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submitted 7 months ago by nave@lemmy.ca to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 33 points 7 months ago

As a network specialist, I have a very different take on this. Why does your wifi at home suck so much?

You'll almost always get faster bandwidth on cellular, unless you have fiber to your home it's hard to compete with the available bandwidth on a commercial network, unless you're in an underserved and over-populated (device-wise) area, your cellular speed should, in most cases, far exceed your available bandwidth at home, but your home WiFi shouldn't suck. You should get, or at least approach speeds up to 1Gbps (or whatever your internet is capable of) on wifi.

A huge problem with it that I've observed is that people treat wifi like a huge truck, they just dump everything on it and that's it. It's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes.... Wait, that's another thing.... What I'm trying to say is that wifi is half duplex, like.... a walkie talkie. Only one person can talk at a time. With WiFi, each "person" (device) that "talks" (transmits) can do so at incredible speeds, so the channel is free sooner.... Unlike with a walkie talkie, when Timmy just won't let go of the talk button.... You can't hear anyone when you hold that button Timmy. Let it go when you're done talking.

Anyways, networks have a lot of stray, not useful (in terms of data throughput) traffic on it. Usually broadcasts (stuff sent to everybody) that should be sent to only a few devices. So there's a kind of static in the background that takes away from your bandwidth. The more devices you have, the more background noise there is on the network.

This is a problem when smart devices are all wifi based. There's ZigBee and zwave and others, but there's a large number of "smart home" devices which are WiFi. Imagine installing 20 lightbulbs which are all smart wifi bulbs, onto a network. That's a lot of static being added; and that static will reduce your wifi speeds.

That's just one example of many. More devices = slower wifi. Thus my motto with WiFi and devices is: use a wire when you can, use wireless when you have to. A good example of this in practice is.... When was the last time you moved your TV? You know, the smart TV with Netflix and everything built in.... Exactly. So why is it on the WiFi? It never moves, there's no need for it to be wireless. That's an easy example of, why not just run a wire to it once, then never think about it again. Copy and paste to desktop PCs which are on wifi, and set top boxes, etc.

Switching from wifi smart/IoT devices to ZigBee or zwave will also help....

The other point I would make is: throw out your all in one router. Yeah, the WiFi router you bought from Amazon/best buy/radio shack/whatever. Throw it right in the garbage. Buy something that doesn't suck. An easy option is ubiquiti. Put wireless access points in and use ethernet to connect them to the network. No mesh bs, or anything. You'll improve your wifi signal and wireless devices will be able to load balance across them. I have a space that's about 800 (ish) sq ft. I have two access points. One covers the space easily.... I still have two. Why? Because load balancing. So when someone is pulling a lot of bandwidth on an access point, the other is right there, in range, ready to take everything on that needs more bandwidth than the small amount left after that one demanding device has taken what it needs. The situation is great, I never have WiFi related slow downs and all of my devices can easily consume all of the available download from my ISP, and my firewall/router/gateway, does the load balancing for the internet connection.

"But it costs so much!", I hear you say. Well, how much do you spend per month on your internet service? $50? More? And you don't want to spend even $100 on a router, which will last years when you're spending $50/month on service? What kind of a fool are you? You're getting what you pay for. The $65 Netgear wifi router is going to struggle. Especially after a little while. Ubiquiti has put out several, recent, and inexpensive options recently for home use. There's the UDR, UX and UCG-Ultra for starters, ranging from $150-$200 (ish). You don't need the $400+ UDM Pro. Add a small switch and a couple access points and you're up to maybe... $500? That's the same as 10 months of internet. So for less than one year of what you spend to get access to the internet, you'll have a system that doesn't suck and will probably last 5+ years. If you factor that out, it's less than $10 a month. Cheapskate. You spend more than that on coffee in a week. Shut up.

TL;DR: your shit sucks. Do better.

[-] MyNamesNotRobert@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

How can I make my Debian pc always stay connected to the wifi? Even if it disconnects for some reason, it needs to reconnect as soon as it can without throwing any password prompts or requiring any human intervention whatsoever. Having to click a "connect" button first counts as human intervention.

Bering trying to figure this one out for years, don't expect a working answer but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

[-] 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 months ago

My debian laptop always reconnects to my wifi automatically

The only annoying thing is it always asks for a password unless you set it to save the wifi credentials for everyone instead of encrypted.

I cant remember the exact wording of the option, but its in thr security tab of each wifi network

[-] MyNamesNotRobert@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I have all those settings enabled. The solution does not lie in the ui buttons. I've beat that horse dead. It always asks for a password and always shows that stupid fucking reconnect window that someone has to click. It's absolutely maddening. I might have to make a system mouse clicker bot for this because there might really be no other way. I don't know how to do that but considering how much time I've wasted trying to find any solution, it's just another attempt.

Too bad there's not a one-time "reconnect now" command that can be attached to a script. And no, disabling the network interface and re enabling it via automated command line scripts doesn't make it reconnect.

[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 months ago

I haven't personally used Debian with WiFi like this. I've used Debian and Debian based distributions on laptops and I've used those to connect to WiFi, but I'm not a full time Linux user.

Since I work on the IT/support side, most of my support tools only run correctly on Windows. Sure, there are client/user side tools for Linux/Mac/Windows, but the technician tools are frequently Windows centric; so most of my stuff is installed with some flavour of Windows.

Most of my knowledge is out of date, but I seem to recall that you can save settings in the wpa supplicant for the network, and set the network manager to default to that wifi connection (ESSID/BSS) when it is in range/available. This was all done in config files, but I'm equally aware that a lot of the Linux networking subsystems have been pretty dramatically changed in the past ~5 years, so I doubt the settings I would have used for this, still exist.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more help here. I just don't have the long term experience with the issue.

I have an old laptop with Debian installed, and I can fire that up for testing and play with it... What version of Debian are you running? I want to make sure the version I have installed isn't so out of date that the testing I do won't help at all.

That system is just sitting on a shelf doing nothing, so it won't be a problem to pull it out and tinker with it for a while. I use a lot of Debian based stuff for servers, usually I'm using rasbian or Ubuntu, but AFAIK they're all very similar.

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