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Comment by vlmutolo | Hacker News Reader

The real solution is to plan for having a low-power access point in every room. Maybe even hidden in the ceiling of every room.

Everything gets faster and more reliable when you limit crosstalk. If anything, I’d want my future home to have WiFi-blocking walls and access points everywhere.

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> The real solution is to plan for having a low-power access point in every room.

This is too expensive, how about a correct placement of a one router and refusing to use a vacuum cleaner with spyware?

> If anything, I’d want my future home to have WiFi-blocking walls

You have no choice since anything except some nasty plastics does this, even wood according to the article.

The most expensive Unifi in-wall AP is $170. Even if you had ten of them, that’s only $1700. If you’re building a house, that’s not that expensive for making basic infrastructure work well.

That $1700 will be somewhat outdated in 5 years, and definitely outdated in 10.

The conduit used to run the Cat6 or fiber to those APs will probably still be useful in 40 years.

THIS! The fact that of all the things we regulate in housing construction by codes, and how we’re turning to view the Internet as a fundamental access need, you’d think we’d be more prescriptive with “in order to make maintenance of this communication medium flexible and future proof, all communication cables in homes should be ran in conduit.”

Yep. When I was growing up 15 years ago, my dad wired the house with Cat6. I am now a homeowner and wiring my house with Cat6.

10Gbps at 55m (180ft) is plenty for residential when the top-end residential internet offerings cap out around 1Gbps. Unless you have a buzzing internal network, you are wasting your money going above Cat6/Cat6a imo.

Cat7 is no speed increase over Cat6, only distance and cross-talk improvements. Cat8 is rated at 4x Cat6 for throughput and costs 3x more than Cat6 (~$530 per 1k ft vs $170 per 1k feet).

There's no reason to buy a Lambo if the speed limit is 35 mph.

Cat 7 doesn't exist as a standard, it is marketing. The highest current standard is Cat6a and is overkill.

Install Cat 6 and if you need any speeds higher than 2.5G install SM fiber and eat the little extra cost.

Even Cat6a doing 10G within the standards distance is flaky, there are far too many factors that will degrade it.

You are lucky, my first network was RG58 (coax), and my second was cat-3 cable (10baseT). They didn't age well. I switch to cat-5 as soon as it was an option and luckily that has aged better.

Indeed I am. I grew up on the cutting edge of tech for sure thanks to my dad. I don't remember a time without internet nor (relatively) fast internet. When I got into a serious relationship, it was a culture shock to find out how others lived tech-wise growing up.

I embarassed myself accidentally in my first apartment when I was mistook an RJ11 for an RJ45 from a distance when I commented to the agent about it having ethernet. I knew what RJ11 were, I just forgot that ethernet wasn't a normal thing to have.

I remember finally getting permission to touch the home server rack in my sophomore year of my CS degree. That was a milestone.

Are you sure? My B+G access points still work with modern equipment - they are slow, but they work (I need to get them to a recycler as I don't use them). Newer standards are diminishing returns - older equipment is likely to be good enough far into the future just because it is unlikely anything will really need faster.

GP said 'outdated', not non-functional. Your 802.11b/g APs are outdated, like you say 'they are slow' - i.e. you've become accustomed to newer faster models.

True, but I'm not convinced that modern network gear will become outdated. It is fast enough in general so it is hard to think of why everyone should rush to wifi-next anymore.

Time will tell!

So far in networks in general we've increased the size of data we're interested in moving at roughly the same rate as we've increased the throughput available. It's repeatedly been 'fast enough', and then not.

Many countries houses have brick internal and external (ours (UK) is - apart from one or two internal stud walls). How do you place a router so that it hits a 4/5 bed house with brick walls?

Airtime contention is a big thing - anything with low signal takes a disproportionately large amount of airtime to carry the same amount of data. You might be able to do it, but everything will suffer (even things close to the AP/router).

We’ve got 4 UniFi APs inside, one outside, and there are still some devices with poor antenna design that are clinging on.

>This is too expensive, how about a correct placement of a one router

Because this has it's own set of limits. Especially if you're the in tech living in suburbs type that doesn't have a tiny house.

I had Cat 6 dropped to the TVs/media devices because I don't want constant streaming devices "using up all the wifi". The offices where computers are have network drops too.

This leaves a few wifi units around the house to service truly mobile things like phones and the assorted device that uses wifi that doesn't make sense to network.

If you're going to try to fed 2+ TVs across a sizeable house with a bunch of other wifi capable devices off a single wifi router don't be surprised when your latency is high and or your speed suck.

Wood and drywall is essentially transparent for 2.4 GHz at least.

https://www.nist.gov/publications/electromagnetic-signal-att...

Low e windows are basically impassible force fields though.

What if we switched to higher less penetrating frequencies? We are now on 6GHZ and there is even a spec for wifi over 50GHz.

That was my solution when we did a remodel of our house.

Cat6 and PoE to each room. Unifi Dream Machine Pro in a rack in the garage and Unifi In Wall APs (with ethernet out) in each room.

They were easy enough to swap out and upgrade to Wifi 6 when that launched.

All of this is why I had high hopes for LiFi - completely blocked by walls, zero crosstalk, allegedly great performance within each room, and you can run it through lights that you wanted to have anyways. Obviously there are trade-offs, but it really did look like a great solution to a lot of these problems. Unfortunately, I suspect that 1. the trade-offs really didn't hurt, and 2. Wi-Fi is already utterly pervasive and it's almost impossible to get a second standard that's not backwards compatible to that.

I can’t wait until 60 GHz is available en masse, and I can deploy an AP in every room.

What happens when you walk around the house?

I have two unifi access points inside and another two outside due to brick exterior walls that blocks most wifi. It seamlessly switches, to the point I can be on a video call on my phone and wander around without any interruptions.

Controllers that support roaming and handoff.

You don't even need a controller for roaming/handoff (although it increases efficiency).

Any standards-compliant 802.11 access point will support basic roaming, even across different vendors, since it can be entirely client/station-driven.

In particular, 802.11r isn't that hard to support.

Hope you weren't downloading a file

It’s more than fine. We have no cell signal (so WiFi calling), 5 UniFi APs. You can walk around the place and you wouldn’t even notice a transition.

If downloading a file makes your WiFi calls bad, look into bufferbloat and CAKE.

It’s seamless

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