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Comment by emmet | Hacker News Reader

Let me know when Wifi gets to the point where I don't need 4 mesh nodes in my 700sqft 180 year old house just to get 50mbps in my bedroom out of my gigabit line at the front of the house.

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That is probably never going to happen. Your problem is not wifi, but the environment, where you are using it.

We also have an old house, with 1m thick stone walls. The stone works as a good material to build a Farraday cage, so we have wifi only in the rooms that have AP. But the APs themselves are not connected wirelessly, that would be futile. Where it was possible, we ran ethernet cable, and where it was not practical, powerline is it. You can get pretty decent speed over powerline, I was surprised too.

>You can get pretty decent speed over powerline, I was surprised too.

How decent, I'm assuming new wires in old house?

About ~400 mbps via TP-Link TL-PA7017P; electricity was re-done in early 1980's, so about 40 years old 2.5mm^2 copper.

I wouldn't advise it, powerline technology is very flaky and even less reliable than WiFi. I have a Devolo G.hn powerline bridge and my parents as well, the one downstairs requires power-cycling about once a week (why they don't just put a watchdog timer in the unit eludes me).

Is it only that adapater or are you power cycling on both ends?

Too much work dragging / cable management in my current setup.

I'm looking to remote stream / remote play my desktop to living room and bed room TV. From what I'm reading, it feels smoother even when there's more latency. But power cycling multiple adapters would be a issue though.

Just one end suffices. I think the software for the Broadcomm PLC controller chipset is flaky and needs a swift kick in the pants every now and then, which is why a simple heartbeat protocol with a watchdog timer should suffice.

IEEE attempted to fix reliability, range and latency issues in WiFi 6 and 6E. Unfortunately, since the 802.11 spec's conception in the late 90s, the push has been to get throughput numbers (meaning, the marketing number for more sales for vendors) up. I believe WiFi 7 is something like 11 Gbps max theoretical throughput which is a solution in search of a problem. Absolutely nobody needs 11 Gbps, but everyone needs reliability.

In crowded spaces speed == reliability since a ton of the unreliability is due to crowded channels. More speed == clients shut up faster == more clients are able to actually communicate reliably.

Sure, you might not need 11Gbps on your own. But you + all your neighbors might need a total of 11Gbps. The air is just one big shared wire.

From the ONT sure, but from a single wireless access point?

> In crowded spaces

I'm not talking about a single wireless access point.

Eh... OFDMA and guard interval modulation would probably serve better for crowded channels than higher throughput. Also, something like 40% of WiFi airtime is used by... beacons. Another opportunity for optimization.

OFDMA and adjustable guard interval modulation are already features of WiFi since WiFi 6. So its not like they're just ignoring those things, they're already there.

Yes, but my original point was the IEEE came up with these things (OFDMA, MU-MIMO, fronthaul MIMO, GI modulation) when they were given the opportunity to focus on optimization instead of speed. I am saying it would be nice if they would continue to do this instead of QAM++.

Wifi is a shared spectrum resource; that 11 gbps is not only for you, but everyone on the same frequency; including other SSIDs.

Sure, but MU-MIMO, OFDMA, GI modulation etc... is all much more useful for time-sharing of spectrum than 4096 QAM.

> MU-MIMO, OFDMA, GI modulation

All things that are already in the spec. So what's next?

wifi7 has MLO, which will contribute to devices getting satisfied with their data sooner and not asking for more timeslots. 4096 QAM will also, however marginally, contribute to this effect.

The higher 6GHz band penetrates walls less than 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which means you will need more APs but each AP will have less interference from neighbors.

If it’s 180 y.o., is it built out of brick / stone?

Not an RF expert but maybe you’ll need a totally different radio frequency for that. I would assume all the tech is built around 2.5 - 5 GHz

Lathe and Plaster wall construction is not WiFi friendly. It was the dominant interior wall material during the Victorian era until drywall became popular in the 1930s and 40s.

Yeah - I have had this repeatedly as I tend to live in old stone houses with meter thick walls.

I’ve found powerline networking to work surprisingly well - over a hundred megabits on a crufty 70 year old power install, and I just jam them strategically in rooms that are separated by a thick wall.

At home, I throw regular 802.11n half a kilometer through empty air with a yagi, but that’s a different story entirely.

I got it working a few years ago in my house. But it took a certain amount of shifting stuff around plugs to do so.

Same, I have two powerline APs that deliver ethernet+wifi, more than enough for chromecast/netflix/etc. The only issue i have is sometimes clients don't choose the best APs.

Counterintuitive, but try turning the transmit power down on your APs - it’ll reduce the intersection without compromising signal quality where you actually want it. I used to almost reflexively turn them all up to full, but that, it turns out, is a fool’s errand.

Turning up transmit power on the AP does nothing to strengthen the signal from the mobile station, and you need a strong signal in both directions.

I don't think that'll ever be possible if by "180 year old house" you mean "house with interior walls made of stone". You chould use powerline adapters (with or without wifi extenders) to get the signal through the house without running visible cables.

For example (and I'm not endorsing it, other manufacturers are available) the TP-LINK TL-WPA4220.

I was just being facetious. I've used powerline in the past, but it's proven to be an impossibility in this house as it was wired multiple times over the years and there's like 8 different circuits between 5 rooms.

I'll have to live with my dodgy mesh network.

My house is larger than this, and my wifi covers my house, my yard, and reaches a few houses away. There's something different about your house, do you have metal in the walls?

The clue is “180 year old” - it’s going to be masonry. I’m willing to bet that yours is framed lumber. The former is like, well, a brick wall, to WiFi signals. The latter is barely noticeable.

Yes I have walls in my walls rather than air and wasps.

Yup, probably that. My 161 year old needs the router and 3 pods and still has no-signal areas.

Not necessarily. My 200 year old house is wood. Although the plaster still there attenuates a bit.

But I agree with your basic point. An access point in one corner of the 1800 sq. ft. house mostly covers the whole place. I was just at a friend's 2BR Europen apartment and one access point only covered about half the place.

I have a slightly smaller flat and the same problem as mentioned.

I DO have metal in the walls... reinforced concrete is a thing.

Won't happen. They are pushing WiFi to lower range not more. A routers in each room (ideally wired, but mesh if you can get a connection is okay) won't interfere with your neighbors WiFi (you won't even realize this is the cause of problems if it is!) and allows for much faster speeds.

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