[HN Gopher] EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consum...
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EE is working with Qualcomm to add Wi-Fi 7 to consumer broadband
hubs
 
Author : beardyw
Score  : 72 points
Date   : 2023-09-25 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
 
web link (www.theregister.com)
w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
 
| 300bps wrote:
| _ISP 's router [...] Put it into modem mode and pass all the
| packets straight through to a third-party router._
| 
| Best thing I ever did. Put in a Linksys Deco X55 mesh system with
| WiFi 6 system.
| 
| Have four of them strategically placed throughout the 2,500
| square foot house and have perfect coverage on a single SSID.
| 
| My iPhone 13 gets a bidirectional 360 Mbps just about anywhere in
| the house (the limit of my $39 per month FIOS line).
 
| throw0101c wrote:
| The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre
| optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2]
| or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, with competition at OSI Layer 3.
| I think at this point 100Mbps would be the minimum, with
| diminishing returns once you start getting above 1Gbps (but
| available with XG(S)-PON(G.98(0)7)/NG-PON2(G.989)/HSP(G.9804) and
| 802.3ca).
| 
| It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and
| continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there
| are any _technical_ hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
| 
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network
| 
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
 
  | hnreport wrote:
  | [flagged]
 
  | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
  | The internet is designed for average people to suck down
  | content, rather than create content. It's why I get 1gbps down
  | but 35mbps up.
 
    | thfuran wrote:
    | The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the
    | modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most
    | part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth
    | because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service
    | infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed
    | for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
 
    | throw0101c wrote:
    | The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it
    | for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-
    | heavy does not mean other types of application could not be
    | created if more bandwidth was available for upload.
    | 
    | If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with
    | 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were
    | nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing
    | returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth
    | and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
 
      | js8 wrote:
      | > The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy
      | 
      | Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I
      | thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming,
      | which requires low latency bidirectionally.
 
        | throw0101c wrote:
        | I think ten minutes of 4K video probably uses more
        | bandwidth than a multi-hour gaming session: game coders
        | are probably very efficient about what they send over the
        | wire.
 
        | gunapologist99 wrote:
        | and, even if the coders were incredibly _in_ efficient,
        | it probably wouldn't make much difference at all, because
        | 4k is literally multiple orders of magnitude more data
        | than just sending coordinates of players and bullets,
        | which even Doom was doing back in the day with reasonable
        | (playable) latency over dial-up.
        | 
        | As you point out, for most types of online games, most
        | limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
 
    | dspillett wrote:
    | Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often
    | business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre
    | connection in their current location).
    | 
    | Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical:
    | the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced
    | asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's
    | tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in
    | both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it
    | wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd
    | usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was
    | uploading anything like photos of force the connection down
    | to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or
    | less.
    | 
    | This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling
    | frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference
    | to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home
    | users who download far more than they send back, but
    | inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many)
    | large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something
    | many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get
    | ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced
    | (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as
    | soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are
    | enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that
    | ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better
    | upstream.
    | 
    | Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that
    | force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not
    | just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far
    | reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is
    | synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side
    | don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this
    | limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the
    | number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many
    | would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster
    | downstream at the expense of upstream)
 
    | ilyt wrote:
    | That's not "the internet", that's last hop of the internet
    | and mostly due to technical limitations (if you got X
    | bandwidth giving most of it to upload makes sense). FTH makes
    | it easier to give symmetrical access
 
    | thefz wrote:
    | With 2.5Gbps I receive 600Mbit up, which is more than comfy
    | for a home lab and for self hosting... even media.
    | 
    | But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
 
  | TacticalCoder wrote:
  | > It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and
  | continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there
  | are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre.
  | 
  | France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a
  | very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest
  | village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps
  | up).
 
    | throw0101c wrote:
    | > [...] _far from the closest village... And I had fiber to
    | the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up)._
    | 
    | You were probably not surprised that the dwelling you were in
    | had electricity. I think at some point having fibre should
    | also be as unsurprising.
 
      | smeej wrote:
      | Interestingly, there are a lot of places near me in
      | northern New England where I genuinely _am_ surprised to
      | find electricity (or plumbing, for that matter) in a house.
      | 
      | Some places are just that hard to get to.
 
        | throw0101a wrote:
        | IMHO, if you can string a copper wire for power (and
        | POTS) you can string a fibre. It's just a matter of us
        | deciding to wire things up like was done in the 20th
        | century.
 
        | smeej wrote:
        | Sure. These really remote places generally have some way
        | they're generating their _own_ power, which is why I 'm
        | surprised to find it.
 
  | rjsw wrote:
  | I got 500Mb/s symmetrical fibre installed last month. Not
  | seeing much faster transfer rates from individual servers, I'm
  | guessing most do some traffic shaping.
  | 
  | Edit: mistyped G instead of M.
 
    | tw04 wrote:
    | I'm assuming you mean 500Mb/s or are being facetious? 500Gb/s
    | is internet backbone speeds.
 
    | [deleted]
 
    | ta1243 wrote:
    | 500gbit? That's about 5% of the entire capacity of the London
    | Internet Exchange.
    | 
    | I assume you're using some WDM to split the carrier into
    | multiple 100G nics at each end? Doesn't sound cheap.
    | 
    | What's the onward capacity, I assume your link is directly
    | into a major peering centre.
 
| RIMR wrote:
| The only thing that Wi-Fi 7 might solve right now is powerful
| local and ad-hoc data transfers. 48gbps would allow for SSD-like
| speeds over the air. On a home network, you could back up your
| entire laptop in a few minutes to a NAS. With ad-hoc you could
| film in raw 8K, and back up everything to a battery powered
| storage device in a backpack in real time, without needing to be
| tethered.
| 
| It certainly isn't a worthless upgrade, but your average user
| doesn't need it. It's definitely putting the cart before the
| horse, and for the majority of home use cases we need better
| reliability, not more speed.
| 
| Ideally, I would like to see a unified standard that allows for
| devices to connect different wireless bands simultaneously,
| allowing for both speed and reliability based on respective
| signal strength and quality.
 
| karaterobot wrote:
| > There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case
| imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.
| 
| Honestly, 640kbps should be enough for anyone, if you ask me.
 
  | dmw_ng wrote:
  | I'd imagine the priority for the service provider is new
  | product lines built around wifi sensing rather than the
  | marketing about bandwidth. It is /really/ hard to come up with
  | new applications that require so much bandwidth constrained to
  | a one room, especially given we aren't even remotely tapped out
  | on compression fanciness for visual media in mass deployment
  | (see e.g. the recent obscenely low bit rate videoconferencing
  | codec work from Nvidia)
 
| tempaway28751 wrote:
| In the UK supposedly they are switching off Landlines in 2025, so
| anyone that still wants a "landline phone" (as opposed to mobile)
| is going to have to do VOIP
| 
| Its going to be a shitshow because everyone's Grandma is now
| going to trying to get VOIP phones working and domestic routers
| are just a load of crap that crash all the time.
| 
| edit: source: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-
| analogue-to-d...
 
  | yrro wrote:
  | It's already begun. The Stop Sell for Wholesale Line Rental
  | happened this month, so you can no longer order a analogue
  | phoen line in most areas.
 
| snalty wrote:
| I don't think the Openreach ONT is going away for BT FTTP
| customers any time soon, so for now you are free to just plug
| whatever router you want into your ONT.
 
  | gandalfian wrote:
  | Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line to
  | make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to
  | their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
 
    | wolrah wrote:
    | > Unless you eccentrically expect to use your telephone line
    | to make telephone calls. In which case you are rather tied to
    | their router to power their propietary VoIP landline service.
    | 
    | If you're the kind of person who cares about your router, why
    | would you care about their proprietary VoIP service? Just use
    | any other VoIP provider of your choice.
 
    | ta1243 wrote:
    | For FTTP (or indeed FTTC) my ISP will sell a voip bundle for
    | PS3 a month or something on top. You just plug in a phone,
    | maybe stick it on it's own VLAN if you want. There's plenty
    | of other voip providers too.
 
    | Daviey wrote:
    | Emotive language such as "eccentrically" is strange
    | considering the decline in landline subscribers, and even
    | less usage of an actual landline.
    | 
    | If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would you
    | choose to use one bundled with your internet provider
    | compared to a much more competitive independent voip
    | provider?
    | 
    | This is a good summary of the decline:
    | https://www.wrappz.com/blog/decline-of-the-landline/
 
      | gandalfian wrote:
      | Yes Daviey, those of use using a telephone in the
      | traditional way are a diminishing number. Hence passively
      | becoming eccentric... Not as much as the person riding a
      | penny farthing but slowly heading that way.
      | 
      | To the other questions in the UK yes you can move your
      | landline telephone number to a third party open standard
      | sipp voip service, but setting up a voip adapter to pretend
      | to be a landline is fiddly for many and migrating a
      | landline telephone number, while it can be done, is not a
      | nice process in practice. If you have an openreach ont with
      | a telephone socket built in don't expect it to do anything
      | in the future. The industry went another way. If you wish
      | to carry on plugging in a telephone to your landline
      | without any configuration then you will have to start using
      | the telephone socket on your wifi router and only the
      | router provided by your isp. (With some exceptions). Though
      | most people won't care because they just use their mobiles
      | now...
 
        | rlpb wrote:
        | > If you wish to carry on plugging in a telephone to your
        | landline without any configuration then you will have to
        | start using the telephone socket on your wifi router and
        | only the router provided by your isp.
        | 
        | I find the need to configure a router or VoIP adapter to
        | be a strange, over-engineered concept when it comes to
        | replacing POTS. We're already authenticated by virtue of
        | being physically connected. The exchange should be able
        | to pass through the identity of the connecting line and
        | no authentication or manual configuration is a
        | fundamental requirement. In PPP, authentication is
        | optional, but BT/OpenReach require it and complicate
        | everything for consumers for no good reason. Since nearly
        | every line has only one provider, they should keep track
        | of that at their end, and then routers wouldn't need PPP
        | configuration in the common case. Everything could be
        | negotiated automatically, and the protocol already
        | supports this!
        | 
        | We do have TR069 but that adds even more unnecessary
        | complexity.
        | 
        | The same goes for a POTS replacement. Authentication is
        | not fundamentally necessary. They could autodiscover, and
        | then the identity of your physical line could be passed
        | through. There isn't an obvious protocol here, but it's
        | trivial to achieve technically as long as it isn't
        | overengineered (see for example uPnP IGD vs. NAT-PMP). If
        | this is a real problem, it can be addressed.
        | 
        | I don't think it's part of most consumer's threat models
        | that it matters if their line identity is intercepted and
        | used by an adversary, since we all use higher level
        | protocols to establish higher level authentication
        | anyway. But if it were, then TOFU together with an out-
        | of-band update mechanism (eg. "call customer service to
        | activate your new phone and/or router" or just "scan the
        | QR code on the side of your phone and/orrouter with our
        | app to activate it") would be all that's needed to deal
        | with that. Client side authentication still wouldn't be
        | needed, and can't address that threat model directly
        | anyway.
 
      | snuxoll wrote:
      | > If you want to have a functioning "landline", why would
      | you choose to use one bundled with your internet provider
      | compared to a much more competitive independent voip
      | provider?
      | 
      | So much this. Even the local Cable co. charges more for
      | residential home phone than competitors like Ooma do, and
      | of course if I wanted to go the whole way with deploying
      | small SIP PBX in my house I could do it for less than a
      | couple bucks a month getting a DID from Flowroute.
      | 
      | I guess getting it bundled by your triple-play provider of
      | choice means you don't have to worry separately about
      | battery backup because regulations usually require they
      | provide that with their CPE; but it's not a big deal to
      | hook your equipment up to a UPS either.
 
    | garblegarble wrote:
    | Is that different from the landline service they offer
    | directly from the ONT? My Openreach ONT has a telephone jack
    | as well as the RJ45. I've never actually used the telephone
    | jack, but I'd imagine I would get a voip-backed fake dial
    | tone if I did?
 
      | ta1243 wrote:
      | I used to have BT Broadband FTTP in a previous house, which
      | had a bidirectional fibre into a box of some sort, which
      | was battery powered, and went into another box which
      | emerged as a telephone jack, and an RJ45.
      | 
      | This was 2016. The battery box was there to provide power
      | and service for a landline in a power cut.
      | 
      | My router plugged into that RJ45 with a pppoe client,
      | username "bthomehub@btbroadband.com" and looks like any old
      | password ("BTSux" for example)
 
| aeadio wrote:
| This article is completely inept. I'm nowhere near an expert in
| WiFi tech, but having done a lot of in-office WiFi setups over
| the past several years, it's easy to see the differences in
| quality generation over generation.
| 
| > Trouble is, the woes listed in the messaging are those that
| previous versions of services and wireless standards claimed to
| fix. If they didn't fix them, why should we believe this lot
| will? If they did, what is Qualcomm actually saying? It's a
| paradox.
| 
| Previous iterations of WiFi DID fix these problems. Modern "WiFi
| 6" is significantly better at handling many simultaneous clients
| than the old 802.11b/g were. We've been through multiple
| generational improvements to the old scheme, such as,
| - 802.11n using 5 GHz with lower penetration, making it easier to
| create more and smaller cells        - 802.11n introducing MIMO,
| leveraging airspace better        - 802.11ac introducing MU-MIMO,
| allowing simultaneous transmission for multiple clients        -
| 802.11ax expanding MU-MIMO into the frequency domain, making it
| more effective        - Much better and quicker channel reuse
| during potential collisions       - Quicker transmission means
| the time slices clients DO get are more meaningful
| 
| WiFi has gotten so much better over the past several years, that
| I suspect people just don't remember how unreliable it was
| before. Part of this is because it's been a gradual improvement,
| as new standards have come out, on-market hardware has slowly
| taken up these new features, and client devices need to be aged
| out and replaced before a newer device can make use of these
| newer features -- which users might just attribute to their new
| device being "better", and not that the WiFi got better.
| 
| It's not hard to look at the WiFi 7 (802.11be) Wikipedia page and
| see that it offers several improvements to handle increased
| client load,                 - Multi-Access Point (AP)
| Coordination (e.g. coordinated and joint transmission)       -
| Enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocol (e.g. Hybrid
| Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ))       - Enhanced resource
| allocation in OFDMA       - Optimized channel sounding that
| requires less airtime       - Implicit channel sounding       -
| Support of direct links, managed by an access point
| 
| > There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case
| imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not.
| 
| WiFi quality is not dictated by the advertised transmission rate.
| That's just the number hardware vendors love to advertise,
| because it keeps getting bigger and bigger generation-on-
| generation, whereas all these other improvements are much more
| nuanced and tough to communicate in marketing copy.
| 
| > The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond
| 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff
| necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems
| won't be fixed.
| 
| Which may actually be desirable. Less penetration through walls
| means smaller cells that don't interfere (need to share airspace)
| with as many neighbors. This has been a boon in dense settings
| (office buildings, apartment buildings, public WiFi) during the
| 2.4 GHz -> 5 GHz transition.
| 
| If you have a large house with many walls separating each room,
| you may now need more APs to cover the same area. But looking at
| the proliferation of mesh-based systems, it seems the market is
| already moving that way anyway.
| 
| > It would be amazing if one in a hundred households notice an
| iota of difference if their current router magically sprouted Wi-
| Fi 7, and this won't change much for the years it takes to get
| phones, laptops, and everything else with older versions of the
| standard upgraded. Good luck getting those managed end-to-end
| services up and running too.
| 
| And this is just uselessly defeatist. My current devices don't
| support the new standard, so why bother? WiFi has seen tremendous
| advances in quality and capability over the past 15 years, and
| users have always realized those advances as their devices age
| out. Back in the 802.11g days, it would've been unheard of to
| have multiple TVs and iPads in a single apartment within a
| densely populated apartment building streaming 4K video over WiFi
| simultaneously.
 
| pzo wrote:
| > Wi-Fi 6's comparable maximum rate is 9.6Gbps. There is no
| consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where
| 50Gbps works where 10 will not.
| 
| iphone has just 2x2 MIMO antena so even with WiFi 6 can get only
| max 2.4Gbps (1.2Gbps per antena - someone correct me if I'm
| wrong). And those are only max speed in labs in perfect
| conditions. So there is definitely use case for WiFi 7 in
| consumer devices e.g. VR/AR/Drones streaming cameras, remote
| control etc. Higher bandwidth should also make connection more
| robust and overall latency possibly reduced.
| 
| I'm definitely looking forward for WiFi 7
 
  | ilyt wrote:
  | Streaming raw video to VR headset is probably _only_ situation
  | when it makes sense for consumers. For near every single other
  | thing it 's a massive overkill
 
    | pzo wrote:
    | another example: Apple added camera continuity for latest
    | tvOS, you might want make video call with 4k at 60fps - sure
    | you probably want to compress it but still you want to reduce
    | latency.
    | 
    | Also with smartphones that have 1 TB of storage would be nice
    | to use it as fast wireless hard drive
 
    | ta1243 wrote:
    | There's no qos or control over the radio channels. A 120gbit,
    | 120fps, 8k stream is lovely, until you have network
    | interference of 10ms and you drop a frame.
 
  | ac29 wrote:
  | >Higher bandwidth should also make connection more robust
  | 
  | Nope. Higher bandwidth could mean two things:
  | 
  | Larger channel size: larger channels have a higher noise floor
  | and are are therefore less robust
  | 
  | Faster throughput: Faster throughput generally means larger
  | channels (as above) or various techniques to get more bits/Hz
  | (such as more complex modulation), both of which are less
  | robust
 
    | pzo wrote:
    | I was more thinking if there is some frame collision and have
    | a lot of data to send then overall robustness latency should
    | be reduced? Similar like in a bus even if they travel at the
    | same speed if you miss your bus or bus is full you have to
    | wait. On the other hand if the bus is bigger with more sits
    | or bus scheduled more frequent it's less likely you will have
    | to wait. Also if bus breaks there is another one not far away
    | behind to pickup passengers from broken bus.
 
    | eximius wrote:
    | I think I read this somewhere but I am struggling to recall
    | where, so hopefully I didn't dream this: I believe the larger
    | channels are much, much larger and include adaptive
    | techniques to dynamically exclude noisy regions within
    | channel. It can afford to entirely sacrifice bands in this
    | way because the channels are much larger.
 
      | ac29 wrote:
      | Even in the absence of all anthropogenic RF noise, the
      | noise floor on larger channels is higher. Specifically, I'm
      | thinking of thermal noise:
      | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise
 
    | cycomanic wrote:
    | What you're writing isn't really correct either, this partly
    | stems from the difficulty of what we mean by "robust".
    | 
    | To increase throughput (i.e. bitrate ) we can either increase
    | the channel bandwidth or the SNR (and use that SNR for higher
    | modulation formats). Increasing the channel bandwidth does
    | increase the noise power (assuming matched filtering) but we
    | typically also assume that the psd of the signal stays the
    | same => signal power increases and SNR stays the same.
    | 
    | If we mean by "robust" that the signal is not as susceptible
    | to fluctuations of the noise, than increasing the bandwidth
    | could help. Assuming we want the same bitrate, we could use
    | the larger bandwidth to reduce the modulation format and thus
    | the required SNR while keeping the bitrate the same. However
    | a larger bandwidth typically also increases probabilities of
    | impairments (interferers, filtering...) but this is typically
    | still a win, because capacity throughput is linearly
    | proportional to bandwidth but only logarithmically to SNR.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | jeroenhd wrote:
  | The 2.4Gbps phy rate is nowhere close to usable bandwidth. With
  | wide channels, good reception, not too much interference, and
  | no really old hardware interfering with your connection, you
  | can get over 1gbps on it, but the theoretical maximum is
  | irrelevant to most use cases.
  | 
  | In practice, most people don't have their routers set up for
  | 160MHz bands (because older devices don't support it and will
  | fall back to the much slower 2.4GHz otherwise) and in some
  | areas near radars you can't even use those bands in the first
  | place. However, with modern equipment, you can definitely get
  | plenty of bandwidth over WiFi 6.
  | 
  | The 50Gbps number stated also assumes very wide channels and
  | even more recent devices, if WiFi 6 isn't doing it for you
  | today, WiFi 7 won't be that much better.
 
  | danaris wrote:
  | I'm honestly struggling to come up with a use case for a
  | _single iPhone_ to need more than 300 megabytes per second
  | (2.4Gbps) of bandwidth at any given time. (Noting that 8K
  | video, in fairly un-optimized scenarios, appears to need about
  | 96Mbps--just 12 megabytes per second, or 4% of that  "low"
  | bandwidth.)
  | 
  | What are you doing, streaming raw, uncompressed video from
  | multiple sources to a single iPhone? If you've got that many
  | devices you _need_ to stream from...it seems to me that it
  | makes sense to invest in some dedicated hardware to handle
  | that, rather than expect to do everything with just an iPhone.
 
    | supertrope wrote:
    | Faster link speed allows the Wi-Fi radio to finish
    | transmission faster and go to sleep prolonging battery life.
    | 
    | TCP throughput is about half of the link rate. iPhones before
    | the 15 Pro maxed out at 1200 Mbps link rate because they are
    | 2x2 MIMO with 80 MHz max channel banwdidth.
 
      | rubatuga wrote:
      | There may be diminishing returns on watts per bit,
      | something that 10gbe Ethernet is not great at.
 
    | pzo wrote:
    | for iPhones maybe not but for drones or AR devices if you
    | want to stream 4k at 60fps or 120fps then there is a lot of
    | data to send. You could use iPhone as Drone payload for doing
    | some site/construction inspection etc. Same with drones -
    | they can fly very fast so would be nice to stream at
    | 4k@120fps. Drones or iphones can/have many camera including
    | lidar, depthmap (trudepth)
 
      | danaris wrote:
      | ...Then what was the point of specifically calling out the
      | 2x2 MIMO antennae of the iPhone?
 
        | pzo wrote:
        | that 9.6Gbps speed mentioned in the article doesn't apply
        | for most consumer devices because they have only 2
        | antennas. Only expensive routers have many antennas to
        | reach such speed. Not sure if we can have 8 antennas in
        | smartphones
 
      | ilyt wrote:
      | That is only the case if you wanted to stream uncompressed
      | data (which for drones is defeinitely not needed), so VR/AR
      | maybe, anything else it would be a waste.
 
      | ilyt wrote:
      | That is only the case if you wanted to stream uncompressed
      | data (which for drones is definitely not needed), so VR/AR
      | maybe, anything else it would be a waste.
 
        | pzo wrote:
        | compressing big video frames (4k) takes time. If your
        | application is latency critical (and drones moving at
        | 100km/h is) and you are streaming at 120fps you have only
        | 8ms for video frame processing. Sometimes you also want
        | uncompressed data (lidar, depthmap) not for human but for
        | machine computer vision / processing.
 
  | sp332 wrote:
  | And MIMO means the AP can talk to multiple such clients at the
  | same time, even if each iPhone is only using 2x2.
 
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Really looking forward to better wifi for better wireless VR.
 
| giantg2 wrote:
| I would rather have ethernet in every room and a less
| sophisticated/powerful wifi. It seems ethernet is fairly rare
| even in new construction.
 
  | hk1337 wrote:
  | Ethernet is how I see the full ~1Gig for up and down at home. I
  | trust the security of ethernet over wifi more too, although at
  | home I am less concerned on wifi.
 
  | DoingIsLearning wrote:
  | To be fair it's a lot less cumbersome to do yourself than a
  | full on electrical installation.
  | 
  | Most diy shops will sell baseboards with precut pockets for
  | cable routing.
  | 
  | For any reasonably hands on technical person it's a 1 or 2 day
  | job ripping baseboards and installing new ones with CAT6
  | cabling behind.
  | 
  | Of course it's definitely the sort of thing you can only get
  | away with if you own the house.
 
  | rockostrich wrote:
  | My house is new construction (although I had no input to the
  | construction) and it wasn't wired for ethernet which is crazy
  | to me. Although it is at least wired with coax so I just bought
  | 2 pairs of MoCA adapters and now I have wired connections where
  | I want them.
 
  | malfist wrote:
  | When I built my house in 2014, they told us we got 2 phone
  | jacks that were cat5e that we could convert to ethernet if we
  | wanted. That was the default they provided, we upgraded to 24
  | ports throughout the house, but I can't imagine this is common.
  | 
  | Two years ago when we were thinking about buying a new house,
  | we toured a bunch of homes that were built in the past decade,
  | probably over a hundred houses. Less than 10 had more than 1 or
  | 2 ethernet ports. Only 2 had ethernet in most rooms.
 
  | em-bee wrote:
  | 20 years ago when we renovated an old house, while the
  | electrician was digging chases into the walls i asked him to
  | add an extra empty pipe for ethernet next to each cable pipe.
  | it barely cost any extra work, and later i ran the ethernet
  | cable myself with the help of a friend.
  | 
  | i don't live in that house any more, but my usage patterns with
  | a laptop moving around frequently make wifi a far more
  | practical experience. the extra effort of cabling just isn't
  | worth the cost.
  | 
  | in a larger houses i'd want one ethernet cable from the
  | entrance to the center and to the back so that you can hook up
  | multiple wifi access points, but that's it.
 
    | rlpb wrote:
    | My prediction of future bandwidth growth is that to get super
    | high speed wi-fi you'll need line of sight to an access point
    | that has fast enough (ie. wired) backhaul. Even today you can
    | get considerable speedup by doing that. So I think power and
    | network cabling (or just PoE) to eg. every area of ceiling or
    | wall is still worth it and reasonably future-proof since
    | that'd typically be enough for up to 10G per area.
 
| corn13read2 wrote:
| Generally I disagree with this sentiment. Do not wait to make a
| pipe bigger because it is full. We had this issue with phone
| lines and then CAT5 and CAT still sucks because commercial
| equipment is so expensive. How can the world innovate in-home
| technology when it's not cheap and ubiquitous.
| 
| I can definitely imagine things I can do with that in-house, not
| just for me but for other adopters.
 
  | RIMR wrote:
  | I agree with you that we shouldn't wait to upgrade until after
  | we are facing constraints, but the current state of home
  | networking is so robust that we're absolutely nowhere close to
  | the pipe being full. I am in no way opposed to the development
  | and deployment of Wi-Fi 7, but I do have a problem with it
  | being marketed as a major upgrade for consumers, when the
  | average consumer is more likely to be adversely affected by
  | worsening radio coverage than benefit from the increased
  | maximum speed.
 
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and three
| Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire, my
| fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from a
| foot away, my results are around 650Mbps.
| 
| The local church recently had T-Mobile install a 5G antenna array
| around it. I'm about two blocks away.
| 
| Over 5G, I get 1.4Gigs down, though my walls, through an entire
| house between us.
| 
| But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it as
| a stand.
 
  | bombcar wrote:
  | 640Mbps should be enough for anyone!
  | 
  | It is kind of amusing that 5G surpasses wifi when it's
  | obviously a more complicated protocol (though, it's frequency
  | regulated whereas your wifi is not; perhaps testing your wifi
  | in the middle of a field in Kansas with nothing around would
  | get better speeds).
 
  | agloe_dreams wrote:
  | OP here, few findings from here: 1. My iPhone only supports
  | 2x2, makes sense now. 2. My M1 14 inch macbook pro only
  | supports 2X2 as well. That is interesting:
  | https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/macbook-pro-wi-fi...
  | 3. The phone next to the router was a bit of a joke, but yeah,
  | still same performance. 4. TMobile is not messing around I
  | guess.
 
  | treis wrote:
  | I think pretty much all wifi devices lie about the speed they
  | can obtain. A lot that claim gigabit combine the speeds of
  | 2.4GHz & 5GHz to get to 1 Gbps. Few devices out there
  | legitimately offered the speed they advertise. At least that's
  | what I saw when I looked a couple years ago.
 
  | ac29 wrote:
  | >But my Wifi router only gets 650 down with the phone using it
  | as a stand.
  | 
  | I cant speak to WiFi, but on the long range wireless stuff I
  | work with the hardware does almost as poorly with signal levels
  | that are too high as signal levels that are too low. Putting
  | your phone literally on top of the WiFi router is likely not
  | going to be a best case test scenario.
 
    | agloe_dreams wrote:
    | My apologies, I was trying to make a bit of a joke of the
    | context of the distance and items between the 5G signal vs
    | the router, below the cause is explained well.
 
    | SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
    | Getting too close takes you out of the "far field" and into
    | the "near field"[1] where the device just won't work at all.
    | It's probably actually connecting via reflections from the
    | walls if stuck right on top of the router. You need to be at
    | least 7.5cm away from a 5Ghz router with 15cm antennas to be
    | in the far field, and anything within about 4.5cm will be
    | entirely inside the reactive near field (and have very poor
    | coupling with standard antennas designed for far field use).
    | 
    | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field
 
  | danaris wrote:
  | Well, what rate do you get through your router over a _wired_
  | connection?
  | 
  | That is, is the problem with your Wifi connection the Wifi, or
  | your ISP or service plan?
 
  | dv_dt wrote:
  | It's more the provisioning of the network in your area than the
  | actual link tech. t-mobile speeds outside my house have been
  | going down from 10mbps down to around one as they've rolled out
  | 5G upgrades (or maybe merged in sprints network).
 
  | secondcoming wrote:
  | I use a 5G router. I get about 600mbps from it over Ethernet,
  | and 300mbps over Wifi
 
  | throw0101c wrote:
  | > _What annoys me is this: I have a TMobile iPhone 15 Pro and
  | three Erro Pro 6 units, all with wired backhaul. Over the wire,
  | my fast.com results repeatedly reach ~1.2 Gigs. Over Wifi, from
  | a foot away, my results are around 650Mbps._
  | 
  | I have an iPhone 12 talking to a Sagemcom 5689E that gets about
  | the same.
  | 
  | Want faster? Get gear that's designed to go faster, i.e./e.g.,
  | both ends support 802.11ax (Wifi 6E).
  | 
  | If I upgraded to an iPhone 15 I'd be able to use the 6 GHz
  | signal and probably get higher bandwidth.
 
    | supertrope wrote:
    | 650 Mbps is a very good result for Wi-Fi 6. 2x2 MIMO and 80
    | MHz channel yields a link rate of 1200 Mbps. Throughput of
    | half the link rate is typical. iPhones don't support 4x4 MIMO
    | or 160 MHz wide channels needed to go significantly faster
    | (2400 Mbps with one enabled or 4800 Mbps with both features).
 
      | throw0101a wrote:
      | I'm curious to know if going to 6GHz (Wifi 6E) would help
      | at all, or does that band simply allow for more channels
      | that have less noise?
      | 
      | I don't think any new MCSes were added for 6E. Though,
      | AFAICT, there will be for 802.11be/Wifi 7, 12-15:
      | 
      | * https://scdn.rohde-
      | schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/premiumdo...
 
        | supertrope wrote:
        | 6e is more channels. There's plenty of room to hog a 160
        | MHz channel in the 6 GHz band. In 5 GHz there's only two
        | 160 MHz channels. https://systemzone.net/wp-
        | content/uploads/2020/01/5-GHz-Chan...
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | mastercheif wrote:
  | That's because iPhones (and all other smartphones) use 2x2 mimo
  | WiFi arrays.
  | 
  | The only way you'll get > 1 GBPS on WiFi is on a device with
  | 3x3 or 4x4 mimo WiFi.
  | 
  | 2x2 is used because it's less power intensive and takes up less
  | physical space in the device.
 
    | standing_user wrote:
    | Are there smartphones with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo wifi?
 
      | supertrope wrote:
      | No.
 
    | throw0101c wrote:
    | > _The only way you'll get > 1 GBPS on WiFi is on a device
    | with 3x3 or 4x4 mimo WiFi._
    | 
    | At 160 MHz 802.11ax (5 GHz) should be able to get 1200 Mbps
    | at the PHY layer with a single spatial stream:
    | 
    | * https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/so/ReferenceGuide_8021
    | 1...
    | 
    | Two streams gets you 2400 Mbps (PHY).
 
      | dboreham wrote:
      | And you have to divide the PHY symbol rate by 4 to get the
      | real world TCP throughout achievable.
 
  | jeroenhd wrote:
  | That sounds rather low, the Eero Pro 6 should support 4x4 MU-
  | MIMO in the upper 5.8GHz band. You'll never get the advertised
  | 2400mbps even on that band, but the 650mbps figure you state
  | comes closer to the 2x2 rate of the lower 5.2GHz band.
  | 
  | Maybe you need to check your APs' settings, because these
  | numbers sound off.
  | 
  | Edit: never mind, iPhones use 2x2 antennae. A little strange to
  | not put in more in such a high-end device, but I guess it saves
  | a bit of power. They do use 4x4 on the 5G chip, though? Very
  | peculiar.
 
  | supertrope wrote:
  | https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html#wifispeeds
 
| mikelward wrote:
| Does this affect BT, too?
| 
| Their branding is a bit of a mess at the moment.
 
| samcat116 wrote:
| This article has nothing to do with the next wifi version being
| bad, rather they're just upset EE doesn't allow bridge mode on
| their routers it seems.
 
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(page generated 2023-09-25 23:00 UTC)