Comment by anyfoo
14 hours ago
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.
> And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps
If one considers that the higher speeds in 802.11ac and 802.11be require 256QAM modulation or better, this is completely expected (assuming 5 GHz band of course, which doesn't go through material very well at all). If you've sen a live eyeball chart of a 256QAM or 1024QAM constellation on test equipment for clear-air microwave link purposes, and seen how quickly it can degrade or get fuzzy if there's anything in the way of the link, it becomes more readily apparent. MCS levels 8 and onwards here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7
"Clean" eyeball example of 256QAM: https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-is-256-qam-modul...
examples of "fuzzy qam" in 16QAM, same principle applies to denser QAM
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-eye-diagram-Symb...
Have you thought about using powerline devices? I’ve successfully used them in place where running my own cable wasn’t a possibility, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-a-powerline...
Yeah, used to run a wifi bridge by necessity for years (yay rental). I could get stable 1gig over wifi6 which is why I'm a little puzzled that 7 isn't much better