Wi-Fi 6 is designed to reduce congestion from devices
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. WiFi 6 only improves / reduce congestions when all devices on the network are WiFi 6 only. As soon as you have older WiFi devices, the difference becomes negligible to non-existence.
2. WiFi 6 only improves / reduce congestions when all devices on the network support WiFi 6 OFDMA, which while being officially part of WiFi 6, it was not mandatory. And if you have one that doesn't support it or does not have a firmware updated to support it, read point 1.
3. WiFi 6E will mandate all those optional features that were intentionally missed out on WiFi 6 due to all sort of technical, economical, political reasons. So in realty if you dont have all your devices as WiFi 6E, read point 1.
4. It is not clear whether 6Ghz support is mandated to be certified as WiFi 6E. On paper it seems to be the case, In practice most part of the world dont have 6Ghz spectrum ready. And I am not sure how FCC ( or similar ) clearance will work for a product that are already shipped on the market. Could we get new spectrum support via Firmware update? I am sure that is how US intends to deal with it since Intel are already shipping WiFi 6E product with label that support 6Ghz. I am just not sure if EU, UK, or other part of the world would allow or follow similar route. That has an implications on how fast WiFI 6E could launch worldwide.
5. Finally, there is only so much you can do with WiFi spec. If you have an extremely noisy environment nothing could really help. In an ultra packed City like HK, I could detect at least a dozen AP at any given time.
It is.
>> Could we get new spectrum support via Firmware update?
Yes. In US/FCC, the procedure is called "Class II permissive change".
Also, US, Korea, EU/UK, Chile, Brazil have opened up 6 GHz band. More countries will follow in coming years.
AFAIK, EU/UK, Korea only has plans to discuss and move forward on selected spectrum sometime in mid 2021. No exact date has been announced unlike the US. Which is a done deal. i.e It is not likely any part of the world other than US to get 6Ghz in 2021.
> Class II Permissive Change
Is that new? I remember Smartphone cant add new frequency spectrum support without going through FCC recertification again . Although that was many years ago.
UK/EU is in final stages of regulation. Final approval for EU countries is in March 2021; and after April, countries will implement it in their rules.
Brazil has approved their rules today! Chile and some other countries have rules in place as well.
[1] https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/samsung-galaxy-s21-u...
On a rooftop in Philadelphia, just standing in one spot and turning 360 degrees in a circle with my laptop, I was able to detect over 50 Wifi APs... (Good 'ol Netstumbler.)
This was in 2003.
A dozen in a city like HK seems quite low.
2007.
...which is the actual effect in a high interference scenario. The more interference you have, the less interpretable data you get.
I can count 67 APs right now.
And Oh Wow. I am checking out T1 now. :)
I assume that can be worked around by creating a dedicated network for WiFi 6 devices?
I'm on the 24th floor in downtown vancouver and see 45 APs and none are using the DFH bands.
All in all, I have around 70 wifi devices in my apartment. That might sound like a lot of devices (it is), but I'm a nerd and I like to tinker with lots of smart home stuff and I also have a lot of computers and gadgets.
Also, because I live in an apartment complex, there is a ton of WiFi noise from other neighbors. There are around 20 different WiFi networks within range.
I went through multiple WiFi routers (including high end $300 ones), but I was rarely able to get over 100 Mbps.
When I upgraded the Unifi UAP‑AC‑HD, it was like flipping a light switch. All of my wifi problems went away, and I was able to get 300-400 Mbps in pretty much every room.
I get that WiFi 6 is great and all, but at this point, I'm not really sure what I would be gaining by upgrading. The UAP‑AC‑HD is on the high end of the previous generation, and at least for now, it's good enough for me.
With everybody's router blasting at High Power, what can you actually do on your side with just one router to compensate?
Thx muchly!
Gives you good benchmarks when you start it but over time fails in a noisy environment.
(I used to work for an enterprise WiFi AP vendor, debugged some driver bits myself ... back when 802.11n was brand new, all the enterprise vendors were increasing their effective throughput from 80mbps, to 100mbps, to 140mbps, etc, just by debugging and optimizing their drivers.)
Anyway, Ubiquity and commercial gear in general just has better software and hardware design.
* The UAP‑AC‑HD has been around for at least 5 years and still gets updates. Wifi is full of weird bugs so its impossible to release a new chip set bug-free. Consumer gear just doesn't get the same duration of support as commercial. * These access points are designed specifically for setting up networks with multiple APs and lots of nearby networks. * These APs are just access points and offload routing and even their UI to a router and management server. A lot of consumer gear uses/wastes a lot of RAM on their fancy management interfaces. * Exterior profile stays the same. Consumer gear companies spend a lot of time & money on marketing and redesigning the 'look' of their products which diverts focus. * Better management/software: All the Unifi APs use the same management server software which consolidates features and fixes. The software also has a lot of performance related features like disabling/limiting the slowest speed enabled on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz network.
Really the last point is a really big one; consumer gear (besides new consumer mesh networks) is often sold on having great range/coverage but these can cause the whole network to be bogged down by a single device operating in 802.11g or older mode. Commercial gear expects you to use multiple APs to satisfy coverage but has the features to prevent network degradation.
I got her a wifi AP that supports DFS, and she has not had any issues..
Note that I initially got her a fancy Netgear which claimed to support DFS, but we could never get it to work. I spent a week going in circles with their support and eventually returned it.
I eventually just gave her my several year old Atheros-based TP-Link router running DD-WRT. It was able to use DFS channels, and she has a channel to herself now.
Is there? I wonder if your neighbors are having similar problems?
praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-syndrome. Specially because your unifi AP is the only (few?) product on the market that requires a second appliance to work (and don't even get me started on running the controller on a vm with outdated dependencies, out of sync open source code, and broken mongoDB implementation) to not have more than half of the advertised features disabled (e.g. vlans, guest, etc)
And before you say, that you can configure all-in-one to work in bridge mode: yes, some of them. Many of them cannot, or have weird limitations when you do.
I think OP means that you have to be running Unifi somewhere in order to get all the features from the AP. Not that it's just an access point and requires a separate router (which I agree, is a huge plus).
You don't need controller per se to get per-user VLAN assignment or WPA Enterprise. What you need is running RADIUS server somewhere, and controller conveniently provides a basic one (it has FreeRadius underneath, but provides only basic configuration options, so you won't be able to use AD for your users; also do not edit the config manually, any update will wipe your edits).
For guest portal, you need, well, guest portal somewhere. The guest portal is a part of the controller. However, if you need guest portal, I don't see any problem running controller somewhere.
For the rest, you can also run controller on your computer once, configure everything and then shutdown the controller. All the devices will work fine without it.
Edit: word
for the record, most other industry that offer APs that run on standalone will work with all features, or only advertise that feature on the package. For example, you don't see cisco(?) unleashed mode APs advertising guest portal, unless they can do it on unleashed (stand alone) mode.
Unifi is intentionally misleading.
I was responsible for a small office, and I tried a bunch of different big-brand expensive prosumer APs, and they all had troubles.
I then tried Unifi gear, which wasn’t as easy to set up, but it worked flawlessly and has done so for years. I’ve since used a few different Ubiquiti products in a few other situations and the gear has just run solidly with zero trouble.
I have used other reliable gear: the Apple Airport was great but now discontinued, every Fritzbox I have dealt with has been fine, and I currently have a Mikrotic at home which has been reliable (albeit in a very undemanding environment). I am about to add a outdoors Ubiquiti AP at home.
Maybe gear is more reliable now, but I recommend Ubiquiti to friends and it hasn’t let me down yet.
i feel you, its much better than your previous ap's but please dont buy too much into the marketing.
(single dualband-ap can at best handle >200 concurrent devices, but not active users)
I'm confused, I thought the entire premise of the comment was that they actually measured the performances of these routers instead of looking at marketing?
There is room for variation in how the products are implemented, but there's no real reason why a consumer router shouldn't be delivering the same high rates unless there was something else weird going on.
Source: worked at Ubiquiti (not on networking hardware though).
So even "the same few chips" can be manipulated to perform very differently. Stuff like retransmit, frame timing, power/gain control, and even tx/rxchain selection and MIMO configuration are often done in software and can be altered between suppliers. Additionally, vendor drivers often perform very poorly at the higher levels as well - the MAC level (associate/beacon/disassociate), the framing level, scheduling encryption/decryption, keeping track of associated clients, and so on, are also all often handled in software and can be optimized.
Plus, once we reach the router level, we also get into the often abysmal IP stack configuration on consumer-grade routers.
In short, there's a lot that can differ, both in IP-land and in chipset-land. Anyone who's "fixed" an ailing consumer router firmware by reflashing it with something else can understand the IP-land pieces, and a quick read through a driver written on the Linux SoftMAC stack (for example) can really illustrate how much goes on at the driver layer (not to mention firmware).
Which is the best router for long range and just few decices?
You might be better off to do a Station->AP wireless shot with a couple of Nanobeams if you're getting crap signal, if there is electricity where your signal is crap. If you'd like to use Ubiquiti, that is.
If the device is low powered, this may still be a problem.
A multi AP system allows the higher powered APs to talk to each other, and the lower powered devices to talk to the nearest AP.
Quite often the biggest problem is not the transmission speed / latency, but my Samsung Note 10 reconnects to the AP randomly.
If you're asking what the Unifi UAP‑AC‑HD is, it's a relatively inexpensive, prosumer, wireless access point from Ubiquiti. The main appeal is: the Unifi ecosystem (optional, but it does offer extra capabilities for your network) and PoE connectivity (ethernet cable is used for data and power). I have two Unifi AC Lites (a slightly less capable model than the HD) in my home they work quite well (and also look good).
On the professional end, Ubiquiti provides wifi hardware for commercial settings like stadiums and conference halls, so they're well versed in creating hardware/software that deals with hundreds or thousands of users/clients. They also offer long-distance communication equipment (think 'wifi' over hundreds of metres)
The routing is done elsewhere, either at the switch that the AP is plugged into, or something another hop or two upstream of that.
The typical $50-100 "router" with built in 802.11ac wifi that you might buy at best buy is indeed a router, with both wifi, some basic routing/nat ability, and a dedicated WAN interface.
no, it can't, try putting 60 actual laptops moving a moderate amount of traffic on it... ubiquiti and marketing hype have a near 1:1 venn diagram overlap.
I'm not sure if it can handle 500+ concurrent users, but we would frequently have as many as 100 people present and on the WiFi during some of the events we held, and we never had any issues. We would have people live streaming video while other people were working on their laptops. As the network admin, I regularly did speed tests and asked people how the internet was working for them and everyone was always very happy with it.
Over the course of about two years, we had over 3,000 people log into the WiFi, and never once had a single problem (other than from our main gigabit cable internet going down once or twice).
This is a HUGE contrast from my experience with consumer grade WiFi routers like Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link, which often advertise crazy speeds like 2,000 Mbps but only deliver 50 Mbps in real life. I once had a $300 D-Link router that I literally had to reboot every week or else it would become completely unusable and slow to a crawl, for example.
I thought it was 1733 Mbps on 5 ghz? Is that figure the throughput sum over all concurrent devices? If so, could a single device with multiple antennas get 1733 Mbps rather than 300-400?
Personally I've never been able to go much above 400Mbps on Wifi 5 with any device. I'm hoping Wifi 6 will change that.
The best I’ve ever seen on WiFi 5 is 850-900 MBps (4x4 MU-MIMO router, 3x3 MacBook Pro, nothing else active on the network)
I don't need technology to increase the speed at which I exhaust my data cap, I need legislation to outlaw data caps and create ISP competition.
but yea, cell confinement and directional interference optimisation is the way to go for high density applications.
true and nobody used it, hence i was talking about AC which was practically the start of 5ghz wifi
This is only true for small houses with certain construction materials, few devices, and an internet connection under, say, 50Mbps. The last year has been especially good for seeing how rarely that's true for most people, however. It's so easy to find people talking about how upgrading from a 10-year old access point or adding 1-2 more made a huge difference for things like call latency or contention between devices. Having everyone home and trying to work, attend class, or socialize online made dealing with all of that a priority.
I don't know when 802.11ac AP's became common, but the first iPhone to support it was the iPhone 6 in 2014.
More details: https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecast...
I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer unused. That was an easy fix.
Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was set to the highest quality.
Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or giving users control.
But only get a UDM pro if you don't need link agger or the ability to control multiple networks from the same controller (i wanted to throw a USG at my parents but can't join it to the UDM pro because.. reasons). it has some annoying limitations (IDS/IPS cannot keep up with my internet anymore) that if i knew about i'd have gotten a USG-pro and a cloudkey.
What the hell is a idle chromecast doing everyday? That's absurd. Is it outbound WAN traffic or just local network traffic.
Go on... A buddy of mine just dropped several G's on UniFi gear so I'm hoping he can tell me about any issues before I jump in.
The UDM can't be adopted by another controller: it needs to be the unifi controller. This really kills the upgrade path imo.
One of my best metrics for deciding what hardware to get is to look through the 1-star reviews for realistic testimonials by reasonable users. It takes a lot of sifting, but it builds an okay picture. There are almost no complaints about the ER-4 compared to the UDM. I think I'd likely roll a pfSense box before jumping into unifi.
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_...
i'd have gone with a USG-pro and cloudkey 2, but otherwise the unfi ecosystem has been good, i like the single plane view of my network and works well enough to not want to give that up
When it's working fine it seems marginally better for wifi connections than a standard cheap consumer Soho router.
But that's the problem: it very often just doesn't work correctly. Port forwarding rules will sometimes, randomly, no longer apply. DNS issues will mysteriously crop up. Some clients seem to get a cut in downstream speed but not others (with or without enabling the setting to optimize channels). UPnP, if you choose to enable it, will mysteriously work for some clients but not others. Sometimes these issues will only happen for wireless clients, sometimes for wired, and sometimes for only a given port or AP.
It often feels like a double-NAT situation, but somehow with a regular, basic, client-only topology. My co-workers have reported both these issues and ones I have never seen.
The worst part is that you will go on the forums, sometimes find users with the same issue as you (and many responses) and then rarely see an official response beyond 'yeah that's a known bug, no eta'.
I've heard nothing but praises from friends for their other hardware. It's just the UDM that seems strangely awful.
I routinely use between 1.4-1.8 TB of data each month. I have about 30 devices connected to the network at any one time, maybe 50 total.
Update:
Throttling via groups: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to...
While this isn't exactly "per device" throttling it looks like it can be used to achieve the same thing. I would most likely have a "low speed" tier that I assign to things like smart speakers, kids devices etc.
I swear I saw some screenshots or maybe videos with a per-device throttle option but maybe I'm getting my routers confused.
That sounds odd.
This whole model seems pointless and strange to me. We no longer need "tech journalists" when you can have literal tech experts creating videos that cover all this stuff in far greater depth.
I'd love to see the metrics on this article versus the best tech expert YouTubers.
My point is why should anyone listen to this guy. None of his qualifications are on display. Does he build out WiFi networks for a living? "He works for the New York Times" is not a qualification anyone should give a shit about after how they've conducted "journalism" since 2015.
I want to hear from experts, not journalists. Maybe articles wherein journalists consult with a range of experts and then convey those experts' opinions to me, but I definitely don't care what a guy with a degree in journalism who happens to love tech has to say. I want to hear from people from work with these technologies from day to day.
If you want to know about heart health, you ask a cardiologist, not a health journalist.
You're not the intended audience for these pieces so it's not weird that you don't find them very useful. Most people just aren't interested in the depth of detail that you are.
Imagine if they replaced all the articles on topics you are just peripherally interested in with wonky deep-dives. You'd probably give up after the first few because you aren't equally interested in everything, and sometimes you just want a breezy high-level overview of what's happening.
NYT is writing to audience that just wants to know whether they need a fancy new router or whether they should stick with their current one for a while longer. That's it.
I know Wendell is the real deal because Dr. Ian Cutress wouldn't have had him on AnandTech livestreams if he wasn't. I also know Wendell's the real deal by watching Level1Techs YouTube videos. I also know he's the real deal because he literally builds out networks for companies for a living (Wendell Wilson Consulting in Kentucky). I don't know shit about this NYT writer. His credentials aren't listed on the NYT website. Does he have a degree in business information systems? Electrical engineering? Computer science? I don't know. That's the whole point.
I don't want to hear heart health advice from a "health journalist", I want to hear what an actual cardiologist has to say. Same with a "tech journalist". No thanks, I'll trust the opinion of someone who builds networks for a living when it comes to my network equipment.
In the past, finding people with these qualifications was difficult, and then you had to find time to liaise with them. Now you can find some of the best people in the world and gain their insight just from reading or watching YouTube.
Though there is definitely a much larger barrier of entry when it comes to video because product is much more involved than just writing an article. I've noticed over the past few years was that pros from the few non-tech hobbies have been trying to get into video and many are clearly struggling. I often wonder how much talent is out there that we don't get to see.
You should consider that not everyone shares your experiences.
I watch a ton of tech Youtubers and I have absolutely no idea who those folks are. The world is a lot bigger than you imagine.
Maybe the world's a bigger than you imagine.
Your internet celebrities are not as famous as you imagine and thus not references the layperson would know of let alone trust.
A major newspaper, despite its defects, is much more of a known quantity.
However, the old router was a Google mesh and 1 of them definitely died slowly, so that could have been causing the delay for a while before it fully died on us.
Who's going to spend $230 on a new router for slightly faster lightbulbs?
It would be interesting to compare it to Ethernet usage of these devices.
Intel has a good write up here:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/wif...
What a time to be alive! We truly are living in the future!
The only Wifi6 device the author owns is probably an iPhone.
I do wonder how much of the issue is channel contention from my neighbors and how much is actual improvement.
* Not mentioning brands because I don't want to look like I'm shilling. Anyway I only had a couple of dozen clients to test with, and only two (before and after) routers.
Edit: I had "K" and "G" where I should have had "Mbs" -- thanks jeffbee and gratin for pointing these typos out.
However, even with the correct units I am astonished and gratified with the improvement.
Can I assume you meant 800 Mbps?
mu-mimo (802.11ax) requires client side support, since it's a way to make clients use different channels than the main channel they would have used pre-802.11ax. i'm skeptical this test actually tested mu-mimo, that the wifi 6 router was doing anything new or better.
not impossible though. it helps that some pre-wifi 6 devices (802.11ac, 2014) started getting mu-mimo/802.11ax support but only on 5GHz bands. so some not fresh devices may have support. i believe anything with 802.11ax support on both bands qualifies as wifi 6. haven't found good links to support this though! i wonder when the first client 802.11ax devices emerged!!
the Wikipedia reference is pretty solid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax
I'm just not seeing a compelling use case for many residential users to upgrade given the number of legacy devices that don't support this protocol. More importantly, the impending release of WiFi6e routers that open up 6 Ghz makes me want to wait even more... That is a huge potential bandwidth increase.
Before at our apartment a little further down the road with the same Comcast service, we were always flipping WiFi on and off on our phones and tablets to reconnect because of hanging connections. I was blaming Comcast, but it’s now clear to me that it was the router and not the connection itself. Our new router has never dropped my connection and I get a signal throughout the house. Streams start instantly and downloads are as fast as at the office. I can work from home via VPN and it’s indistinguishable from sitting at my desk on a wired connection.
For one, my Amazon smart speakers are now more responsive. In my bedroom, I ask Alexa to control a pair of internet-connected light bulbs. With the older router, whenever I said, “Alexa, turn on the lights,” there was a delay of about two seconds before the lights turned on. Now it’s less than half a second.
With work-from-home and online school, I had to move an Orbi satellite so Wi-Fi 5 was more evenly distributed. 6GHz will have even less range than 5GHz but having it and the other changes in Wi-Fi 6E could make a huge difference for offices.
Nice car analogy; how will that play out in a crowded condo building, where neighbors around you have multiple routers with umpteen "lanes"?
Its kind of silly to have wireless that is faster than the wired options. One use case is that I want to store larger files on a NAS but I don't want throughput to randomly drop such as during large image backups and restorations to a cloud server.
In the real world, 1G ethernet isn't going to hold back a WiFi 6 router. The only exception might be a multi-radio WiFi 6 AP that is within several feet of WiFi 6 clients on both radios.
feels kinda weird that wifi marketing speek is taken at face value two decades into the bullshitting with theoretical maximum agregates.
[1] tested with multiple client/router devices, in close to ideal circumstances (few feet line of sight between devices, no other devices active on the network)
The advertised speed of your router usually doesn't mean much, as it usually implies the maximum concurrent speed available, rather than how much one device can use.