Comment by Onavo
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
Yes, that helps quiet a lot in practice because in most places there's limited "frequency-domain" capacity (i.e. free channels) but plenty of "time-domain" capacity, (i.e. free air-time). So even if you are sharing a channel with 4 other APs and their users, everybody may subjectively feel the network is fast. When chopping up the time domain into nanoseconds there's just a lot of idle time available, even if clients are pulling down files at 600Mbps.
But at a fundamental level, the channel space (~60 across all bands best case) is extremely limited but the potential growth in transmitters is unbounded. It's like a linear hack to an exponential problem. It seems to work at first, but under very high load conditions performance still degrades ever faster until it falls off a cliff. Then there's all sorts of complex dynamic behaviour like the hidden node problem to add to this, but it all boils down to needing air-time and SNR.
> But at a fundamental level, the channel space (~60 across all bands best case) is extremely limited but the potential growth in transmitters is unbounded.
You’re overlooking the spatial dimension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_multiplexing
Yeah 6Ghz freq doesn't have DFS channels which remove a lot of usable channels for 5Ghz. Unfortunately it'll be a while until most devices support 6Ghz.
> Unfortunately it'll be a while until most devices support 6Ghz.
Per this May 2025 Juniper presentation, half of their deployed APs have 6 GHZ enabled, and at least 20%—but as much as 50% depending on the environment—of clients have 6 GHz:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV-3gA0OP9s
Corporate environments (where client hardware is more standardize) has higher 6 GHz adoption, BYOD (universities) environments have lower adoption.
So I'm not sure how you define "a while" as, but it's probably already the majority at most workplaces, and will be for personal stuff with-in a year or so.