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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

This would be fantastic in my current apartment. My immediate surroundings are completely saturated by WiFi access points across both 2.4 and 5.x GHz making all wireless connections unreliable at best, and the layout of my apartment is such that the only way to have a wired connection in the living room where my desktop sits is to run an ethernet cable across the floor.

So I run an ethernet cable across the floor, and it's not great.

I also think VR/AR use cases may benefit from this eventually.

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I wonder, does this pollute the IR on your apartment so that your TV remote would no longer work? Although with streaming set-top boxes, those are using RF most of the time these days.

Have a look at Ethernet over power cables. I had them in my last apartment where WIFI was bad and cable was unacceptable.

I’ve actually tried this too! Had great luck at an apartment in the past, but the wiring here is also really old, and I had issues getting reasonable speed.

I need to look into newer generation Ethernet over power to see if it’d work better than the aging pair of plugs I purchased a number of years ago.

My guess is that if the power cables suck the newer generation will have bad speeds too. If you have the option buy a pair with the right to return and try it. I was very happy with this solution.

You could consider wifi6e; the 6GHz band probably isn't too noisy, for now.

In fact in my experience switching to DFS 5GHz channels would already make things much better. Many cheap access points don't support them at all.

Until you get that radar sweep that cuts off your wifi for 30s.

Depending on where you are, you might never get that.

If you're anywhere within ~150km of an airport with radar, you will likely get hits on certain days (due to atmospheric lensing).

Not just any airport but only airports with TDWR.

(There are none on the west coast: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_TDWR.svg)

And then more rarely, certain military airports.

I’m in Chicago under an approach path to O’Hare, and Midway airport is within that range as well.

I have the same problem here and I'm considering buying a 6GHz tri-band (2.4 + 5 + 6GHz) Wi-Fi 6E router. Problem is: the only ones I can find are "gamer" routers bloated with features I will never use and priced 5x to 10x a regular Wi-Fi 6 (without the "E") dual band (2.4 + 5GHz) router.

Both my phone and computer supports 6GHz, but it's still hard to find a reasonably priced router.

You can usually find them lightly used on eBay or Craigslist (or country equivalent). Then just flash it with DD-wrt or openwrt.

Not sure if $199 is reasonably priced in your opinion, but the Nest Wifi Pro supports 6E.

I was going to suggest the Banana Pi BPI-R3, but that still doesn't have 6 GHz. The successor to that one is going to have Wifi 7, but might not get supported by mainline OpenWRT.

It is virtually impossible you’re getting enough distortion from other 5GHz networks to matter, unless your walls are made out of tissue paper. I would recommend analyzing your own devices for faults.

5GHz is significantly better than 2.4, but I still get latency spikes that make it unacceptable for gaming.

And my range it atrociously bad.

It’s an old building, and I live on the top floor just below a roof with assorted antennas. I think there’s some microwave gear up there that would explain my issues.

I’ve wanted to do a site survey for awhile to figure out what’s up, but have just lived with the Ethernet cable across the floor.

But that means your distortion issue is not 5GHz networks.

Way back when I was still in university, if I would walk out of my room and close the door (which would put a few cm thick wooden door, some plaster wall and about 14m between me and my router) I would already have a significant reduction in connection strength.

Even with the ridiculous walls Americans use for their homes, there is just no way a neighbors 5GHz signal is strong enough to cause significant distortion. And if there somehow is, there is enough room on the spectrum to choose a different band.

Thinking on it, almost all civilian microwaves also only operates at around 2.4GHz. And since you mention sudden spikes, I would check for radar interference and if you are on a band that’s radar-assigned.

> Thinking on it, almost all civilian microwaves also only operates at around 2.4GHz.

I spent a number of years as a network engineer working with consumer microwave gear, most of which was in the 5.2-5.7 GHz range. There is plenty of this stuff around.

And I’ve seen what a poorly aligned backhaul can do to the wireless networks in the vicinity.

That said, I’m not committed to a specific reason it’s not working well, it’s just not. The point was that wifi is not a good option for me for some use cases given the apparent spectrum use here.

I think it’s probably a combination of factors since I live in a dense city. Radar is certainly a possible factor.

I can get a 5GHz signal in my bedroom through two interior walls. And some appartments do have very thin walls and ceilings .

Thin dry wall with steel framing is pretty good at blocking wifi signals, as far as I recall.

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