Vendors care about only two things: (1) Cost (2) the Gbps they can print on the box.
So today that means 802.11ac and WPA2, unfortunately.
Stability of the software is not a consideration.
One of those sites is my home, another my brother's home and another my dad's and another is at work. At least one of the others, you might have heard of.
I'm not quite so jaded as @roboman. I suggest you keep up with the Joneses. The latest is wifi 7 and if we get a bit conservative, we might consider 6 as current and hence the advice is stick to wifi 4!
That's not my advice. I suggest that we embrace the latest stuff and learn how it works. If necessary you can always spin up another SSID with special properties.
I've got devices from fridges to ESP80266 wired thingies and laptops and phones and whatever all working fine.
I'd even go as far as to say we had as many client tickes from bugs about old hardware from 2 standards (~10 years) ago that weren't receiving patches anymore as we did from the new hardware but at least the new stuff was still getting patches.
That said once you go to consumer/prosumer hardware I'm convinced everything has a litany of bugs that have no hope of getting meaningfully fixed regardless which version you use. For 99% of use cases it'll work fine enough and that's all any vendor selling it will care about, new or old. Often Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever-made-the-actual-wifi-chip-com will have patched things consumer APs and devices won't have actually updated to anyways.
I’d imagine that every single thing that could happen to an AP would happen.
What hardware did you use?
As far happenings to APs I'd say 90% of the time it was one of two classics on infinite repeat:
- (Particularly after a new install) "This AP near my work desk and I've been having headaches ever since" -> "We'll try turning it off, let us know if things stayed the same or got worse" -> we actually turn the LEDs off and leave the Wi-Fi on at first -> They mostly never follow up, if we do they say things are great. There were a few occasions they'd follow up and we'd really turn the AP off but it never resulted in anyone being able to tell when the AP was on or off without us telling them (or a few who knew enough to check the RSSI near the AP of course). The "happening to the AP part" was there were sometimes people would just take them down (you just need a ladder and then spin it unless you put every AP in offices in an enclosure) the AP as the first step and then we'd get outage alerts thinking it had just died.
- (Particularly by maintenance crew, presumably since they had the ladders and comfort level in taking things apart during work) we get an alert that an AP in a warehouse/break/hidden-office-cubby/etc area is down so send someone out -> arrive and maintenance person says the Wi-Fi has been bad today -> See the AP is not physically there, ask where they put it -> "Oh you mean this? I thought they were putting up a security camera to watch me work".
Neither of these things were particularly common at the individual level but when you have 36,000 you refresh every 5 years somehow it becomes something that happens somewhere every week. The other 10% is boring stuff, APs being ripped off by someone pushing a tall cart down the hall, someone decorating the APs with aluminum foil to make the hall look like it has disco balls, water/sewage leaks taking out a ceiling of APs because someone broke a toilet. For the most part these were extremely rare and I don't really blame people often ('cept the toilet one). E.g. you've got a bunch of old patients and try to make a disco hall, you're a good person - just know that'll kill your and the patient's Wi-Fi or you're just trying to get shit to where it's supposed to be and you stacked it on this thing too high - don't blame ya for being in a rush but keep safety #1 it could have easily been a different accident having stuff that high rushing down the hall.
But we could also count like: 5, 5 Wave II, 6, 6E, 7.
In this case, 2 generations behind would be either Wi-Fi 5 Wave II or Wi-Fi 6. Those are both quite good! My workplace is just deploying Wi-Fi 6 now, and at home I still have Wi-Fi 5 Wave II.
Unifi tends to be a bit divisive in forums such as HN and r/networking and even their own forums! The wailing and gnashing of teeth at every version update is quite something to behold.
For me as an old school sysadmin, running a Linux VM as a Unifi gateway is fine and has been for years. I treat it with respect and read change logs and I have decent backups and so on.
The vast majority of my customers and my already installed gear is wifi5 and any new APs are 6 by default. I'll wait for 7 devices to actually be available but it doesn't bring much to the table. Wifi 6 with the addition of 6GHz was a major upgrade, 7 not so much.
My phone now has way more bandwidth to my home LAN via wifi than the LAN itself! It can use 2.4/5/6 GHz and each band has more than one MIMO. Its not quite that simple but I will be grabbing some 2.5 or 10Gb LAN switches soon. At work 10Gb with 40Gb uplinks is generally indicated ...
https://www.destructoid.com/oopsies-ign-watermark-on-the-cov...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GdJiEjSho
Spelling error is at 5-8 seconds in. As that is kinda the first thing you see, it is quite noticable.
You can choose current-generation hardware from a company that chooses to implement less advanced wireless specifications. For example, the gl-inet Flint 2 (MT-6000) runs a fork of OpenWRT out of the box and can be flashed with stock OpenWRT snapshots. That's a very modern piece of hardware that will do wifi 6 (not wifi 6E/7).
So hardware-wise you get the current gen, software-spec-wise you get one generation behind. I don't think practically speaking you're going to feel much pain from using Wifi 6 for the next few years, as it can saturate a 1Gbps link pretty easily.
But it’s nice when your Wi-Fi is just a dumb box with almost no settings that you can upgrade independently.
Currently I have 3 TP-Link AC routers running OpenWrt, RPi 4 running OpenWrt for the router.
Other than that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln.
Why not name it?
It seems like most people don't necessarily care per se about wifi performance because you can stuff an AP every 30 ft and call it a day.
Most MSPs seem to become a shop of some kind based around a hardware that isn't necessarily the most performant, but good enough, cheap, easy to manage, etc. (lots of UniFi shops even though I don't consider it a good solution).
In terms of performance, though, I live in a very high density apartment so I have a niche use case: I've been trying to find the access point.
So far, ruckus has been outperforming every other access point I've tried (Aruba, Unifi, extreme, etc.)
I can't find any reliable data on whether or not Ruckus is just literally the best access point, and I still consider myself in the researching phase.
Is there industry knowledge to the contrary? Are there any actual engineering standards that companies aspire to, or is it just a "most people don't measure this, so whatever" industry?
I’d recommend looking at Juniper Mist for high congestion areas because their auto mode actually works and adapts to changes in the environment.
I do have to ask though, do you really need enterprise Wi-Fi? It’s not very neighbourly but buying a high end consumer Wi-Fi router that lets you pick DFS channels, picking the least congested channel, and setting transmit power as high as it will go should do the job in an apartment.
Do I actually need it?
Eh, no, I suppose.
But I can't stop myself from not doing it.
Also, in terms of tangibility, my 2.4ghz is so abysmal due to congestion I'm willing to do anything to maximize it. Even Aruba falls flat with this band but Ruckus does an *okay* job. It's obvious that AP performance is a factor here.
My 4x4 Wifi 6 Aruba 535 gets completely shut out by a 2x2 beige colored clunker Ruckus 510 that I got for $40. It's obvious that price, features or "newness" aren't things I can rely on to give me a good picture.
Aruba outperforms my other models -- I've spent a lot of money just testing this out myself using the use case of 40 competing SSIDs.
(According to my research juniper doesn't perform particularly well. Check the Packet6 report that Ruckus cites. Probably biased, but what else is there? "Data sheets" that don't really say much about anything. I havent purchased a test AP, though.)
You should visit Chicago some time.
The nice thing about the newer 2 is 6ghz, for people in highly congested areas. I live on an acre and pick up tons of 2.4ghz, some 5ghz. I can't imagine how bad it would be in a modern tract home development, or worse, a large apartment complex.
When I was still at university, just walking out of my studio appartement and closing the door would already drop my 5GHz signal a good bit. Open the door, much better.
Unfortunately, this also means I'm competing with nearly a hundred different APs in the apartment alone - of which many broadcast in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz - to the point that my Macbook less than a meter away from the router still takes a hot minute to automatically find the AP unless I manually select it.
Of course the -real- benefit to upgrading early is that you'll likely have the 6ghz space to yourself for a couple years.
I do suggest using the latest generation client chipsets with driver support in your OS, though. Whether or not a newer client radio talks to a similarly capable AP, it is likely to have better receive sensitivity than older radios.
I also suggest specifically buying Intel client radios. I have first-hand benchmarking experience that shows that Intel radios are very good at receiving marginal radio frames in heavily congested environments. Qualcomm and Broadcom radios might be just as good, but I wasn't able to evaluate them for lack of driver support for my purpose. Realtek/Mediatek/Ralink radios have pretty good drivers, but the actual radios behave notably worse with congestion. I've had friends living in apartments take my advice and switch from Realtek to Intel, and they've reported back significant gains in wifi stability. I'll also note that the original Steam Deck has a Realtek radio, and many people complain about its mediocre Wifi performance. Some people have gone as far as hot air reworking their Decks to have 802.11ax Intel radios, which happen to be pin compatible.
Are you suggesting there are some good cheap APs that can readily do WDS with more than two spatial streams, or wider channel bandwidth? That could be fun to play with, although at this point my WDS link is just for the lols because I've since run cat6 between buildings...
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that I've seen a toggle-able option in some home user routers for them to automatically reboot themselves once every um... day (or some other time period).
Like "we can't be bothered tracking down the memory leaks in shipped software, so lets just implement an auto-reboot of the router".
It's both funny and tragic at the same time.
My wifi router had a bug that was eventually fixed, but before that I would need to reboot it every hour. That's a simple workaround - if only there was a setting for that.
It won't allow every hour though. The options are either daily, weekly, or monthly, and you can set the exact time.
It doesn't seem to allow for more than one reboot schedule either, so it wouldn't be possible to set (say) 24 different daily schedules 1 hour apart as a workaround.
One generation behind is usually where you want to be because your clients usually haven’t caught up anyway.
Economy of scale does take a generation or two to get behind in general. Wifi, EV's, heck even apple refurbished macbooks are cheaper because there are more of them (as they are from an older generation).
So "being N generations behind latest tech" is solid advice in general is my point. Thanks.
Mesh, however, it is not about roaming (i.e. multiple APs with same ssid, clients connects to preferred one). Mesh is a topology thing (nodes come and go), wireless mesh also means wireless uplink (i.e. the AP you are connected to itself talks to its uplink wirelessly). These are things you use only if you cannot avoid them; metalic connection to each AP is way more reliable.
No way the big hospital systems / robot warehouses don't light people (VPs and up) up over flaky wireless.
besides the algorithmic stability, the new radio bands or their combinations still have merit fwiw.
Best person to ask I've come across all year!