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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

Not everybody got 802.11ac at home already and most people are fine with 802.11n speed for their personnal usage. I would say this is irrelevant for a large fraction of the population.

Also not everybody need declarative configuration, especially when talking about a monodevice scope.

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It's not just about speed. I live in an apartment block where so many people have got WiFi networks and Bluetooth devices that the 2.4GHz band has become heavily congested. These days, I need 802.11ac on the 5GHz band just to get a connection on my tablet in the bedroom to the router in the hallway ...

There is 5GHz N. Not as common in devices or routers though.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a 80211n device that _didn't_ support 5GHz.

A lot of low end consumer devices don't. For example the PS Vita supports N but not 5GHz, nor do most kindles until the latest Paperwhite. It was also super common for cheap $400 laptops in 2011 to have N but not 5Ghz support.

I believe Nintendo didn’t support it until the Switch, surprisingly - the WiiU was 2.4 only.

Not for the internet but Wii U uses 5GHz for streaming to the gamepad.

Guess that explains the poor range issue people cited back in its heydey.

802.11ac came out 2013.

And a lot of people only get a new access point when they either receive a new router from their providers or change providers.

This is not uncommon to have the same wireless access point for a decade or so and people are generally fine with it. Also most people don't even know there are different revisions of the wifi standard and if you say 802.11 they will just look at you with clueless eyes.

I am not saying it is ok for any OS to not support it but it doesn't necessarily affect everyone's life.

Some work is done on that front though: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/80211ac

Sure most people don't upgrade their router very often but those people probably aren't the ones interested in using freebsd as their desktop, I doubt they have even heard of freebsd or would care to hear about it.

The type of person that will install freebsd on a laptop and then setup all the configuration is probably very techy and would want the best tech, os, wifi.

Hm, as far as I can tell FreeBSD has drivers for ac cards, but they only support WiFi 4 at the protocol level?

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