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Comment by agloe_dreams | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps.

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.

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>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.

Getting too close takes you out of the "far field" and into the "near field"[1] where the device just won't work at all. It's probably actually connecting via reflections from the walls if stuck right on top of the router. You need to be at least 7.5cm away from a 5Ghz router with 15cm antennas to be in the far field, and anything within about 4.5cm will be entirely inside the reactive near field (and have very poor coupling with standard antennas designed for far field use).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field

My apologies, I was trying to make a bit of a joke of the context of the distance and items between the 5G signal vs the router, below the cause is explained well.

That sounds rather low, the Eero Pro 6 should support 4x4 MU-MIMO in the upper 5.8GHz band. You'll never get the advertised 2400mbps even on that band, but the 650mbps figure you state comes closer to the 2x2 rate of the lower 5.2GHz band.

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.

To be fair, 2x2 is already a high standard as smartphones go..

That’s because iPhones (and all other smartphones) use 2x2 mimo WiFi arrays.

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.

> The only way you’ll get > 1 GBPS on WiFi is on a device with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo WiFi.

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).

https://mcsindex.com/

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.

With the iPad and MacBook Apple added 160 MHz support for 6E only (not on 5 GHz still, which makes sense). Did they really not do that with the new iPhone 15 Pro as well? A bit disappointing really.

2400Mbps = 300 MB (megabytes)/s x2 = 600MB/s which is pretty close to the number the OP was stating. So to get over 1GB/s you need more than 2x2, right?

I supposed that depends if you interpret GBPS as someone holding shift or someone really meaning to express network speeds in bytes and just happens to capitalize the rest too. But yeah, to get over 1 GB/s (or 8 Gbps) you'd need more than a 2x2 setup even with the massive 320 MHz channels Wi-Fi 7 is going to bring.

And you have to divide the PHY symbol rate by 4 to get the real world TCP throughout achievable.

There is some loss but you shouldn't be getting anything near 4 unless something is very wrong with your wireless environment. Even a flat half is pretty bad. In a hospital environment our managed clients (i.e. laptops, phones, wireless desktops) in the 5 GHz space would reach more near ~80% theoretical.

Both Eero and Apple only support 160 MHz channels in 6 GHz

Are there smartphones with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo wifi?

No.

640Mbps should be enough for anyone!

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).

For wall penetration/distance, it's because 5G has better spectrum allocation and allowed transmit power than WiFi. For speed, it ultimately boils down to that massive, expensive antenna array (up to 256 antennas) enabling a higher practical spatial stream count than the 2-4 antennas typical WiFi base stations use to talk to client devices.

(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...)

OP here, few findings from here: 1. My iPhone only supports 2x2, makes sense now. 2. My M1 14 inch macbook pro only supports 2X2 as well. That is interesting: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/macbook-pro-wi-fi... 3. The phone next to the router was a bit of a joke, but yeah, still same performance. 4. TMobile is not messing around I guess.

I think pretty much all wifi devices lie about the speed they can obtain. A lot that claim gigabit combine the speeds of 2.4GHz & 5GHz to get to 1 Gbps. Few devices out there legitimately offered the speed they advertise. At least that's what I saw when I looked a couple years ago.

> What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps.

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.

650 Mbps is a very good result for Wi-Fi 6. 2x2 MIMO and 80 MHz channel yields a link rate of 1200 Mbps. Throughput of half the link rate is typical. iPhones don't support 4x4 MIMO or 160 MHz wide channels needed to go significantly faster (2400 Mbps with one enabled or 4800 Mbps with both features).

I'm curious to know if going to 6GHz (Wifi 6E) would help at all, or does that band simply allow for more channels that have less noise?

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...

6e is more channels. There's plenty of room to hog a 160 MHz channel in the 6 GHz band. In 5 GHz there's only two 160 MHz channels. https://systemzone.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/5-GHz-Chan...

It’s more the provisioning of the network in your area than the actual link tech. t-mobile speeds outside my house have been going down from 10mbps down to around one as they’ve rolled out 5G upgrades (or maybe merged in sprints network).

https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html#wifispeeds

Well, what rate do you get through your router over a wired connection?

That is, is the problem with your Wifi connection the Wifi, or your ISP or service plan?

I use a 5G router. I get about 600mbps from it over Ethernet, and 300mbps over Wifi

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