Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be) | Hacker News Reader

Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be)

wiisfi.com

121 pointsthunderbong33 comments

Thanks to this website, I gave up chasing an elusive target of squeezing 1gbps over wifi on any of my devices - it explains really well what is going on and why I was banging my head against the wall trying to make it work.

A useful trick to explain you current wifi speed on Mac is to alt-click on the wifi icon - it immediately gives tons of useful connection properties that you can make sense of after reading this page.

One more thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned that may decrease the wifi speed - is installing an open-source firmware like OpenWrt on your router. While it gives a ton of cool benefits, it is totally possible the drivers etc that come with it will be worse than stock firmware.

It’s not that the drivers are worse. It’s that the hardware acceleration of the router might not be available since it is all closed source/proprietary. If you care about having a better router experience, something like Microtik or an OPNsense box running on a general purpose computer is great. Then you can combine it with dedicated access points like Eero or Omada.

Can you suggest how to get the best router experience if I intend to use an alternative firmware? (I am thinking of OpenWrt right now)

I have some experience running m0n0wall (it wasn't deprecated back then) as a router and a Ubiquiti Long Range AP (bought old, used) as a dedicated Wi-Fi AP at my old home.

My sibling comment covers what I've done at a high level, what seems to work really well to me is to use a separate router and AP so that the wifi side of things is completely divorced from managing the router. That'll let you use something like OPNSense, OpenWRT, or PFSense to manage the traffic. If you don't already have a device to do that I'd highly recommend looking at ServeTheHome's reviews of some of the N100/N300 based devices that have been coming out lately, there's quite a few really powerful ones coming out that would work wonderfully for this (I'm using a Ryzen based normal PC that I've optimized for power since those didn't exist when I did this).

Some recent reviews that give an idea of what's out there (look further too, there's a few 4x2.5GBe + 2x10GBe ones too)

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-industrial-4x4-box-8840u...

I'm actually running mine with the router in a VM in proxmox with a PCI-e passthrough NIC because I'm also running a few other network critical services that I wanted more isolation on (omada controller, mail server, ldap, etc.) but don't want the power budget for yet another server.

EDIT: bah, wrong second link for STH, https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u...

There are 2 very different approaches depending on the reasoning your interest in running alternative firmware.

Reasoning 1: FLOSS/Libre principles - find whatever wireless router has the best wireless radios but still complies to your particular set of openness principles. More than anything the radio performance will still be your performance limitation so the rest of the box ends up not mattering and you can use your software straight on it without much worry. If you're ideal FLOSS hardware doesn't support running your ideal FLOSS "smarts" directly you can mix this with the 2nd approach, otherwise just stick with the one box.

Reasoning 2: You just want better software - find the device with the best radios and see if it has a native "AP" mode (it probably will). The radios will likely outperform the rest of the device if you want to do any "smarts" with the traffic so completely ignore whether or not that specific device can run open software and get an x86 tiny/mini/micro PC to run some set of software like OPNSense or whatever you prefer. The AP is then a dumb passthrough and the PC is flexible so the two sides no longer limit each other (both in performance and lifecycle).

My personal current setup is 10 year old desktop PC with a dual Intel NIC running OPNsense as my router. This is more than enough power and aside from a relatively long reboot time (about 80 seconds or so) it works wonderfully. Connected to this router is my WAN (Frontier fiber) in one NIC port and a TP-Link unmanaged Gigabit switch with POE ports on the other. The Wi-Fi is provided by TP-Link Omada access points managed by a local hardware controller (TP-Link sells these and they support many more APs at a time than I ever would need). This setup has been amazing in terms of managing it and in terms of user experience. Fast Wi-Fi, built in roaming over my 6 access points, and a router that is powerful, fast, and very flexible to manage with a great community behind it. Would have loved an open source AP solution but Omada at least does work well just like most TP-Link stuff.

This is one of the reasons I've separated the router from the AP on my network. I'm running OpenWRT on a normal computer as the router because I'm familiar with setting it up and then using some TP-Link Omada EAP devices for the Wifi part of things. I don't like that they're completely closed as far as firmware/software goes but I'll live with that compromise because it gives me the ability to manage the wifi separately, and then the APs also support VLAN and some other features that lets me handle things nicer than I could with consumer grade routers (with or without stock firmware).

I work for a startup ISP, and I often wonder how we can better educate the end consumer about all this.

I'm a developer but sometimes take customer support calls. One time a consumer had just gotten our 1Gbps symmetrical fiber installed, and he was testing it against his crappy 200Mbps/10Mbps high-latency existing cable. He claimed that the cable was "far better" and wanted to cancel us. Took me about a half an hour of troubleshooting and trying to convince the guy that it's virtually impossible the other connection was better. Turned out he was standing close to the old router, far from our router, using a low-spec Android phone. I had him connect to our router via Ethernet with a Macbook, and the speed test blew his mind.

The problem is that ISPs, including the one I work for, advertise only one number: bandwidth. Consumer thinks "1,000Mbps is faster than 200Mbps, so I should buy that!" They then run a speed test and whoever has the higher number is the winner. But it's not their fault for not knowing the flaw in their method, because the only marketing or education about our product that any ISP does is around that one number.

I have a lot of ideas around how better marketing/education could be achieved. But I have a lot of code to write, so, maybe one day...

In the meantime I take every opportunity to explain to folks that 200Mbps fiber != 200Mbps cable. Latency is incredibly important to how "fast" your internet feels, and of course there are a million things about your Wifi router and how/where it is set up.

A lot of ISPs include a performance test built into the modem which the customer and employees can access via a portal. For high speed plans e.g. ATT will have the installer who brings the modem, connects it, runs the test, shows the customer the speed, and then asks the customer to test their device. From there they can troubleshoot/explain any differences. Particularly around the >1 gbps plans because so few people realize most of their wired devices have that limit.

Of course if you're a "light initial touch" ISP or are more open about letting them run their own modem then this kind of approach isn't as easy to do and you're stuck with trying to educate the customer on doing the whole shebang themselves.

Yes, we are doing all of the above except for the on-modem speed test, which we are working on.

Having the installer run a test and talk with the customer is helpful, but a lot of people don't trust the installer. The incumbent ISPs are so evil that they've convinced consumers that all ISPs are evil tricksters. So we'll get a customer service call 10 minutes after the installer has left: "I'm not getting the speeds I'm paying for!"

The best / cheap solution for great wifi is to purchase additional cheap ones, disable the dhcp server and drag lan from one to the other. (AP mode I guess.)

Lounge, Office, Bedroom for example. Connect your devices to each at least once and then forget about it as it'l switch over.

Of course if you have money, you could do the same but using MESH/Mimo.

There are wifi extenders that should do transparent roaming quite well. Some can be connected using RJ45, some just take the wifi and "repeat it" further away, Some can do both.

In this case, you don't even need to connect to each.

Good luck. Some device (cough iPhones) are really sticky.

Apple stuff support all the 802.11 roaming specs, and they explain how roaming is triggered at this page:

* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/dep98f116c0...

My iDevices roam well. I do have my access points set to 14 dBm instead of the default 22 dBm.

I've had bad experiences with those repeaters, but never used the RJ45 backed ones. IMHO, that is then the same as an AP though - except for maybe sharing the same network SSID.

As the article mentions in section 17, WiFi extenders are not recommended unless you don't mind slashing your speed in half. Two repeaters will slash your speed to a quarter, three to an eighth, etc. While they do extend range, they do so effectively by halving the speed because they are repeaters, which repeat every data packet they receive to get it to the other side, which wastes half of the available bandwidth. If it is only using RJ45, and not repeating the WiFi signals, then it may be OK but at that point it's acting more as an AP than a repeater. Section 18 of the article suggests an AP (eg. router in AP mode) is the best way to extend WiFi range.

> Connect your devices to each at least once and then forget about it as it'l switch over.

Not by default, you'd still need to tweak the Roaming Aggressiveness/Sensitivity. Set it too low and it will only switch when the current WiFi is down, too high and it will switch too often and you'll have too many network interruptions.

On iOS devices for example I think the roam trigger threshold is not user selectable (–70 dBm, and if gaining 8/12dBm depending on transmitting state). So setting this up reliably is closer to luck than science.

Chapter 18 has some good diagrams to go along with the explanation of why/when this makes sense.

I work at a network VAR and I'd say this covers 99% of anything you'd need to know for home Wi-Fi, albeit it's a bit of a long read as a result.

It's very well thought out and the only qualm/pre reading tip I'd have with it is "it was written a couple years ago then extended over time". Practically, this means when it starts out talking about how your devices are the problem you should start thinking about "how many of my heavy data devices are laptops or phones already 6ghz capable or could easily be made to do so and what would it look like to connect them in my house" and keep that as the priority in your head as you read the rest of the article.The article eventually mentions everything you really need to know to come to that thought but you may have already come to conclusions on trying to solve it via optimizing the legacy bands before you get there.

Once most of your heavy data devices are doing most of their traffic on 6ghz, optimizing the rest of your network/bands becomes anywhere between not needed to much more feasible (which depends largely on your physical environment and how many heavy clients you were able to put on 6 most of the time) so you may not need to do anything else to enjoy gigabit Wi-Fi speeds.

I guess the other bit I'd list the mentioned tri band 2.4, 5, 6 GHz mesh systems don't have a "dedicated backhaul". Instead of buying one of the above 2.4, 5, 5 tri band radio mesh systems for IP to twice the price you can just as easily not connect clients to the 6 GHz radio on the other mesh APs and you will have a "dedicated" backhaul that (almost certainly) performs better than a dual 5 GHz mesh solution while also leaving you more 5 GHz bandwidth available. Still listen to the advice to avoid mesh if you can though :).

One last "fun" mention: If you want to splurge just to have it those TP link (pre finalization of) Wi-Fi 7 routers are really quite good and if you can get coverage and device support right in your space 1-2 Gbps as the typical goodput is feasible. If you want more than that for some reason there aren't any "practical" answers right now.

The best understanding is, an Ethernet cable is always going to be the best. So many users with WFH issues blamed our VPN when it is always their WiFi being bad.

Ask/Force them to connect via cable to test. "oh the issue is gone now". Well, well well...

Really cool website. Found it while trying to understand the issues with support for wifi6E.

Reading that the "normal power mode" would require sending GPS coordinates to a central database explains the limited support/availability I guess. And the regulations are different per country..

Creating wifi 6E hotspots still seems to be impossible with windows and the available wifi6E hardware.

And sellers seem to take advantage of customers, who mostly don't understand the difference between wifi6 and wifi6E. Even Meta seems to do it for Quest3. They advertise a dedicated, super fast wifi TP-Link USB-stick which only supports wifi6 and not 6E(which is the whole point of using wifi6 with the Quest3)

Anyway..

> And the regulations are different per country..

As I understand it, the FCC is the sole regulatory agency which requires this weird setup (of pinging and determining stuff just to have a higher power) - other countries, probably understanding how confusing and weird this setup is, just basically cap the power to 200mW-ish for indoor use (in most countries which allows 6GHz Wi-Fi that is, a lot of countries are not allowing them at all).

You've got things backwards: The FCC is just as sane as anywhere else when it comes to indoor low power (no requirements) but all the other regulatory agencies lack the option of something like AFC if you want to go beyond the 250 mW EIRP client limit (1000 mW EIRP AP limit). See the table on page 2 https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-375609A1.pdf

You may have mixed this with outdoor use, which the FCC does require AFC for regardless of power, but I'd still argue even the outdoor regulation is saner than how most countries approached the band. I.e. rather than say "no, you can't use all/most of this 6 GHz space outdoors at all because there are some incumbents" the option of "Despite there being incumbents, you can use the band up to 4000 mW EIRP from the AP and 1000 mW EIRP from the client on the condition you tie into the AFC system to make sure you aren't interfering with an incumbent by doing so" is available.

Last I was really paying attention I think n was about to come out…

Pretty sure my router is still g

If you have decent bandwidth coming in, your router might be a bottleneck.

Yeah maybe one of these days I’ll look into a replacement… last time I checked they looked real pricey.

"Pricey" is of course relative but, FWIW, the $40 < x < $80 price range for a low end Wi-Fi 6 wireless router would net your particular situation 80% of the real world improvement the $150-$300 recommendations in this article would.

Thanks I’ll look again… my cursory search was showing mostly stuff in the $150+ range

For a recommendation on the cheaper side I've had luck with the TP Link Archer AX10 and AX21. There are some slightly cheaper options from "rando" companies with similar hardware if you'd rather go that route.

The Wireless LAN Professionals folks have a couple of conferences each year, and they put up the presentations:

* https://www.youtube.com/@WirelessLANProfessionals/videos

Some good details from the people who have to make things work.

Somehow 1000's of phones are able to speak to a tower miles away, but you are telling me my phone can't load youtube through my fat husband when lies down to sleep

This has to do with the radio frequency being used. A higher frequency can carry more data but has a harder time penetrating objects.

Most cell phone use frequencies below 1GHz. Years ago a consumer wifi company released a router combo that I thinkc could do 10 Gigabits per second, over 10 times our current normal speed. But they used a frequency above 60GHz and simply holding a piece of paper directly between the computer and router line of sight caused the connection to drop.

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