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Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry’s New Priority: Stability
(spectrum.ieee.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Good. I almost never need speeds in excess of those possible with WiFi 2, and 90% of the time WiFi 1 speeds are enough, but very often my speeds drop below 1mbps, rendering accessing the Internet on my phone or tablet essentially useless.
Currently gigabit Ethernet is faster and more reliable than WiFi, despite WiFi theoretically being equivalent. The benefit of increased speed and scalability is never needing wired infrastructure at the home/office.
We’re in a race: on one side WiFi7 had great potential, but on the other side 2.5gE is becoming more common on new PCs. Who will win? Will consumers care, if they don’t have a home lab and can’t get an internet connection to match?
For those claiming current bandwidth is more than people need, I would agree in theory but it just doesn’t pan out in reality. There are always network glitches and irregularities, there’s ever more tracking and advertising, there’s ever more Interference.
Recently my fiber provider had issues and my connection was downgraded to 350/150 with 44ms: theoretically still way faster than I need yet even “simple” web pages were noticeably slower.maybe I’m spoiled but I couldn’t imagine trying to game on that
I resent wireless because I feel like we got led astray by the aesthetics crowd. It was never good-- contested bandwidth, poor penetration, paper-mache security, but it was so much more attractive than cables asunder that we're throwing moonshot resources at it to try to make it good enough.
Meanwhile, consumer wired has stagnated. You can finally get 2.5GbE on a lot of new mainboards, but there are few affordable home router/AP devices, especially with multiple 2.5G ports. the local home centres still primarily stock spools of Cat5E, and even new-build developments treat networking as a low-priority line item, probably well below cable TV jacks, if they mention it at all.
If we had put the same emphasis on wired, there'd be 10/40Gb fibre NICs in commodity systems, and the Home Despot would sell all-inclusive fibre and Cat6A or 8 retrofit box kits.
My SFP 10GbE equipment was cheaper than the 1GbE equipment I installed 15 years ago. You can absolutely set up a home fiber network affordably if you want, NICs for tower hardware isn't even the issue - even SFP USB dongles are widely available and not that expensive.
Yup, I went with MikroTik for my home network, and it's been great, although the sfp switch I'm eying will set me back a bit.
I switched my house to 10gbe & 2.5gbe and never looked back. Not only is it fast, it's so much more stable. I still have 1gbe for things like PoE cameras but man. My network is rock solid.
You might just have a crappy router in general...? Not as in, you need the newest router with fastest speeds to tide over the slower times. What I mean is that there's lots of cheap, no-name routers that are just extremely unreliable. Many ISPs hand them out.
Investing into a more expensive router from a widely known brand is usually well worth the money, in my experience. You can probably even buy a used one and still have a better experience.
Currently I'm a college student, so I don't have my own router but I use my university WiFi. And that frequently goes below 1mbps.
Ah, yeah, that would do it, too. I don't necessarily feel like a new standard will help with that either, but who knows, maybe in a decade or two, every university WiFi router is on WiFi 7...
In that case, in assuming interference is the issue. A lot of college housing is made of solid concrete block which is great at blocking WiFi signal
There's some of that, but even in the open dining hall space I get terrible Internet speeds, even when it isn't particularly crowded there.