single AP you might need one, but the best philosophy on 5GHz is to have many smaller APs.

All my APs are connected through ethernet (actually everything is PoE powered). I don't use any mesh stuff (although Mikrotik can be used in that configuration, I don't recommend it). All my APs are simple bridges, I don't use the Mikrotik tunnel stuff.

I don't use 802.11r because Mikrotik can't do it yet. I am not sure if anyone except Cisco can do it. I wish I had 802.11r, this is my Achilles' heel.

Everything works very well, but you get what you pay for. Mikrotik is really cheap compared to the real stuff out there, which means much less polish, more bugs, and no real documentation. If I were to do it again I might chose Unifi[2] instead. Don't get me wrong, this all works very well, but the level of polish is what you'd expect out of a GitHub project compared to some real commercial product. For example while you can set antenna gain in standalone AP mode, you can't do it in managed AP mode. Minor stuff like that.

I also run a RADIUS server and I create user accounts for all my wireless users (WPA2 Enterprise). At different locations users have the same credentials.

I use all kinds of clients (Linux/BSD/macOS), but the ones where I'm most interested in speed are the Macbooks.

[1] https://routerboard.com [2] https://unifi-hd.ubnt.com

perfect. thank you. upvoted.

I can saturate my 100Mb/s internet connection on Wifi so you'd be missing out on 2/3 of the speed there. It's useful for backups to be able to do even more than that as the local network is even faster. But you can probably get away with just ~30Mbps for most uses.

Yeah, I have FreeBSD on my laptop with iwm(4) also. 11a speeds are enough for the usual web surfing and stuff. When I need the speed (system upgrades mostly) I just plug in the cable. I have link aggregation set up with wifi and ethernet so the handover is seamless.

I'm very happy with my decision to not provide wired network all over my house after I moved. Good Wifi is really nice in that it decouples speed from location.

Even with 802.11ad (that I don't have) there's a huge difference between having to plug in when you reach a "fast area" and not having to.

I'm very happy with my decision to replace every multi-lane highway around my house with a congested single lane dirt road with half the speed limit.

Your analogy seems far fetched to me.

Going wired->wifi is like going desktop->laptop. I'll admit to being slow to go to both laptop and wifi years ago, but at least to me they're clearly superior.

Could you share your configuration for link aggregation? I did it for a while but if I remember correctly, while plugging the cable into my laptop worked as expected I think that in order to get connected to wifi again after unplugging the cable, I had to manually

    service restart netif lagg0

And sometimes also

    service restart dhclient lagg0

But it might also be that I was to impatient and that it would have reconnected to wifi by itself if I gave it more time. How long does yours take to get back on wifi?

That used to be my solution in the b/g times. These days it has gotten to the point that unless I'm doing something extremely heavy like transfer TBs between machines the added advantage of not having to bother with a fixed location for the laptop and extra wiring compensates for the slower speed. And that's with simple wifi setups with a single good AP. I'm sure the line is even further pushed out if you've designed a multiple AP setup with good coverage and low interference.

I have what was supposed to be a very good ap/router.

Still I think it is awful.

I hear it is because the spectrum is jammed but I almost cannot believe it: I have a big garden and so have my neighbours.

What do you guys do to get fast, stable wireless?

I bought a Ubiquiti UAP-Pro access point. It is maginally faster than the fastest consumer access point / router, but substantially cheaper and more reliable.

The ubquiti has a spectrum survey mode that will tell you what sort of interference it sees on each channel. It takes 10's of minutes to run, and seems pretty thorough.

The real winning feature is that it is designed to be ceiling mounted, so I could place it in the center of my house, a few feet away from the nearest wall. There is also a mesh mode, where you buy more than one. If your house is big, and interference isn't the problem, that might help. I haven't tried it. They have newer / different models that do a better job of this than the UAP-Pro.

Later, I replaced my router with a pc engines apu2 running openbsd. Ubiquiti has a highly recommended cheap router (edgerouter lite) that works out of the box, if you aren't looking for a hobby project. People have gotten openbsd to run on it too.

Use 5ghz instead of 2.4? I have zero neighbors on 5ghz, my network is the only one my phone sees :D

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