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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Looks like penetration and range decrease with each new WiFi generation.

Not really. There's only the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz split.

And the problem with "long range" is that everyone who doesn't live in a detached suburban house now has massive noise on the 2.4 GHz band from their 20 neighbors so that everyone gets terrible speeds. The weaker penetration/range of 5 GHz solves that by right-sizing everyone's network.

edit: researching the updates in 802.11ax, it looks like Wi-Fi 6 will bring the improvements from 802.11ac to 2.4 GHz as well, so it will actually improve performance for people who need range as well. It also has guard interval improvements for outdoor environments.

The larger problem with the 2.4 GHz ISM band is the lack of non-overlapping channels along with only one station being able to transmit at a time per channel (in pre 802.11ax). There are only three non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum, where 5 GHz spectrum has about 21 (although some require active radar avoidance).

> The larger problem with the 2.4 GHz ISM band is ... only one station being able to transmit at a time per channel

Is there any Wifi tech for which that isn't true, sans beam-shaping and other tech that effectively puts stations on different physical networks? How do 5 GHz technologies handle multiple simultaneous broadcasts on the same channel? How will 802.11ax do it? Signal processing?

My impression, based on only a little research, is that it's impossible with any tech. Even cell providers need CDMA, TDMA, etc. Maybe that understanding is out of date?

Maybe this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...

> Spatial frequency reuse

> Coloring enables devices to differentiate transmissions in their own network from transmissions in neighboring networks.

> Adaptive Power and Sensitivity Thresholds allows dynamically adjusting transmit power and signal detection threshold to increase spatial reuse.

> Without spatial reuse capabilities devices refuse transmitting concurrently to transmissions ongoing in other, neighboring networks. With coloring, a wireless transmission is marked at its very beginning helping surrounding devices to decide if a simultaneous use of the wireless medium is permissible or not. A station is allowed to consider the wireless medium as idle and start a new transmission even if the detected signal level from a neighboring network exceeds legacy signal detection threshold, provided that the transmit power for the new transmission is appropriately decreased.

That makes good sense to me, but it's still basically keeping stations on separate networks - it's managing the networks' transmission power carefully so they can run in closer proximity.

Still I don't know a solution to concurrent broadcasts on the same network, as the GGP comment seemed to imply.

Those along with downlink multi-user MIMO from 802.11ac allowed an AP to send to multiple clients at one time using spatial division multiplexing.

It's not a bad thing. Base stations are cheap and it's better than having everyone's network clog everyone else's.

As someone who lives within reach of 30+ networks, this is a step up.

I'd rather people used multi-base wifi mesh networks to increase their coverage instead of one long range transmitter.

Single long range base stations might be great if you have a house and distance from your neighbors, but it's terrible for people with denser living arrangements.

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