Wi-Fi 7 Overview (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi 7 Overview (2024)

mrncciew.com

44 pointsspeckx46 comments

This is all good, but will it be able to penetrate the 12-inch German walls in my apartment effortlessly? WiFi reception was pretty good when I used to live in cardboard houses. But now 5GHz struggles a lot with the thick concrete walls at my place.

pros and cons of very thick walls i guess…it’s difficult to make changes to your home.

Wifi 7 (6ghz) barely penetrates a single “drywall” wall (in U.S.). It will have a very hard time penetrating thick concrete / brick walls.

in your case if you wanted good wifi 7 signal in all rooms you’d probably need to run wired backhaul and install an access point per room. Probably not worth it. It might make sense to have wifi 7 in your living / dining space though. Especially if you have an open kitchen.

You can get powerline/wifi kits...sometimes installing your own Ethernet isn't feasible.

There are also MoCA kits which allow you to use the existing coax cabling.

If Wifi 7 (6ghz) cannot penetrate dry wall does it have much application for home users?

depends on the user. The short answer is it’s worth it if your wifi airspace is very congested or if you have a use case for wifi 7 speeds, such as moving large files around your LAN often.

The 6ghz band has poor range but this can be a benefit actually. It means your neighbors 6ghz signal can’t flood your home like their 2.4ghz and 5ghz can. So there’s very little interference on the 6ghz band. This also means a more stable connection and a little lower latency.

If your wifi works well today i wouldn’t bother upgrading. Unless it’s a fun hobby purchase.

The fact that 6 GHz Wifi cannot penetrate walls is a great feature for people living in apartment buildings. The 2.4 GHz band is insanely overcrowded.

The best of both worlds would be to install 6 GHz access points in each room, and run a wired connection between them.

Why the scare quotes around drywall? It's just gypsum board. If you have plastered walls it's the same thing. But it needs far less skill to install correctly since the sheets are manufactured, smooth, and you just have to hang them.

you’re 100% correct.

i added the “” because i wasn’t sure if everyone would be familiar with the slang, especially those living outside the US.

The good thing is that you don't have any interference.

2.4Ghz should penetrate your walls better, but maybe not enough better to matter? Wifi 6 and 7 run on 2.4, 5, and 6 Ghz (wifi 6e), as opposed to wifi 5 (ac) which was 5ghz only, so if 2.4ghz is viable for you, you'll get some help from an upgrade.

Some of the coordination stuff might help you run multiple APs, but with strong attenuation from walls, you might not have much overlap anyway.

Any benefit of thick concrete walls other than weird flex?

AFAIK modern building materials are better for environment, insulation, repairs, build time and cost.

Source: dad was a builder and inspector for 50 years in eastern europe. I’ve grown up in german house from 1890. He’s helping to work on my “cardboard” house in NZ now. Big aspect of course is - houses are built to the local conditions and market, but he loathes block/concrete houses back home. They are being replaced by cardboard homes too.

Already having them in place without moving would be the main benefit

Thermal insulation is usually better in concrete apartments. Also, when I was working in the US, the places I lived were mostly "cardboard" houses by default. In Germany, I don't have much choice. So in my case, it's not even weird flex.

"cardboard" houses have insulation in the walls. Meanwhile I can't imagine how solid (?) concrete would have better insulating properties than fiberglass insulation sandwiched between two "cardboard" walls.

And I'm not entirely sure what part of the house they're calling cardboard. It's typically concrete foundation, wood framing, and drywall (i.e. gypsum i.e. stone) walls.

Drywall doesn't deserve the hate, it's fantastic. Flame resistant, cheap to repair and replace, easy to cut and penetrate to install drops run wires. Wiring my whole house with ethernet was a single day affair because of it.

Sound insulation, I can’t trust builders these days to put enough insulation between apartments in mass timber buildings

Then you shouldn't be trusting them build concrete house either lol.

Faster speeds are great and all but what I'd like to see prioritized is Wifi at the 900mhz band so we can have a long range option that penetrates through walls. We must be at the point where we can manage to have relatively usable speeds in lower bands right?

Penetrating through walls is really bad in urban areas though.

I'd love it for our farm in the middle of nowhere.

Have you considered wireless network bridging and/or directional APs/antennas? Both of those could enable wifi to get where you need it.

We do use some of that for building-to-building links. What would be nice is if smartphones supported a lower frequency band, so we could have some connection without having to be near a 2.4ghz hotspot. Our cell service pretty bad here.

Whats with the 850/900MHz cell bands these days? Do providers where you are use spectrum that low? I guess at lower frequency maybe the data capacity is lower as well

Verizon uses band 13 (700Mhz) but it just lets them put the tower even farther away.

There are wireless options which operate in the 900mhz or lower bands, depending on what your use case is.

433Mhz LORA, for example.

Maximum possible throughput for LORA is 27kbps though. That's not a WiFi competitor unless you just want to link some sensors.

WISP (wireless isp) operators have all sorts of neat directional gear that iirc is 900MHz because of the distance they can cover with it.

What would be nice is if phones could connect to a low-frequency wifi. We have 2.4ghz hotspots here and there, but a long range low speed signal that a phone could use for WhatsApp or similar would be really handy. Our cell service is very poor here.

if you have power on the other side of the farm, or if you can run POE power, the Unifi UDB Pro could be useful:

https://youtu.be/SnCY9O2qCek?si=jgKWcvLaNfEkMCB0

900MHz would need to strongly encourage directional radiation (high EIRP, low TRP) for this to not end up as a congested wasteland like 2.4Ghz.

Search for WiFi HaLow.

(I work for Morse Micro; we can do 30mbps udp)

I wonder if a wire connection (ethernet/fiber) will have limited use in residential. Speed isn't so much concern although a wired connection still better in terms of reliability and backwards compatibility.

I say this as somebody that's about to do Ethernet runs and fiber in the house.

Why would anyone pay to run Ethernet in their home in this day and age?

Reliability and speed, especially if the airwaves are congested around you, plus simplicity in that there's less configuration than Wifi, and for some IoT-y devices like cameras you can use PoE and not have to worry about powering them either

speed, stability, reliability

In addition to the other answers, to drive multiple APs.

Stabile, high bandwidth connections for wireless APs, Home A/V, IP cameras (wireless is typically junk in this category) & other PoE IoT devices. Wired connections are still incredibly useful.

- anyone that works from home and wants a 100% stable connection.

- someone that lives in a large building with many adjacent access points all blasting on the wifi spectrum, causing interference.

- latency sensitive applications. for example video chat works better. Gaming works better.

Gaming? Maybe, since some gamers are apparently willing to spend extra money on 5000hz mouse to shave <1ms of latency over a "normal" 1000hz gaming mouse. WFH? Probably not. Wifi adds maybe 5ms of avg latency with occasional 100ms spikes. Most video conferencing software introduce enough of a lag (through buffering, encoding, echo cancellation, noise suppression) that you won't notice the difference. Same goes for bandwidth. Video calls with screen sharing barely goes over 5Mb/s for me. You don't need fancy 10Gbe hardwired connection for that.

It’s 5ms of average latency - under optimal conditions! Wifi latency can range anywhere from 5-50ms. Not everyone’s in a single family home, where there’s little interference. :)

Wifi 7 is nice in that regard because the 6ghz band is barely used these days.

I think ethernet is a nice to have, certainly not required.

I joke that I prefer Ethernet because I know how WiFi works.

Generally, WiFi is fine if you have line of sight or close to it. And you don't have strong demands on total bandwidth (not doing large local file transfers).

It’s hard to see the value of a wired network, but there are about a million. As other commenters have pointed out, most of the scenarios are more than one access point and thicker walls / building materials.

You don't even necessarily need to run Ethernet. For example, my parents house was built without Ethernet cable runs to every floor, but they ran coax cables to basically every room for TV.

Thanks to MoCA (Media over Coax Alliance) you can route your Ethernet over Coax, and thus we have a really stable and performant (> 1GbE) Ethernet connection to every room.

Wireless repeaters/mesh doesn't really work well when you have reinforced steel-concrete floors and walls.

I had my house wired and it's one of the best things I've done. Just straight up no issues.

Behind every good wireless network, there is a fantastic wired backbone. I have access points in every room that comes out of a wired ethernet network. My daughter stopped complaining about latency with her games the day she learned that it is better to stay wired with her computer.

Wireless is a convenience, but I’d always prefer wired connections wherever I can.

https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

My house is wired for ethernet, and I don't use all the jacks. Best practice is probably run two lines to two opposite walls to most rooms. But you'd expect to only really use one of those for most rooms. It's just nice to have options for placing wired devices (which is why you want wired to opposite walls) and to have a spare in case it fails.

1gbps at low latency and low jitter is table stakes for wired networking, but pretty difficult for wifi (regardless of the sticker bandwidths). Wifi 7 will likely do a lot better than wifi 6 on well equiped clients and access points because of aggregation across frequencies, but it's still going to be not entirely consistent, and it still won't hold a candle to 10g-baseT which isn't too expensive if you only need a few ports and you shop well on ebay.

If you do fiber runs, there's lots of used stuff much faster than 10g for not much more. 40gbe seems to have had a short lifetime in enterprise so there's a lot of decommisioned hardware out there, if you've got fiber to run it on.

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