A novel channel contention mechanism for improving wi-fi's reliability
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The major issue I had and I suspect this will have, is with devices that don't play by the rules. The unit economics mean the manufacturer is going to squeeze everything out, and if they can 'cheat' and claim higher numbers they will.
Back ten years ago the issue was devices ignoring CTS frames but this feels similar.
We decided not to copy this into Windows, since it would be a race to the bottom.
But it's also not something that would cause noticeable issues on a network. Apple devices performing slightly better wouldn't be a big red flag. There are many reasons that this could be the case, from a better implementation, better testing, better HW (antennas), a different OS with a better TCP stack, etc.
Usually large vendors try to do the right thing.
So long as you're complying with the general rules for the ISM bands, I'd expect the FCC doesn't care about you following the details of a specific protocol.
As to what that exactly means, and where the line is drawn is up for debate. I doubt Apple would necessarily lose here, but ‘wifi jammers’ on Amazon would, for example.
It's in-scope for the WiFi alliance, but I don't see this as "poking" them. It's either a bug, or it's a way to get your devices to work a bit better than the competition, but in a way that the WiFi alliance would never notice.
47 CFR § 15.5(b): “Operation of an intentional, unintentional, or incidental radiator is subject to the conditions that no harmful interference is caused and that interference must be accepted that may be caused by the operation of an authorized radio station, by another intentional or unintentional radiator, by industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) equipment, or by an incidental radiator.”
47 CFR § 15.5(c): “The operator of a radio frequency device shall be required to cease operating the device upon notification by a Commission representative that the device is causing harmful interference. Operation shall not resume until the condition causing the harmful interference has been corrected.”
47 CFR § 2.1: Harmful interference: “Interference which endangers the functioning of a radio navigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs, or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service operating in accordance with this Chapter.”
If you somehow adjusted the definition so that this would count as harmful interference, then every competing service would also count (microwaves, bluetooth, baby monitors, 2.4Ghz cordless phones, even other WiFi, etc.).
Intentional interference here doesn’t mean ‘slightly tweak behavior from a given standard’, it means things like ‘intentionally create nasty interference to block other users’ or ‘recklessly spam the band with enough noise no one else can use it’.
Notably, most cheap IOT wifi devices already do massive spamming of the band and terrible behavior that makes it nearly impossible for other users of the bands to work well, and they aren’t getting in trouble.
See everything from cheap Wifi security cameras to ‘smart’ fridges.
Accelerate.
Do we really need more frequency? At this point it does not seem like the challenge for Wifi quality is actually the available frequency spectrum. In fact, I have a lot of devices still in this household that cannot connect to more than 2.4GHz and that is not a question of available spectrum but that supporting all those frequency bands apparently is too costly for some chips on the market.
In American suburbia it might not matter much, but it's definitely an issue for the rest of us
Out of the box most consumer WiFi routers will be configured for high power and most consumers won't even know that it is something they can change. Even if someone does know about it lowering it will probably make things worse for them unless their neighbors also lower their power.
Maybe consumer WiFi routers should also include some kind of long range low bandwidth communication method, such as LoRa, to find and communicate with surrounding routers to build a map of the routers in a general area (not necessarily a spatial map [1]) and then agree on power levels and channel assignments to avoid interfering.
[1] it would be a map of how they relate by WiFi signal strength rather than how they relate in space. So a two routers that are a couple meters apart but on opposite sides of a wall that nearly completely blocks WiFi radio frequencies would be far apart on the radio map despite being very close together spatially.
I have one bedroom apartment and the was unstable wifi in one half of it due to L-shaped reinforced concrete wall near the router. Cannot move it due to optic fiber input. To solve the issue I installed second router to have a wifi mesh.
Ding ding ding! The incentives are all wrong.
Plus, if more SNR is available, you can modulate more bits per unit time, then clear the air sooner.
2.4GHz only has three non-overlapping 20MHz channels, and those can only do ~286 Mbps throughput in the best case when using 802.11ax.
The 6GHz band is finally allowing 14 non-overlapping 80 MHz channels and 7 160MHz channels, without any DFS restrictions (though some channels are lower-power/indoors only).
Then there's also 802.11ah for unlicensed sub 1GHz networks and 802.11af for licensed networks. If implemented properly, could shift some usage to other bands (especially if those devices can't handle modern features or require excessive transmission power to be reachable).
Though giving everyone channel 13 and 14 would indeed be quite nice. It's clear that we can't get rid of 2.4GHz operation.