EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consumer broadband hubs
theregister.com
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It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up).
You were probably not surprised that the dwelling you were in had electricity. I think at some point having fibre should also be as unsurprising.
For the first few decades it was not mainstream. The US passed (under FDR) a law in 1936:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
How long did it take after that point? I'm curious in how quickly conscious policy choices can be made into reality.
Some places are just that hard to get to.
Wiring up some places for electricity is really hard. I live in a huge country (Brazil) with a sprawling integrated electricity network, but there are still over a hundred small localities (source: https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R...) which are not yet connected to that network. Most of them are deep within the Amazon forest, a few are in a state (Roraima) which is separated from the rest by the Amazon forest (though that state used to have a connection to Venezuela's electricity network), and one is on an island (Fernando de Noronha) which is far enough from the continent that a submarine cable would not be easy.
The context of this thread is: if you could technically string power and POTS lines, why can't you string fibre?
Note what you, yourself quote: the same with fibre. It pre-supposes the other infrastructure was setup.
Edit: mistyped G instead of M.
I assume you're using some WDM to split the carrier into multiple 100G nics at each end? Doesn't sound cheap.
What's the onward capacity, I assume your link is directly into a major peering centre.
We also have 5G Home Station in many places and those are fast becoming part of the broadband solution especially in rural area. ( So much about 5G being useless on HN )
Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less.
This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream.
Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)
If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming, which requires low latency bidirectionally.
As you point out, for most types of online games, most limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array around it. I'm about two blocks away.
Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire house between us.
But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as a stand.
I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not going to be a best case test scenario.
Maybe you need to check your APs' settings, because these numbers sound off.
Edit: never mind, iPhones use 2x2 antennae. A little strange to not put in more in such a high-end device, but I guess it saves a bit of power. They do use 4x4 on the 5G chip, though? Very peculiar.
The only way you’ll get > 1 GBPS on WiFi is on a device with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo WiFi.
2x2 is used because it’s less power intensive and takes up less physical space in the device.
At 160 MHz 802.11ax (5 GHz) should be able to get 1200 Mbps at the PHY layer with a single spatial stream:
* https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/so/ReferenceGuide_80211...
Two streams gets you 2400 Mbps (PHY).
1200 is for 2x2 at 80MHz which is the max theoretical an Iphone can get.
Also other comment is wrong about dividing by 4, usually can expect 0.66 of max phy rate. So just under 1Gbps.
It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would get better speeds).
(2x2 is effectively the standard for WiFi clients; a 4-antenna access point can theoretically talk to two 2x2 devices at once, with lots of caveats. So even your Eero is likely to dedicate its 4x4 radio to backhaul and use its 2x2 radios for talking to clients. Which then means users are less likely to see any benefit from 4x4 in clients, so no one makes them, so access points keep optimizing for 2x2 clients, and on and on...)
I have an iPhone 12 talking to a Sagemcom 5689E that gets about the same.
Want faster? Get gear that's designed to go faster, i.e./e.g., both ends support 802.11ax (Wifi 6E).
If I upgraded to an iPhone 15 I'd be able to use the 6 GHz signal and probably get higher bandwidth.
I don't think any new MCSes were added for 6E. Though, AFAICT, there will be for 802.11be/Wifi 7, 12-15:
* https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/premiumdo...
That is, is the problem with your Wifi connection the Wifi, or your ISP or service plan?
iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust and overall latency possibly reduced.
I'm definitely looking forward for WiFi 7
In practice, most people don't have their routers set up for 160MHz bands (because older devices don't support it and will fall back to the much slower 2.4GHz otherwise) and in some areas near radars you can't even use those bands in the first place. However, with modern equipment, you can definitely get plenty of bandwidth over WiFi 6.
The 50Gbps number stated also assumes very wide channels and even more recent devices, if WiFi 6 isn't doing it for you today, WiFi 7 won't be that much better.
Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things:
Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor and are are therefore less robust
Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less robust
To increase throughput (i.e. bitrate ) we can either increase the channel bandwidth or the SNR (and use that SNR for higher modulation formats). Increasing the channel bandwidth does increase the noise power (assuming matched filtering) but we typically also assume that the psd of the signal stays the same => signal power increases and SNR stays the same.
If we mean by "robust" that the signal is not as susceptible to fluctuations of the noise, than increasing the bandwidth could help. Assuming we want the same bitrate, we could use the larger bandwidth to reduce the modulation format and thus the required SNR while keeping the bitrate the same. However a larger bandwidth typically also increases probabilities of impairments (interferers, filtering...) but this is typically still a win, because capacity throughput is linearly proportional to bandwidth but only logarithmically to SNR.
What are you doing, streaming raw, uncompressed video from multiple sources to a single iPhone? If you've got that many devices you need to stream from...it seems to me that it makes sense to invest in some dedicated hardware to handle that, rather than expect to do everything with just an iPhone.
TCP throughput is about half of the link rate. iPhones before the 15 Pro maxed out at 1200 Mbps link rate because they are 2x2 MIMO with 80 MHz max channel banwdidth.
At that size, and the speed I mentioned above, it would take less than 2 minutes (100 seconds, to be precise) to download the entirety of the game. I don't know about you, but I think expecting that a game like that download in less time than that—an operation you only have to do once, when you first install it—seems pretty excessive.
Also with smartphones that have 1 TB of storage would be nice to use it as fast wireless hard drive
It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better reliability, not more speed.
Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously, allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective signal strength and quality.
If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider compared to a much more competitive independent voip provider?
This is a good summary of the decline: https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/
To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your landline telephone number to a third party open standard sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline without any configuration then you will have to start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though most people won't care because they just use their mobiles now...
I find the need to configure a router or VoIP adapter to be a strange, over-engineered concept when it comes to replacing POTS. We're already authenticated by virtue of being physically connected. The exchange should be able to pass through the identity of the connecting line and no authentication or manual configuration is a fundamental requirement. In PPP, authentication is optional, but BT/OpenReach require it and complicate everything for consumers for no good reason. Since nearly every line has only one provider, they should keep track of that at their end, and then routers wouldn't need PPP configuration in the common case. Everything could be negotiated automatically, and the protocol already supports this!
We do have TR069 but that adds even more unnecessary complexity.
The same goes for a POTS replacement. Authentication is not fundamentally necessary. They could autodiscover, and then the identity of your physical line could be passed through. There isn't an obvious protocol here, but it's trivial to achieve technically as long as it isn't overengineered (see for example uPnP IGD vs. NAT-PMP). If this is a real problem, it can be addressed.
I don't think it's part of most consumer's threat models that it matters if their line identity is intercepted and used by an adversary, since we all use higher level protocols to establish higher level authentication anyway. But if it were, then TOFU together with an out-of-band update mechanism (eg. "call customer service to activate your new phone and/or router" or just "scan the QR code on the side of your phone and/orrouter with our app to activate it") would be all that's needed to deal with that. Client side authentication still wouldn't be needed, and can't address that threat model directly anyway.
So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute.
I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of choice means you don't have to worry separately about battery backup because regulations usually require they provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
If you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use any other VoIP provider of your choice.
This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power and service for a landline in a power cut.
My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client, username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old password ("BTSux" for example)
i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't worth the cost.
in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up multiple wifi access points, but that's it.
Most houses do have coax, which works great with MoCa if you want something wired.
Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house, we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade, probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
Most diy shops will sell baseboards with precut pockets for cable routing.
For any reasonably hands on technical person it's a 1 or 2 day job ripping baseboards and installing new ones with CAT6 cabling behind.
Of course it's definitely the sort of thing you can only get away with if you own the house.
Best thing I ever did. Put in a Linksys Deco X55 mesh system with WiFi 6 system.
Have four of them strategically placed throughout the 2,500 square foot house and have perfect coverage on a single SSID.
My iPhone 13 gets a bidirectional 360 Mbps just about anywhere in the house (the limit of my $39 per month FIOS line).
I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not just for me but for other adopters.
Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers are just a load of crap that crash all the time.
edit: source: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...
It seems to have stalled out development in about 2015. G.Hn has came along but doesn't seem to offer speeds that are any better. I can get about 150mbit/sec on AV1200 adaptors and maybe double that on 300mbit/sec.
It seems to me that if "WiFi 7" esque modulation techniques were used with powerline we could get far better speeds on it. For example 8x8 MIMO (AV2000 uses 2x2), with perhaps a larger frequency band would enable multigigabit over powerline?
It’s much better to use MoCa over coax and setup WiFi APs.
Anyways there's a lot more differences between how a wired protocol works and how a wireless protocol works. Mostly not interchangeable.
Honestly, 640kbps should be enough for anyone, if you ask me.
All of this was pretty much Broadcom business previously.
Their branding is a bit of a mess at the moment.
> Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a paradox.
Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,
- 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to create more and smaller cells
- 802.11n introducing MIMO, leveraging airspace better
- 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO, allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients
- 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it more effective
- Much better and quicker channel reuse during potential collisions
- Quicker transmission means the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful
It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and see that it offers several improvements to handle increased client load,
- Multi-Access Point (AP) Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission)
- Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ))
- Enhanced resource allocation in OFDMA
- Optimized channel sounding that requires less airtime
- Implicit channel sounding
- Support of direct links, managed by an access point
WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate. That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise, because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.
> The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed.
Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace) with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition.
If you have a large house with many walls separating each room, you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is already moving that way anyway.
> It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end services up and running too.
And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and users have always realized those advances as their devices age out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would've been unheard of to have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi simultaneously.
I don't think it said otherwise, in fact he acknowledged it
He is railing against the ISP imposing QoS on your network via WiFi. (How that happens is not clear - but the Qualcomm marketing he quotes seems to imply they will do it with WiFi 7.)
QoS which can be thought of the reverse of net neutrality and it's being done inside your home to boot. Handing over QoS inside your home to your ISP does sound scary. What happens next - they sell favoured access to your WiFi speeds to people like Google and Amazon?
Like you said he brings up all sorts of arguments, one being we have so much bandwidth now we don't need it. That one didn't make a lot of sense, given his favoured solution was to let the customers handle their own QoS (somehow).
To be honest it all sounded a bit far fetched to me. But back to your point - it wasn't a rail against WiFi 7.
CPU, Wireless ( Wifi / 5G ), USB?, possibly every single hardware topic is the same.