I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good.

The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.

I don't get what the point of the article is. Is the takeaway that I should lower the channel width in my home? How many WAPs would I need to be running for that to matter? I'd argue it's more important to get everyone to turn down TX power in cases where your neighbors in an apartment building are conflicting. And that's never going to happen, so just conform to the legal limit and your SNR should be fine. Anything that needs to be high performance shouldn't be on wifi anyway.

If you want to spend a really long time optimizing your wifi, this is the resource: https://www.wiisfi.com/

This is such a great write-up it highlights a truth that’s been hiding in plain sight for years: we’ve optimized Wi-Fi for headline speeds, not human experience. Emphasis on throughput reminds one of the "megapixel wars" of early digital photography a simple, clear-cut figure that completely misrepresents actual quality. Responsiveness and reliability are the actual measures that control day to day satisfaction, but they are harder to define and won't neatly go on a store shelf. What is fascinating here is that speed tests themselves actively degrade the network performance. It's like taking your pulse by first dashing a lap in sprinting mode. Whether we'll see more router makers or ISPs start offering "responsiveness scores" instead of speed numbers once the consumer pays attention to latency and airtime contention remains to be seen. At any rate, this post nails the broader cultural problem in networking: the industry still chases awe inspiring numbers instead of better experiences.

Apple has a draft specification for a better way of measuring network quality than just doing speed tests: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness

Their `networkQuality` implementation is on the CLI for any Mac recently updated. It's pretty interesting and I've found it to be very good at predicting which networks will be theoretically fast, but feel unreliable and laggy, and which ones will feel snappy and fast. It measures Round-trips Per Minute under idle and load condition. It's a much better predictor of how fast casual browsing will be than a speed test.

This is a clear case of "you get what you measure". Measuring speed is so easy, everybody can do it, and do it all the time. No wonder that providers optimize for speed. But it also works the other way around. We have developed a focus on speed as it was the only thing that mattered.

I have worked with networks for many years, and users blaming all sorts of issues on the network is a classic, so of course in their minds they need more speed and more bandwidth. But improvements only makes sense up to some point. After that it is just psychological.

One of the things that makes our wifi suck are HP (and other) printers using wifi direct. Looking at a wifi scan, I can see new fewer than 5 of my neighbors printers screaming to the top of their lungs.

The only thing that makes wifi in a large condo building viable is the 6Ghz channels available on wifi 6e

>The IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8) working group has acknowledged the need for a shift in focus, framing the standard’s goals differently from past generations: not chasing ever-higher peak speeds, but improving reliability, lower latency (especially at the 95th percentile), reduced packet loss, and robustness under challenging conditions (interference, mobility).

For people who dont follow WiFi closely. While WiFi 8, or 7 or 6 all has the intended features for its release, they are either not mandated or dont work as well as it should. Instead every release was a full refined execution of previous version. So the best WiFi 6 ( OFDMA ) originally promised will only come in WiFi 7. And current WiFi 7 feature like Multi-Link Operation will likely work better in WiFI 8. So if you wanted a fully working WiFi 8 as they marketed it, you better wait for WiFI 9.

But WiFi has come a long way. Not only have they exceeded 1Gbps in real world performance, they are coming close to 2.5Gbps, maximising the 2.5Gbps Ethernet. And we are now working on more efficient and reliable WiFi.

> Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated.

Is that actually a thing? Why would any ISP intentionally add unnecessary load to their network?

For me the only thing that really matters, and globally sucks with WiFi is roaming.

My house is old and has stones walls up to 120cm, including the inner walls, so I have to have access points is nearly all rooms.

I never had a true seamless roaming experience. Today, I have TP-Link Omada and it works better than previous solutions, but it is still not as good as DECT phones for examples.

For example if I watch a twitch stream in my room and go to the kitchen grab something with my tablet or my phone, I have a freeze about 30% of the times, but not very long. Before I sometime had to turn the wifi off and on on my device for it to roam.

I followed all Omada and general WiFi best practice I could find about frequency, overlap... But it is still not fully seamless yes.

The next release standard is 802.11bn, "Wifi 8", and it has been dubbed Ultra High Reliability (UHR):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11bn

So other considerations are being considered.

> Because consumers have been conditioned to understand only raw speed as a metric of Wi-Fi quality and not more important indicators of internet experience such as responsiveness and reliability.

Whie the two are not the same, they are not exactly separable.

You will not get good Internet speed out of a flaky network, because the interrupted flow of acknowledgements, and the need to retransmit lost segments, will not only itself impact the performance directly, but also trigger congestion-reducing algorithms.

Most users are not aware whether they are getting good speed most of the time, if they are only browsing the web, because of the latencies of the load times of complex pages. Individual video streams are not enough to stress the system either. You have to be running downloads (e.g. torrents) to have a better sense of that.

The flakiness of web page loads and insufficient load caused by streams can conceal both: some good amount of unreliability and poor throughput.

Honestly what's unsaid in a lot of this is that it would be really nice if there were more and wider ISM bands. So much makes use of 900Mhz, 2.4GHz and 5GHz in novel and innovative ways, that if the government and FCC really actually wanted to spark innovation including augmenting wifi performance, they'd stop letting telcos and other questionable interests hoard spectrum and release it as ISM (and no, they shouldn't steal from ham bands to make ISM bands either).

A households bandwidth use is quite a bit different to a business. While a household may have a lot of devices most of them are doing very little at any given time, but the primary device in use requires the best speed possible. In a business however there are a lot of primary devices and not a lot of idle little devices and as such fairness and reliability dominate the needs as does getting the frequencies maxed out for coverage and total bandwidth available.

Wifi 8 will probably be another standard homes can skip. Like wifi 6 it is going to bring little that they need to utilise their fibre home connnections well across their home.

“Behind every good wi-fi network is an excellent wired backbone infrastructure.” - the Tao of Wi-Fi

I wish the Wi-Fi developers would put some serious effort into improving range and contention. Forgot 40 MHz vs 80 MHz — how about some 5 MHz channels? How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR? How about improving the stack to get better performance when a device has mediocre signal quality to multiple APs at the same time?

There are are these cool new features like MLO, but maybe devices could mostly use narrow channels and only use more RF bandwidth when they actually need it.

The thing about speed tests causing a bad experience because they hog airtime felt like a non sequitur (since performing them is rare and manual) until I saw this:

  > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated

Moving into a house for the first time since before college this year, I only just learned about Wi-Fi channel width this week. Apparently the mesh routers I ended up picking several months ago had a default width of 160 MHz, but only go as low as 80 MHz, so that's what I ended up switching to. Anecdotally it has seemed to be somewhat more reliable, but maybe in the long run finding something that can go even lower might be worth it because we do still notice some stutter occasionally that would be nice to reduce even if the theoretical max throughout was a bit lower.

Anyone know what Google Wi-Fi devices are set to?

I don't see a way to change that setting and I don't see a way to see what it's currently set to.

I'm surprised, at least for businesses, small cell wifi is not a thing. For example, if you walk into an office building everyone seems to have a physical phone on their desk that is hard wired. What if that is also a small cell AP. Like a personal AP. Using automation and central provisioning and analytics can make this doable. Yeah handoff and roaming has to be seamless and quick but it doesn't feel that hard, no? If so this would be pretty neat and would solve the contention issue in the air.

Wifi sucks in general. You ever get on a video call and someone has starts talking like a robot? And then, out of pure superstition they start walking around their house hoping to "find" the better reception? And it never really works, but they keep trying it anyhow, and then they either say "maybe I need a better internet" or "but I have full bars." No information is really given to a normal (or in some cases, even technical users) which would allow them to actually correctly diagnose their problem. So like Skinner's pigeons, they just keep playing their ritual even though it has no effect.

The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices

I wonder how many of those could be wired.

Is it really that big of an issue? With device spread over 2.4 5 and 6 ghz you really need a lot of them to run into issues

I actually switched from 40 MHz to 80 Mhz when a friend complained about slow downloads on my Wi-Fi.

So yeah, I do think speed is more important.

Responsiveness doesn’t matter that often and when it does, plugging in Ethernet takes it out of the equation.

I always assumed it was Ethernet protocol itself that made wi-fi suck

I bought a Wi-Fi 6 TP-Link router recently and found out that it's normal for people to have performance/responsiveness issues due to all the "advanced" features enabled. I turned them all off and use the simplest possible connection settings, but somehow there is still a 20-second delay when my smartphone tries to access a web page (and I use 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8, and this never happened on previous wifi routers). The great enshittification rolls on.

Honestly, none of the comments here coming from a place with enough protocol knowledge to talk about the "whys"

I operate a large enterprise wireless network with 80mhz 5Ghz channels and 160Mhz 6Ghz channels. It is possible if your environment allows.

Not the "Need for Speed" I expected.

Is there a good guide on what the right things to do are?

Is this still true with OFDM and subchannels or whatever it's called?

Also MIMO.

And don't think it's relevant to compare what to do in a large space with what one should do at home. The requirements are entirely different.

In a large space with many users I'd use small channels and many access points. I want it to work good enough for everyone to have calls, and have good aggregate throughput.

In a two bed home I'd use large channels and probably only one AP. Peak single device speed is MUCH more important than aggregate speed.

And in a home it matters much more what channels are being busyed by neighbors.

For latency, of course, there is only wired. Even with few devices.

In the IoT space I really wish an "ESP for power line Ethernet" existed these days.

I have 50+ ESP based devices on WiFi and while low bandwidth (and their own SSID) I really wish there were affordable options that they could be "wired" for comms (since they mostly control mains appliances, but the rules and considerations for mixing data and mains in one package are prohibitively expensive).

"The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices"... wtf?