Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwertywert_ | Hacker News Reader

6GHz is coming thankfully.. wifi channel planning especially across regions is rough.

to use full power on 6GHz, the router needs to upload its GPS location to a central server to get the available frequencies. Worse than 5GHz in my opinion

Just lie

I’m not: it’s called AFC. https://www.extremenetworks.com/extreme-networks-blog/wi-fi-... https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Other_Topics/Wi-Fi_6E_Fr... (Point 4)

It has been approved in November: https://www.rcrwireless.com/20221103/network-infrastructure/...

No, lie to the router about what frequencies and power is okay.

You don't have the crypto keys to do that.

AP firmware is 100% closed-source, vendor-signed blobs these days.

I don't know the situation in the US and I don't think EU administrations require firmwares to be locked at the moment, yet I can tell that requesting locked hardware/firmware is a recurring debate within RF administrations since there were too many abuses (cf. this thread "just tell the hardware to lie" or "just use openwrt to disable DFS" above...) and too many interferences to other services (such as wifi-DFS-disabled interfering with weather-forecast radars). The 6 GHz wifi 6E has to coexist with fixed links, and administrations obviously don't want to repeat the mistakes and issues that are happening today at 5 GHz with radars...

I assume that can be also done offline, right? Forcing an intranet device to connect to the outside just to get a list of frequencies would be less than optimal.

No, it can't. Which is precisely the problem.

There is an exemption for indoor low-power APs, but the manufacturer has to prove that the housing will not survive outdoor weather (usually rain). They have to deliberately make it not-rainproof.

6ghz has pretty poor range. I had to pull my routers off that backhaul.

Poor range means less interference from neighbors, which I've found is a good thing. I'm pretty sure I have a neighbor with a leaky microwave or cordless phone that wipes out 2.4 intermittently. Remember: interference isn't all WiFi.

It does, and that's generally a good thing. But I have 2 routers in a mesh, about 50 or so feet away, that work serviceably in my house on 5g, and poor connection on 6g. I think in the future people are going to need a lot more nodes. Like, twice as many. But hey, fast speeds and less interference.

So, note to new IoT device makers… give it an AP

Ugh. No, thanks.

Yeah. Imagine trying to hunt down misbehaving devices when every single one is an ap

I've been at the "have one AP in every air space where we make significant use of WiFi" for ~5 years. My 1700sqft home has 4 Google mesh nodes, and I've moved towards hard wiring them. Has really improved the wifi quality.

Were you using directional antennas (or at least parabolic reflectors around them) for your backhaul?

No. I just bought an off the shelf 6e kit.

A 6 GHz radio is pretty much equivalent to a 5-point-something GHz one.

As a counterexample, 2.4 GHz is completely unusable in our penthouse office. I'd rather deal with limited cell size than continuous interference issues.

Yes, in an apartment, more available frequencies and less ability to penetrate walls is a good thing. Otherwise there’s immense amounts of interference. And it ends up being made worse when people try to improve their own experience by turning their transmit power all the way up. It necessitates that everyone turn theirs up, which then just makes the interference return and spread further.

There's a reason wired backhaul is considered best practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com