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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

I'm not yet making use of wifi 6 or 6E, let alone needing wifi 7, when my ISP fiber speed at home is only 300Mbps so even the old wifi 5 AC currently in use is sufficient for my household with its 866 Mbps theoretical top speed.

I could in theory install it at my parents place where they have multi gigabit fiber internet available, but there's only so fast you need to beam cat videos to your iPad before you reach diminishing returns and I feel like we crossed that point a while ago.

Wifi 7 feels just like mm-wave 5G and 8k TVs, as in there's legit use cases it for them, but for 90% of people it's overkill compared to the previous-gen they already have, and all the hype in the media is basically advertising to drive consumer interest and sales for something they most likely don't need.

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5G marketing always made me smile. “It will allow doctors to operate on a patient on the other side of the planet”. How? “It will enable next gen VR content”. How?

If WiFi + fibre can’t do that, how on earth is 5G supposed to do that? Even if 5G was supposed to replace WiFi (it didn’t), you’re still stuck with the same fibre in between the two 5G masts.

telemedicine and vr are held high for new infotech since i can remember.

probably because those usecases are generic, futuristic and useless, so they can be employed again and again.

There's a British TV advert for a mobile phone network where Kevin Bacon helps a family to land a plane from their living room using a 5G dongle.

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/ee-lands-plane-family...

Worse, ultrawideband/mmwave 5G and 8k TVs can be a nuisance. I've seen 5G phones repeatedly get "stuck" on a weak or nonexistent mmwave signal while traveling, and it can take quite some time before the phone decides to fall back to a different tower. 8k TVs are cool until you realize that a lot of your cables won't even output 4k signal to them, if the manufacturer didn't implement a decent fallback.

I'm not sure if wifi 7 has similar hangups, but considering the fact that my 10 year old Airport router still does everything I need at home, with an integrated backup for my Macs, it's a hard sell. I still get reduced bufferbloat on the Airport Extreme compared to most commercial routers -- I'm guessing that even when you just use one, modern mesh network configs have some nasty overhead.

The worst thing about TV input is usually refresh rate. Many TVs will display 120hz internally, but their HDMI port will only carry 4K@60. Because of this, the only way to see 120fps video is by playing 60fps (or less) video through the TV's internal GPU-based frame interpolation.

If TV manufacturers would have just put in a DisplayPort port, we wouldn't be in this mess.

>If TV manufacturers would have just put in a DisplayPort port, we wouldn't be in this mess.

HDMI winning the TV market over DisplayPort wasn't a free market victory like VHS over Betamax, it was an anti-consumer corporate monopolistic grab.

The big TV manufacturers at the time (Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sony and Toshiba) were also the main founders the HDMI consortium when it was invented, meaning they had vested interest to push their proprietary shit to get paid and make more money.[1]

HDMI was also backed by Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney along with system operators DirecTV, EchoStar (Dish Network) and CableLabs.[1]

It's like politicians voting themselves bigger salaries. Open standards like DisplayPort stood no chance compared to so much corporate moneybags, who monopolized the TV market, pushing in the opposite direction.

Consumers were never given a choice in the matter, but the TV manufacturers, movie studios and cable operators decided for us. From the bottom of my asshole, a big "fuck you" to them and to the regulators who slept at the wheel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#History

I have never seen a WiFi 5 device benchmark anywhere close to 866Mbps in real world scenarios.

Most of the time, you're lucky to reach half of the "theoretical" numbers for WiFi due to the way that they're calculated. I would almost be amazed if you could consistently max out your 300Mbps internet connection over WiFi 5, but that's probably just within reach of WiFi 5, assuming there isn't much interference for WiFi 5 to handle.

EDIT: I checked on my old iPhone SE (1st gen), which is a WiFi 5 client device, and it was only able to achieve ~240Mbps down on the best run. Are you sure you're not bottlenecked by WiFi 5?

My iPhone SE 3rd gen is bottlenecked by my 500Mb fiber line in speed tests within my office room where the wifi AP is located. My AP is only a wifi 5 device.

What do you stream to your iPhone that you're bottlenecked by 500 Mbps? Call of Duty ISOs?

As mentioned, I'm just doing a speed test to show the bottleneck is my fiber line and not the wifi, hence my wifi is giving significantly better performance than was expected by the commenter I replied to.

Testing with a WiFi 5 client device (iPhone SE 1st gen), I'm seeing only 240Mbps down and 122Mbps up, which is far closer to what I would expect from WiFi 5.

I don't know how a WiFi 6 client (like your phone) might work around the limitations of a WiFi 5 access point, but I'm not seeing anywhere near 500Mbps out of WiFi 5 from a normal client device.

But in this case, I am still getting what I'd consider great performance out of my wifi 5 AP while using an almost 2 year old device. Moving to a wifi 6/6E/7 AP is not going to appreciably make my Internet experience on my phone any better or faster. I felt this was relevant because the article is about wifi 7 access points.

I agree your comment was relevant. The person I was responding to said they weren’t using WiFi 6 at all, which I interpreted to mean that all of their client devices were also still WiFi 5, but my interpretation could have been wrong.

If you can run docker somewhere in your network, you could consider running an OpenSpeedTest server and browse to that from your iPhone. This would let you remove your ISP from the equation and see just how fast your WiFi 5 connection can go.

I’m also mildly skeptical that your access point is WiFi 5, but instead might actually support WiFi 6, since you’re already close to the maximum speeds I was seeing out of a WiFi 6 access point and WiFi 6 client device before I upgraded my network. Maybe WiFi 6 clients can do some serious magic with WiFi 5 access points, but it just seems… unlikely. But if you’re sure, then the numbers are what the numbers are. It just doesn’t make much sense to me.

My AP is a Mikrotik hAPac2: https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_ac2

Mikrotik claims it is a wifi 5 device on 5GHz bands. Qualcomm says the SOC used also only supports wifi 5 on 5GHz: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/internet-of-things/network...

Installing the OpenSpeedTest app on my iPhone and then running the test from my desktop which has wired Ethernet shows 646Mbps/472Mbps throughput.

Thanks for the tip about OpenSpeedTest! I have been curious to get a tool like this for other easy local speed testing! :)

gotcha, it’s cool that you’re able to get such good performance out of a WiFi 5 AP! And yep, OpenSpeedTest is nice!

Are you sure that the 2016 iphone se can do wide channels and multiple streams? Those are wifi5 features, but devices do not have to support them. Highend ones often do.

>but I'm not seeing anywhere near 500Mbps out of WiFi 5 from a normal client device.

Not sure what you mean by "normal client device", but I've gotten approximately 500Mb/s on my laptop under optimal conditions (ie. direct line of sight to router and connecting to a wired device on the same LAN). The "top" speed for 2x2 80mhz under wifi 5 is 867Mb/s[1] so that roughly tracks. Under more realistic conditions (eg. wall between router and device, or transferring files between two wireless devices), you'd expect less.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013#Data_rates_...

When I used the Macbook Pro (13", 2015) with Turris Omnia, my jaws dropped. I was getting gigabite over wifi. No wonder that the mbp had no ethernet.

It turned out, that Apple at the time used 3x3 MIMO ac and Turris happened to also be one.

With more common setup (2x2 mimo, 80 mhz wide channel), it is not a problem to achieve near 800 mbps speed with wifi5. 300 Mhz is too low; that must be either very noisy environment, or misconfigured AP (no mimo, narrow channel).

It depends on how new/expensive your router is, how strong the signal is/close you are, and how congested the channel is (at that moment). Some Wifi 5 (802.11ac) routers are significantly faster than the average.

with MLO and the promised latency decreases, even at 300Mbps, it should significantly make a difference on how "snappy" everything is (and how reliable video calls are).

That sounds nice I guess, but since I'm not a professional twitch streamer or cam-girl, I doubt that one improvement will change my life.

The fantastic article, Wireless is a trap[1], is one the best resource and will likely be valid for quite a pretty long time that -- yes, Wi-Fi is cool and all -- but you it will still lag behind wires.

The article was also discussed over and over again;

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23589798

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358855

1. https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

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