Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz. There were report of N1 not supporting 4096 QAM as well but I didn't check.

View on HN

> The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz.

I was at a Wi-Fi vendor presentation a while back and they said that 160 Mhz is pretty improbable unless you're leaving alone and no wireless networks around you. And 320 Mhz even less so.

In real life probably the best you can get is 80 Mhz in a really good wireless environment.

I would believe that MLO or similar features could make it a bit more likely that large amounts of bandwidth would be useful, as it allows using discontiguous frequencies.

WiFi does currently get anywhere near the bandwidth that these huge channels advertise in realistic environments.

OFDMA also makes it more useful, but I don't know if vendors actually use that in practice.

Given that they had WiFi 6 as trial I expect WiFi 7 to have it ironed out for OFDMA. And MLO to be not working until WiFi 8.

For which band? I run 160/160 on 5/6ghz and it’s nice. They are short range enough to work. For 2.4 yeah 20mhz only

For 5ghz, that's a pretty unusual. You need to be somewhere where DFS isn't an issue to even get 160mhz.

For 6ghz? Yeah, not uncommon.

Indeed, in any relatively dense setting no one should even think about using channels that wide. Think about the original problem with 2.4ghz 802.11b/g: there were only three non-overlapping channels, so you had interference no matter where you went. Why would we want to return to that hell?

My limited experience:

2.4Ghz is pretty much only used by IoT, you generally don't care about channel width there. When your client device (laptop, phone) downgrades to 2.4Ghz it might as well disconnect because it's unusable.

5Ghz get stopped by a drywall, so unless your walls are just right to bounce off single, you need AP in every room. Ceiling mounting is pretty much required and you're pretty much free to use channels as wide as your device support and local laws allow.

6Ghz get stopped by a piece of paper, so the same as 5Ghz except you won't get 6Ghz unless you have haev direct line of sight to the AP.

"stuck".

An infinitely small percentage of people can take advantage of 320Mhz. It's fine.

Today. But in 3 years time it'll be widespread and your Mac will be the one with the sluggish WiFi connection that jams up the airwaves for all other devices too.

How does it “jam up the airwaves” if its operating at a different frequency than the devices you say it will be jamming?

It really won't, and there will be a ton of devices "jamming up" the airwaves. In most places the backhaul isn't fast enough for anyone to get any use for 320MHz channels beyond maybe very large LAN file transfers which are for some reason happening over WiFi?

Thankfully, there has been nothing new to use computers for since 2022. Definitely no new technology that involves downloading different 10+ Gib large files to test with, and users couldn't possibly conceive of a NAS, nevermind owning one because Netflix has never removed shows while people are watching them, breaking an assumed promise by users. ISP speeds are never ever going to improve either. Everyone knows that!

From Apple's support docs:

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/wi-fi-ethernet-sp...

No devices support 320Mhz bandwidths, and only supports 160Mhz on 6GHz band on MacBooks and iPads. Some iPhones support 160Mhz on 5GHz as well.

Does it? If it’s the same WiFi chip used in other M4 Mac’s then it’s still limited to 160MHz:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep268652e6...

My word I thought the Broadcom ones were better. Thanks for checking.

Channel width is not the only thing that determines the usability or quality of a chipset though.

Reducing Broadcom's influence over the WiFi ecosystem alone would be a large benefit.

I doubt the number of people in both "has no neighbors" and "owns Apple hardware" camps are significant at all.

Poe's law?

I don’t think 4096 QAM is realistic anyway, except if your router is 10 cm away from your laptop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com