I can't say that AFC excites me:
<a href="https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf</a><p>Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to verify what frequencies they can use.<p>It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.
This is a really helpful guide to understand wireless networking. For in-depth reviews, I like to check out SmallNetBuilder [0] as they feature thorough tests and sometimes teardown of the wireless routers. Most "reviews" these days are pretty much just regurgitating the marketing spiel from manufacturers, which really doesn't help much.<p>Recently, I also stumbled upon a Chinese site [1] which does similar teardowns, but only in Chinese.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.acwifi.net/category/information" rel="nofollow">https://www.acwifi.net/category/information</a>
This article is so awesome!<p>I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1 802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.<p>Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.<p>Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz the PHY rate drops to <100 Mbps, so in those cases I recommend 802.11n 40MHz on 5GHz band.<p>The AP/Router/Modem combo that all the ISPs give in my country is very much capable of fast WiFi. It has 4x4 MIMO at 802.11ac with 80MHz + 2x2 MIMO at 802.11n up to 40 MHz (I always tell people to avoid 40 MHz on 2.4GHz band!).<p>On a good phone, this gets you around 600 Mbps with 867 Mbps PHY, on a cheaper device, between 250 and 290 Mbps on 433 Mbps PHY. Devices with 4x4 can get 1.7Gbps PHY, but I do not have any.<p>This does not stop people from complaining about the free modem they get, demand it is put into bridge mode, buy an ASUS router for >400€, and get the same result. Some (smartly) return the router they bought right away, and request the ISP put the device back into routing mode, but some keep the useless and expensive trophy of stupidity...
This article strongly suggests that modern hardware reviews for consumer grade routers have become mostly useless. This has a wealth of practical knowledge in it the likes of which you never see in a review of a router. So much of the modern internet for product reviews is really advertorials.
Superb article, high on info, low on confusion!<p>For my own home, I used to try to optimize the hell out of it (regularly switching channels, trying new routers etc.)<p>Now I "installed" a TP-Link Deco M9 system. I have 250 Mbps coming in, and at the worst part of my house, my iPhone will still get 100 Mbps from that. That is more than enough even for streaming 4K. So I have now arrived at the "why bother tinkering with a good enough system" stage of WiFi, which is a huge relief.
If you're interested in learning some networking, I recommend Ubiquiti. If you want to save money, I recommend used Ubiquiti.<p>My rationale for buying used is that basically normal consumers typically do not buy Ubiquiti enterprise products - so anyone who does is someone who has experience with technology and will take care of it well.<p>I haven't had a chance to test this out yet, but I hope it works!<p>I picked up an Edgerouter X SFP for $40 on FB Marketplace (retails for $99), the guy selling it is a mobility architect. It came in great condition. After I bought it I found an Edgerouter PoE5 ALSO being sold for $40 - this retails at $275. I don't really need it, but I've thought about buying it since it's so cheap anyways. I'm also going to purchase an AP AC Long Range for $50 - this retails at $109.<p>The Edgerouters do not come with an AP built in, so you have to buy one separately. I don't mind doing this since I think it's easier to mount an access point than it is to mount a router since you have to worry about less wires (just ethernet if the ap can be poe'd).<p>For about $90 total I'll have an enterprise router and AP that'll work much better than the cheap sagecom router I'm renting from my ISP.
It's interesting that the he says in the guide that it's definitely worth getting a 4x4 MIMO AP/router:<p>> It is easy to overlook and miss, but beamforming and diversity are the key reasons why you want a 4×4 MIMO router even though most clients are still only 2×2 MIMO. The extra antennas are actually used and offer value (a stronger signal, which translate to better connect speeds for some users)!<p>Having been a keen user of the TP-Link Omada series of APs I went to check what their capability was. No wonder they don't mention anywhere on the site - it's only 2x2 (for the EAP225). I was able to confirm this by using their maximum speed and the access speeds table in the article.<p>I don't know how much I'm actually missing out on, but I'm going to stop automatically recommending these products now.
This article's comprehensiveness is amazing and worth a read.<p>While I love WiFi for my mobile devices or occasionally when my laptop isn't at my desk, I can't recommend to people enough to prefer actual network cables for their devices which are in "fixed" locations, for example your normal work area for your laptop, or where your TV is with consoles or something like an AppleTV.<p>Once you move at least mostly to wires, you'll find that most (if not all) your network problems just go away.<p>If you're worried about aesthetics, my laptop has power, networking, screens and everything working through a single USB-C port, so my desk is quite pristine. Around TVs and their connected devices it's pretty much always super easy to hide wires.<p>Wireless is a shared medium with everyone in range who is also on wireless, it just can't scale like individual wires (very inexpensively) at 1Gb/s speed EACH. So put everything you practically can on wires, that way your airwaves remain largely open as they're only used by things like mobile phones or light browsing on laptops.<p>I understand that if you're renting then it may not be possible to do wires. My hope is that in the same way that most houses started being built to accommodate cable tv / telephone points, in the future they'll be built to accomodate network points by at least TVs.<p>Offices trying to be all wireless are almost certainly never going to be able to provide high speeds to everyone for the foreseeable future. Employees at their desks should use wired connections and wireless should only be used for mobile phones or people not at their desk for some reason (like being in a meeting).
Buy a router that supports flashing openwrt. It is very transparent to debug and supports lots of features in addition to adblock, monitoring, etc at the router level.
Nice article!<p>However, roaming support is entirely missing. Handover between access points is really important in my experience. It would have been nice to have an overview on the current situation in WiFi.
I went through so many routers until I bought two Ubiquity Wireless AC's.<p>Definitely not consumer friendly to configure using a java webbased application but I never had to reboot or change anything.<p>They just work day in and day out and the family is happy.
> 650 → 390: MAC efficiency
> there are 'housekeeping' packets that MUST be sent at the SLOWEST possible modulation<p>True, but it's actually the slowest <i>supported</i>/<i>enabled</i> modulation, which can be increased. In a crowded 2.4GHz environment (1Mbps min. modulation), raising it to 12Mbps or more can cut 50+% fluff (SSID, ARP, data broadcasts..) down to <5% fluff.<p>> 2166 → 1083: Client MIMO
> You must use the minimum MIMO common to both devices<p>MU-MIMO should enable the router to split its numerous MIMO channels to multiple devices with less MIMO channels. I have no idea whether it actually works.
Nice article.
I find that 5Ghz bands are entirely useless in my house though. Old solid walls and heavy floors mean that I'd need an AP in every room at 5Ghz. At 2.4 I can get away with two good access points.
Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out there?
Very informative.<p>I use a TP Link 1750AC cheap router($60) that seems work perfectly fine for the whole house for streaming and surfing.<p>My internet is about 20mbps down and 6mbps up.<p>I never felt the need that my bandwidth is too slow somehow. What's the super 1Gbps wifi + ISP for? I never need it, maybe until I'm doing VR on Internet some day.<p>Transfer large files inside the house over wifi is the only time I felt wifi is not fast enough, but that happens once a year, for huge size files I can do USB transfer anyways.<p>In short, $60 router suffices for me. I see no needs for wifi6 yet for 99% of the households.
Great article, what we come to hacker news for.<p>Edited to add: I'm starting to think that wireless communications were–on balance–a terrible mistake.
Wi-Fi 6 looks promising for people with really fast Internet connections that are not capped. For capped internet connections it's almost irrelevant. In my experience, it just reaches the cap quicker and ends up in charges or having to carefully manage things to not reach the cap before the end of the month. I downgraded my connection from 350mbps to 200mbps as I was breaching the 1tb cap too quickly (Comcast). I can't imagine having a 1gbps connection with a 1tb cap. It might last a week or two before getting hit with massive overages. It's been nice not having this problem the last few months, but I don't expect to upgrade my router anytime soon. There's simply no service here that would warrant it as Comcast has a monopoly.
This is an excellent reference about the WiFi side. It would be even more awesome if it included software setup -- for my lazy self that's "make sure it runs OpenWRT and does firewalling quickly enough".
Very good information to get great performance. It would be nice if it explained how much to go for for a given WAN speed and LAN requirements. The links I have are 100Mb/s symmetrical so spending 250€ on the recommended router would probably not help compared to the 70€ Archer C7/AC1750 I've installed in a couple of places already.<p>It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support. Add some affiliate links and it could be a nice income stream.
Living in the place where the list of "available networks" can never fit to a single screen of anything, I like the major point:<p>"15. How to improve speeds<p>Use Ethernet whenever possible"
In my experience all in one routers with WiFi at a consumer level will fail after a year, or have other problems. Typically it only fails on the wifi side, so I turn them into ethernet only and hook up an ubiquiti AP. They're configured through a phone app and a QR code, haven't had to worry about it ever again.
Wow, thank you so much for sharing this fantastic resource. Saved me a ton of time, and hugely increased my confidence in how I'm setting things up in my "new" home.
Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it.<p>>Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner (early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware -- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E.<p>We <i>could</i> technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their router would work, the problem is compliance and passing FCC certification and if Upgrade were <i>allowed</i>. Yes may be practically we need to buy new hardware. ( Profits )<p>And I could rant about WiFi 6/ 802.11ax for hours. Basically either buy a decent WiFi 5 or wait for 6E in hope they fix their mess.<p>MacBook Pro - As far as I know All 2016+ MacBook Pros has 802.11ac 3x3 WiFi by default. Giving you a "marketing" speed of 1300Mbps. Older Generation MacBook Pros has 3x3 for 15", 2x2 for MacBook Pro 13". All non-pros MacBook has always had 2x2 WiFi.<p>The reason is simply because only Broadcom make WiFI Client chipset that support 3x3. May be at the request of Apple. And the notebook market is basically an Intel only game. You get incentives and bundle pricing from Intel CPU for using Intel WiFi. And Intel doesn't make 3x3 WiFi ( Or they did but only in <i>Centrino</i> era... ) . Not in 802.11ac and likely not in 802.11ax.<p>Since demand for 3x3 802.11ac continues to be a niche, PC vendors fail to market better WiFi speed as added value. And Intel doesn't want to do a custom WiFi controller just for ~5M unit of MacBook Pro annually. And why innovate when there is no competition? Intel has 90%+ of Notebook PC market shares anyway.<p>In case anyone is wondering, there is an Broadcom 3x3 WiFi 6E client chipset announced last year. Hopefully you will see this in the next MacBook Pro Upgrade.<p>One reason people may have heard about the rumours of Broadcom selling their client WiFi business late last year. Their WiFi PC market is limited by Intel's domination, Smartphone market is a similar situation with Qualcomm. And Broadcom's Client WiFi business is primarily an Apple business. For nearly 4 years I have been anticipating Apple doing WiFi on their own before doing 4G/5G Modem. Considering they use more WiFi unit than Intel's current annual WiFi shipment. But so far only ultra low power chip W3 is being used in Apple Watch.<p>Samsung S20 is also an 2x2 Devices. May be worth an update in the WiFi 6 table.<p>>The AC#### naming ......<p>Those naming are confusing, but one way to look at it is the number represent the theoretical maximum <i>capacity</i> of the WiFi network. Those were never intended to be speed. But of course marketing is working is way. So <i>hypothetically</i> speaking a higher speed router gets you faster speed when you have multiple client.<p>Nice! Turns out all of my 802,11ax Rant is included in the its own Section.<p>>(1) 802.11ax is not even expected to be made an official IEEE standard until "Sep 2020" (source),<p>It should be noted the date is <i>prediction</i>. And that date has been moving up a quarter for every meeting since 2018. Draft 3.0 was suppose to be the last Draft, then Draft 5.0 and now Draft 6.0......<p>> 160Mhz<p>It should be noted none of the current Mobile Devices ( Or basically Non Intel Wifi 6 devices irrespective of their form factor ) supports 160Mhz ( 160Mhz / 80+80 ). Both Samsung and Apple are on 80Mhz only. This will likely change with WiFi 6E.<p>>Not all wifi clients are DFS capable!<p>Wow. I was always under the assumption DFS is a router problem. This sucks.<p>Such a great site that explains so much what is wrong about WiFi and its industry as a whole. And how it seems no cares about the user experience. There are increasing amount of people who just want to use a simple and working 4G/5G connection than their WiFi.<p>This is such a great resource I wish I could pay the authors some money as gratitude. It also reminds me of the Internet in the 90s where people spend their time, heart and soul into making something. It is not for SEO, or Ads Revenue. Simply wrote out of passion. ( or may be anger )<p>Thank You.
It’s amazing that OpenWRT praises themselves as performance oriented router firmware yet I can’t find any mainstream router model that can reach practical limit of 3x3 speed...