Hacker News Reader

Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone can use 5Ghz - if you have one of those 50s/60s/70s houses that were build with plaster/chicken wire (rather than lath&plaster or drywall) then at 5GHz you're basically living in a bunch of faraday cages

(at a company I used to work at we once had to abandon a 5GHz product when we discovered that an appreciable numbers of customers would take it home and not be able to make it work reliably - it would have been a support nightmare)

View on HN

People living in Faraday cages rarely complain about radio pollution

Or they do but you just never see the complaint

Not all IoT products support 5ghz - some of mine say they don't (Nest Protect) and some say they do but don't work (Nest thermostat, Netatmo). The only way I could get a stable IoT network in my apartment was to set up a 2.5ghz guest network and put all of them on it.

See also all Espressif ESP devices. Still sadly on 2.4GHz only.

Yeah, really sad. Even the new ESP-C6 that will come with WiFi 6 and BLE 5 only operates on 2.4GHz. :(

I live in a relatively modern house (<15 years old) and the 5Ghz signal doesn't make it up the stairs. 5Ghz is 'same room' wifi, and I have Problems with it. It's the same with mobile 5G data, it needs so much more signal towers / transmitters to be effective.

I've hit 'forget' on my home 5Ghz network because it's just unstable upstairs, and my phone isn't smart enough to pick the network with the stronger signal for some reason.

>50s/60s/70s houses that were build with plaster/chicken wire

the new townhouses being built near by in MV are exactly this.

depends on whether it's used for internal walls, chicken wire as part of plaster on external walls alone would help keep the neighbor's interference down

Older chicken wire for internal walls (ie pre-drywall) is the problem at 5GHz (and I'm sure to a lesser extent at 2.4GHz)

Hard to beat steel or aluminum siding to protect yourself from the neighbors.

I would love it if those down-voting this comment would explain why. Is this comment untrue? How? Does not metal siding end up grounded, however weakly, by rain downspouts anchored to the side of the house then contacting the ground. Does not a relatively contiguous grounded metal sheet around the exterior of a building attenuate 2.4 and 5Ghz?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com