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Comment by JohnnyD10 | Hacker News Reader

When incorporated into Wifi 18 in the year 2046, it will prove to realistically get around 500 MB/s, and have a hard time getting through most walls.

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They are only transmitting 30 mm, when they moved to transmitting 20 meters it had to drop from 64QAM to 32QAM and lost some throughput. It's also laser generated so I don't believe it's omnidirectional, just point to point.

Sounds more practical for satellite-to-satellite communication than for consumer devices then if it's being sent with lasers

Might work well in open office and large public spaces though, there's quite a lot of things in between consumer and space.

The transmitted signal is diode generated, not laser-generated, and it's coupled with a typical EHF horn antenna.

IIRC there are modern enterprise wi-fi APs that sit in the rafters, and form star-topology laser relays between devices.

Jokes aside, I get a consistent 1600mbps over wifi 6E which is good enough for me.

Of course you need an AP in every room to get consistent performance, but wifi has always been like that. And unless your applications use forward error correction wifi will always have latency spikes from L2 retransmission if there's even one wall between the AP and device

If I may ask, what is your hardware setup like if you're achieving consistent 1.6Gbps? Is that a reproducible, every day speed? Is that only for LAN or both LAN+WAN?

> what is your hardware setup

U6 Enterprise AP, Hasivo ethernet switch from aliexpress (used as a media converter from the AP's 2.5G copper to 10G fiber), MikroTik RB4011iGS for NAT (router on a stick), 56G Mellanox SX6036 for wired LAN. 56G optics from eBay and 10G optics from fs.com

>only for LAN or both LAN+WAN?

Wired LAN is 56gbps nominal.

Wireless LAN is 1.6gbps actual throughput.

WAN is 1.4gbps actual throughput (limited by Comcast DOCSIS)

An AP in every room, incorporated into the light fixture. Sounds like a business model just waiting for some funding.

Already exists

Could you share a link?

Why incorporated into the light fixture?

I paid ~$280 for each U6 Enterprise and that's the only thing that limits how many I have. I'm sure it's the same for anyone that cares about wifi performance. How much of a premium would you pay for better aesthetics?

You placed one in each room right? Each room has at least one light fixture. AP becomes invisible, saves space.

Space on the ceiling where I have essentially unlimited space?

I'm not saying there aren't advantages to this idea. Eg powering the APs with 120V from the light fixture would mean they can use fiber instead of PoE 2.5G ethernet. That would save me the cost of an extra switch and also reduce power consumption on both sides of the cable. But I'm sure a combined light+AP unit would be expensive enough to make that a moot point. If anything, I'd prefer to sacrifice even more aesthetics and use a bare PCB to save money if I could.

> wifi has always been like that

not for me

Nor for me; I have a 3000 square-foot house and run a single access point; I ran Ethernet to a very central place (we have a centrally located open stairwell between the two floors, which helps) and got a PoE WAP that covers essentially the whole house (if you hold your phone in the very corner of the corner rooms, you can get it to drop).

> if you hold your phone in the very corner of the corner rooms, you can get it to drop

See clearly we have very different standards. If you're seeing packet loss in the corner of the room, there will also be a fuckton of L2 retransmissions throughout the room. The latter will not be visible as ping loss%, but it has the same effect on p99 latency

I guess I don't do things on my phone that are that latency sensitive. Web browsing used to be latency sensitive, but now the typical website does nothing for 250-750ms when I click on a link, and (seemingly randomly) takes multiple seconds about 5% of the time even if I'm connected via GigE, so any network latency is masked by that pretty well.

Every website I use (besides reddit and wikia/Fandom) load almost instantly.

> typical website does nothing for 250-750ms

Two common causes:

- Your HTTP cache is slow because your workload size is larger than your SSD's SLC cache. Cheap 1TB SSDs only have 50GB SLC which gets nuked with every background software update, so buy a better one.

- your p99 DNS response time is slow. Recall that many websites require many DNS queries to randomly generated subdomains and the whole page is limited by the slowest response. Set prefetch=true in unbound and use multiple DNS servers in parallel with pihole/dnsmasq to eliminate that issue.

If you live in a small/medium apartment then 6E is quite good. I've been using one of those "enterprise" tri-band APs for around a year and my experience has been also amazing, with just one AP in the entire flat.

Enabling all bands should allow your device to just drop to 5GHz/2.4GHz when needed. This has been seamless for me.

Depends on the wall construction. Bricks or some AAC will be fine. Steel reinforced concrete panels - and you might as well call it Faraday cage.

Consider: the faster the packets go, the faster the channel gets free to let other TDMA stations talk. A big office with a lot of computers still experiences QoS losses over 6E when someone starts watching a 4K video. Get those bursts of video-buffer-filling done faster, and other traffic will stay smooth.

Oh absolutely! That's the main reason why every room needs an AP. A 20mbps 4K video only uses up 1% of the air time for wifi 6E. Any more than that will noticably increase p99 latency. A device outside the room could easily use 10x as much airtime for the same bitrate.

> … have a hard time getting through most walls.

Thankfully, the Class Wars of 2037 has caused most of society to move into tents, so signal penetration through walls was no longer an issue.

> have a hard time getting through most walls.

Dial up the TX power.

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