Comment by bjackman
14 hours ago
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
What kind of WiFi 7? (There are a lot that don't have 6GHz support).
You should get far better performance on 6GHz, though there are harsh power limits in most countries with various ways to enable it which may complicate things. But if you can get full power on 6GHz it should reach 10m no issues at all, and with 320MHz should be at least twice as fast.
If you can also get MLO working (which is not simple) you'd be able to bond another band with it.
It's a Unifi Dream Router 7. The 6GHz doesn't reach through the wall IIRC
That doesn't support high power 6GHz (called standard power/AFC). You need one that does support that to get the (much) higher 6GHz transmit power.
Why would 6GHz make such a difference compared to 5GHz?
Because it supports (on WiFi 7) 320MHz channels. So there is double the bandwidth. 5GHz only supports 160MHz channels.
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The brick wall will prevent any and all 6GHz penetration.
Not at higher power output, which that router doesn't support.
I saw a really good improvement through a floor for a device that has wifi 7 radio. Went from about 300mbps to 2000mbps. Going from 5Ghz 80Mhz channel to 6Ghz and 320Mhz was a big change. What has not worked with wifi 7 is MLO, openWRT doesn't really support it very well yet and neither did the original firmware but I have no one on 6ghz within range so its been stable and performant.
For a while I had wireless mesh networking in my new house, until I finally got around to pulling fiber to get a proper 10Gbps backbone. Upgrading from my UniFi WiFi6E AP to a WiFi 7 doubled my effective throughput as measured by SpeedTest. This in a 1930s house with solid brick construction.
For your brick wall home situation; polarization duplex combined with some amount of beam forming/spatial-multiplexing plus importantly directional antennas on both sides of the wall would give you substantial gains even without increasing EIRP. Without EIRP increases it's the receiving side that needs the antenna to improve speed.
Try OpenWRT if you want a good OS for routers. No need to change hardware.
Yeah I was considering this actually, but then I realised that I really want a working LAN 100.0% of the time, so I'd only go tinker mode if I had a backup. So I was gonna be buying a router regardless.
Now I have a Ubiquiti one, it's antithetical to my DIY instincts but I think I'm OK with my router being one of the proprietary appliances in my life.
Plus now the wired section of my LAN is really fast.
Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.
I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.
It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.
All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.
I've just upgraded to an 8Gbit package (50 quid a month, rude not to). I'm having to use the provided router as my old one only has a 2.5Gbit port (still provides wifi however). I'd be keen to know of any fairly decent openwrt compatible routers with 10Gbit/wifi 7 at a reasonable price.
For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.
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> interference motivation
I am not sure what that term means, but perhaps you meant "mitigation"?
Powerline networking is worth trying for this too.
As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.
People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.
Yeah I have tried it! It beats WiFi to some rooms, but to my office it's very slow.
You would never be able to predict this, which is an unfortunate thing about powerline IMO. You just have to buy the modems and see how they perform on your particular wiring.
Do you have personal success using powerline ethernet? I tried it once and it was utter shit.
A very expensive "up to 1000mbps" kit maxed out at ~200 when both devices were plugged into the same outlet. It just got worse with distance.
Just a bit of side opinion working rf and some electrical, and fully understand if that was the best you could get, but some outlets are wired on different circuits. Also, some rf devices get overloaded if you're too close and that can degrade performance. Not saying that's definitively what happened, but you could have been either too close or further than you thought
I tried this once too and instead bought a big-ass SRS bit and went through a concrete wall instead.
Rock solid and reliable networking =)
(Repeating myself coz I saw this after writing my sibling comment..)
It's highly variable in my experience. I've had it work pretty well in some situations and barely at all in others.
I have certainly never got 1000mbps. I think I have got 300 at best. In my office I can only get about 50 even though it works pretty well in other parts of the same small apartment.
... Which is kinda annoying coz they aren't really all that cheap for something you have to just buy and then find out later if it actually works!
How often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?
I had a TP-Link deco, which while great as mesh, you couldn't limit the speed of certain devices. Which was again fine, except when the PlayStation 5 in a room could literally saturate the whole 250mbs bandwidth of my internet and when it would do an update would make our whole houses internet unusable.
It's seriously impressive how it wasnt possible to set per device speed limits or even QoS which has been a thing since like 2007
Is your Deco in AP mode or router mode? Mine says QoS is only available in router mode. I just use my ISP router with the AP turned off and my Decos in AP mode. My ISP router is pretty full-featured so I don't really care to deal with whatever simplified management the Deco would give me if it was the router and firewall instead.
My router is slightly loadbearing for my homelab so probably much more often than average!
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…