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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Deeply uninspiring.

5Ghz gets blocked by the thinnest brick walls. We all live in castles in Europe so 5Ghz practically only works line-of-sight. Makes it pretty expensive and cable-intensive to deploy [well] in a large building.

It's also disheartening when a new standard comes out and device manufacturers flock to replace all their old single-radio, single-antenna devices with shiny new... single-radio, single-antenna devices. Wave2/MU-MIMO should be a base requirement.

Is there any progress on improving longer band wifi? Ie sub-2.4GHz, or 2.4GHz coordination between masts so devices can actually roam well?

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Single antenna devices make sense for a lot of small/low power devices. Not to say manufacturers don't just cheap out sometimes though :).

802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency in the short term. I have a 5 year bet going with another guy in the office that he won't be able to get a client and an AP with it by 2022 (i.e. he thought manufacturers would jump on it, I thought it was going to fizzle and 6/24/60 GHz would have the hardware action). So far it's looking like I'm going to win that lunch. There is also some talk about refreshing the 3.7 GHz space but I'm not sure that'll happen and if it did it'd probably be a ways out before real world impact (if ever).

As far as improving 2.4 all of the roaming standards improvements work in it and Wi-Fi 6 works in it. It's really no different than 5 GHz/6 GHz in that regard it just has a bunch of shitty legacy clients to compete with which is amplified by the fact it penetrates farther.

> 802.11ah (2017) would be your most likely bet for low frequency

900MHz is pretty nice for the 1-10mi range (this is what I do for my day job), but it never really made sense to me as part of the WiFi umbrella for that reason. Its also got a bit of a chicken/egg problem - without the correct antennas and chipsets in devices, its useless in an AP and vice-versa. 2/5Ghz have been around since 802.11a/b days, so continuing to iterate on those bands makes more sense.

Curious what you work on in the 900 MHz space :). I come from enterprise Healthcare so it's mostly about connecting very new consumer type devices and very old pieces of shit.

I think the 802.11 group wanted to offer low to mid speed Ethernet/IP + traditional wireless security managed the same as the rest of the devices which makes some sense I just didn't (and still don't) think the types of devices using 900 MHz care about fitting in that mold enough to adopt.

Pretty much everything 900 MHz has the chicken and egg scenario on hardware/protocol right now so I didn't/don't count that in my reasoning. There's not really a single protocol that has a large number of products deployed in a large number of verticals where you can safely say "we'll just attach to the existing 900 MHz radio at the customer site". Some protocols at some verticals yes but not enough that choice is locked in due to chicken/egg blocking changes.

Overall though while 802.11 is going to continue iterating 2.4/5 they are heavily interested in offering Wi-Fi in basically any unrestricted frequency. Moving extremely high bandwidth things to 60 GHz, moving low bandwidth things to 900 MHz, moving new clients to 6 GHz. They've come to realize they can come up with the coolest protocol in the world but there is only so much you can do with the 60 MHz of space in 2.4 when devices with wireless N chips are still being sold. There are even talks with hardware vendors looking at interest in the 50 MHz of space in the 3.7 range for things that should be 2.4 but 2.4 is too crowded.

Edit: I just realized out of all of that babbling I never said why I didn't think 900 MHz Wi-FI would take off. They made some protocol changes to make it reasonable to use at low bandwidth long range but not enough. That combined with the desire for long range Wi-Fi itself already being niche almost guaranteed hardware manufacturers weren't going to be very interested. I think there was a company in France that actually started sampling some AH hardware but it's only partial spec and very low bandwidth.

I'm a radio technician, not a hardware or software engineer. Most of our customers are things like water/wastewater districts, utility companies and assorted state and federal government projects (people who can afford $1000 radios and need them to be rock solid for 10+ years). Its not all super exciting work, but we do get the chance to work on some pretty interesting stuff on occasion, and designing radio networks can be pretty rewarding.

Agree with you on the lack of protocol compatibility - I think its seen as an competitive moat of sorts, but it can make it difficult to get into existing systems due to the need to essentially rip and replace existing systems. Unfortunately, vendors are also terrible at being compatible with their own legacy products due to the use of fixed function chipsets, although that is changing with the move to SDR.

My email is in my profile if you want to reach out.

I worked briefly in the radio group at Trimble Nav Ltd. around the DotCom times.

900 MHz and VHF CB bands didn’t have great channel bandwidth but sure worked well at a distance. 2.4 GHz was marginal but useful just like as it’s used for WiFi. 5+ GHz is/was basically useless... and 802.11/A proved that out. GPS and other satnavs use the L-band 1.2 - 1.6 GHz which is a very sweet spot for many applications. Cell phones use/used 450, 800 MHz through L-bands, which makes sense.

5G is being deployed in bands (24 - 71 GHz) that are implicitly trying to sell as much equipment making the deployment as expensive as possible and/or going to waste an enormous amount of energy trying to overcompensate for their horrible spectrum utilization. I predict 5G will die, not because of unfounded conspiracy theories, but because carriers will realize it’s too expensive and users will balk at $400 USD mobile bills to fund this pointless adventure. I suspect they’ll be forced to redo or abandon the emperor’s new clothes when they’re discovered to not be a substitute for a winter coat.

Yes that's how it works in professional installations you want a lot of AP's that don't overlap and using 5Ghz makes this simpler than using 2.4Ghz

5Ghz Also has lot more non overlapping channels.

Just use Powerline for your DS

What's the "that" in "that's how it works"? 5GHz APs in every room?

I'm not saying that 5GHz doesn't have benefits, just that many of them are hard to exploit when you have real walls.

They do indeed have 5GHz APs in almost every room in most commercial installations in the US.

Using higher GHz is all about selling more hardware.

Let’s use 500 GHz so you have to have one in ever corner of every room to work. And don’t breathe or take a shower because that will block the signal.

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