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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

I've read all the rants about how the Bluetooth spec is too long and complicated and hence the protocol is impossible to implement properly, but

Honestly I have so much trouble with Wi-Fi as well, it randomly won't see a network, it won't roam to 5 GHz leaving me on slow 2.4 GHz (turning on "band steering" on the router makes it even worse, it just drops completely), you check the forums, people swear that this new OS update made the range worse somehow.

Even Apple's AirDrop on which they own the whole stack is very unreliable if it will see the other device.

Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G). It just always works, flawlessly, 24/7. Even with the random crap Chinese "iFOE" Mediatek knockoff I bought once.

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One job I did involved a large provider of public WiFi in the UK. As a result of this, I'm convinced that WiFi is pretty much like tech from the Warhammer 40k universe and simply will not work if the correct benedictions to the Machine God are not uttered in the right order.

I am reminded of old school parallel SCSI: three terminations are needed: one at each end of the bus, plus that of a black rooster at midnight with-in a circle of black candles.

Once you learn the habbit of navigating to neverssl.com as soon as you connect to a public WiFi network to force the captive portal/auth you'll usually not have any issues with it unless the WiFi network itself sucks.

Thank you nice site tip! One after one my goto http sites adds a s.

Haha. Great to see more websites using SSL encryption but it does make it harder to connect to public WiFi if the OS's captive portal detection doesn't trigger properly.

Wow, I’ll have to remember that. I always am fumbling to get to an http site to redirect when I go on the train or somewhere.

I use example.com or example.org, which seems to work just fine also.

I usually use notpurple.com for this (I used to use purple.com until the guy finally sold the domain to the mattress company), but I suppose there's no guarantee the notpurple person won't some day add ssl.

Thanks for the tip.

>Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

Indeed It is. And not much appreciation about it anywhere either.

>The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G).

And that is why they are expensive. Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it. Everyone likes to shit post on 3G / 4G / 5G without actually spending any time to understand the insane difficulty of wireless. No one realise we got 10,000x capacity improvement in the last 20 years on mobile network. All while siding with Apple and suggest they should only pay 30cents on patent to Qualcomm or Ericsson.

> Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it.

Ideally, you would have governments spend tax money on universities and national standardization bodies to do the R&D and publication of open standards, and then both companies and private efforts can openly use these standards to develop products against, with clearly defined interfaces and interoperability expectations.

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