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LogTrim 6 hours ago

The peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum.

The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.

My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.

itopaloglu83 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My neighbor thinks that they can increase their 100Mbps ISP speed by having 5 or 6 access points at 2.4GHz in their 1400sq ft (~140m2) apartment.

There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.

spockz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Having a AP in every room can be as significant boost if the walls impede the signal a lot. In fact we have one wall which is especially bad. Stand in front of it or next to it and reception from the front of the house is decent. Take one step back behind the wall and signal drops to less than 10%.

So having the 5-6 AP is not the problem, then shouting at max power is the problem. Especially “gaming” routers tend to do this.

Gigachad 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.

WhyNotHugo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.

I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.

mschuster91 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users.

Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.

Hendrikto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.

izacus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not really how latency works though.