Well the newer WiFi standards on 6Ghz support a lot more channels. Not a perfect work around by any means but it does significantly reduce congestion.

I would agree with that. G to N was perhaps the most critical move in Wi-Fi because it included MIMO. You can think of this as unwanted signal echoes and reflections being switched from a liability to a benefit. Heck, I _still_ run WiFi-4 networks and they perform very well. WiFi-5 was an incremental upgrade, with many experimental features that barely used in practice.

802.11 is in general a vast swag of cool tricks, and when enough ideas are thrown at a wall, many do end up sticking, but for the most part the benefits are cumulative. MIMO being one major exception.

Surely some of that was need. When G was dominant from around 2004-2009 the theoretical maximum was 54mbps… most people were still on DSL or cable at the time, often capping out way below that.

Does any of it have to do with the spectrum becoming available? After 2.4GHz and 5GHz, I have no idea what else the latest/future gens of WiFi are using. As some tech like 2G is no longer in operation, that spectrum was opened up. There are other frequencies that have become available where operating the older equipment that used to operate there is a big no-no now. There was a frequency range used by old wireless microphone systems that are banned at locations.

Just taking a swing at it, but I don't play that sport so probably a big whiff

It's all very proprietary and the tooling is ass, there's a lot of wasted effort creating and testing out the same stuff. Bluetooth is just as horrible for the same reasons.

So that table is using distance as a proxy for signal to noise ratio. SNR is what really matters.

Each data rate in the standard uses a different encoding technique. "Faster" encoding techniques cram more data into a given transmission interval but require a higher signal to noise ratio to be received without error. Since SNR declines with distance you can have a rough idea at what distance from a transmitter you will be able to receive at what data rate.

However, people and vendors focus far too much on maximum throughput. I've seen data showing that even in the best conditions, clients spend about 1% of their time transmitting or receiving at the highest data rates. Because they are dynamically adjusting the data rate based on the perceived SNR.

Individual clients' peak throughput also works against _aggregate_ throughput when talking about wireless networks with multiple users. If you have 100 clients, do you want one to be able to dominate the others or everyone get a more or less equal share? These peak speeds assume configurations that I would never deploy in practice, because they favour individual users and cripple aggregate throughput - things like 160 MHz wide channels.

But the sticker speed is what sells..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Because the variable is the base, not exponent.

yeah, it's pretty common to refer to x^2 as exponential colloquially since there's A. an exponent B. a single term for all values (vs. quadratic, cubic, quartic...)

But you're technically correct!

Due to boring circumstances outside of my control, I have to use WiFi for the most part, so I've got quite some experience with making it run optimally (or rather, as optimally as I managed to, not as optimally as I would like it to).

And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not near radar, which intentionally causes you to get kicked off those channels and lose connection entirely.) And even then you might have to mess about a lot with positioning, because of reflections and generally multipath propagation.

I'd say it's not worth the headache. I would love to lay down Ethernet cable, even if it was just cabling only suitable for 1 Gbps (for which there's no good reason to, might as well do 10 Gbps).

But yeah, any mesh system worth its salt figures out the topology and absolutely favors wired links over WiFi for the back haul. Anything else wouldn't make any sense at all, there is basically no situation where you'd prefer an RF channel over a wire, unless the wire is maybe made of wet string.

how many spatial streams are you using (2x2, 3x3, etc) and are you using an 80 or 160 MHz channel?

If you have a set of full capability 802.11be clients you'll see the best performance with a 3x3 AP and 160 MHz channels.

There aren't any usable chipsets with usable drivers for 802.11ah unfortunately.

Latest-gen zigbee stuff and zwave 800 seems to have already thoroughly occupied that niche for a great deal of home and office automation equipment.