Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s).
Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable
I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had.
I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything.
We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences.
The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app.
And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
Your mileage may vary.
That said though when they work I got pretty much the rated speeds all the time without any intermediate dropouts or other issues. Stupid simple to use, just plug both sides in and suddenly network. This was sometimes even without both units being on the same circuit, but at least one of the legs had a decently short run to the electrical panel.
You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.
Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
PM 2.5 may be in the range of a couple micrograms/m³ in one room (with air purification) and 100× that in the other adjacent room, so it makes sense to have sensors everywhere.
Still very far from 50, though.
Lightbulbs not so much.
The only thing I wish it would do would have better multi-zone temperature and humidity sensing to know to turn on the circulation fan when the edges of the house get too hot/cold compared to where the thermostat is. Even then that doesn't require the internet, it could be done with cheap 433MHz temp/humidity probes running on button cell batteries for years.
Or to respond to the weather (e.g. start warming the house earlier coz it's a particularly cold day).
If your life is very strictly regimented maybe it's less useful.
This doesnt mean I want a cloud connected thermostat. I want something that talks to homeassistant.
Respond to the weather? Its a thermostat. Even a decent bi-metallic strip thermostat will "respond to the weather". Its not like the thermostat needs to do anything different if its an especially cold day outside, it will keep the indoor environment as you programmed it. How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
The only "respond to the weather" idea I'd like would be to account for especially humid days as sometimes the temperature is fine but its really humid in the house. But once again it doesn't need to reach out to an API to figure out the humidity outside at some airport 20mi away, it just needs a local humidity sensor.
I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
>How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
Either wasting money heating an empty home when I went out or I came home to a cold house and then turned on the heating. I remember.
I also remember thermostats which didnt understand the concept of weekends, etc.
I agree, which is why I use a multi-stage programmable thermostat. Once again, it turns off when I leave, turns back on a bit before I get home, lets it warm/cool a bit while I sleep, and then starts back up around when I wake up.
> I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
If you're manually telling it you're on your way home that sounds like less automation to me. Personally I'd take the tiny bit of efficiency hit having it heat the house maybe an hour or two off from my regular schedule than having to micro-manage turning my thermostat on and off on a more expensive device that will probably be eventually bricked.
I'm just saying, the vast majority of the quality of life improvement from your internet connected thermostat could have been achieved with just a 7-day 4-stage programmable thermostat that has existed for 20 years. Its nice you're happy with your expensive device that's beholden to some cloud server, I hope it stays online for a few more years.
lol I guess you made a bad guess about what homeassistant does or you simply chose not to read what i wrote.
Either way it's nice that you won the argument against the straw man you argued with.
It being beholden to a cloud server is only half of my point which is the vast majority of the key functionality you talked about could have been achieved with a far simpler and cheaper device that has absolutely no network connectivity at all. Sure, you wouldn't be able to datamine exactly when your thermostat kicked on or off, but to me pressing a button to tell it you're coming home is less automation than your home just automatically being at the temp you want when you're there. If your schedule fluctuates by several hours every day for when you wake, when you leave, when you come home, and when you sleep I guess it could be useful to reprogram that on the fly remotely but for the vast majority of people a 7 day 4 stage programmable is fine. Not everything in my house needs to have an IP address.