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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedi:

>Though the nominal data rate is just 37% higher than IEEE 802.11ac, the new amendment is expected to achieve a 4× increase to user throughput due to more efficient spectrum utilization.

>IEEE 802.11ax is due to be publicly released sometime in 2019.[2] Devices were presented at CES 2018 that showed a top speed of 11 Gbit/s.[3]

Sounds good but with limited practical value while broadband speeds stay so limited in home. For businesses this would make a big difference (for example editing HD video over WiFi).

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I suspect for most WiFi users, the overwhelming need is more reliable and fast establishment of connection. I waste vastly more time trying to deal with flaky connections, reconnection after wake from sleep, and network priority issues than I do waiting in the rare cases the WiFi is limiting thd data transfer rate (rather than the wired connection).

The timescales involved in making Wifi connections should be ms or less, not human-noticeable (order 10 sec).

I've found Macs to be vastly better at this than my Linux/windows laptops, for some reason, to the point where I almost never wait for them to connect. Might just be some aggressive workarounds they've implemented, though.

I've seen Connman connect in under a second IIRC, on am embedded system. Proper PCs usually use wpa_supplicant, NetworkManager and some DHCP client, none of which are very fast.

Connman doesn't seem to handle all possible situations like NetworkManager, though, and its developers only seem to do (or approve patches for) whatever Intel management tells them to do.

IME, Macs connect faster when the signal is strong. But on a weaker link, it takes just as long as my Windows and Linux machines.

True, this is mostly at home. In cafes and hotels it can definitely take just as long.

It's been posted here multiple times: https://cafbit.com/post/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do/

THIS.

I've got good LTE signal in my neighborhood, and managed to convince AT&T's retention team to grant me 50GB/mo (whether or not I choose to tether my laptop, none of this "unlimited with tiny cap for hotspot usage" nonsense) ... I digress. I tend to turn my phone's wifi OFF, even when nominally in range of a trusted AP, to ensure a reliable connection. I'll take a steady 4-5 MBps over fragile and on-again/off-again 60MB anytime.

I would love to have a multipath vpn on my phone - prefer wifi on connection, but automatically fall back to lte when responses take too long to arrive.

I recently updated my phone (MIUI/Android) and it does fall back to LTE when it can't reach the Internet through Wifi.

Mine does that as well, but it has to re-establish all connections whenever this occurs. If a webpage is in the middle of loading, it restarts, video stream stutters, it's not even close to seamless.

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