[airesQ]

WiFi doesn't have an easy life either:

- It needs to work on unlicensed spectrum, which means that it has to play well with all manner of devices that contend for this spectrum (e.g. other WiFi devices, Bluetooth, IEEE802.15.4). In practice this means that it cannot do much beyond CSMA/CA (i.e. the 'listen before talking' thing). CSMA/CA is a terrible contention mechanism for high density scenarios, and before long much of the air-time is taken by collisions. LTE does not have this problem, it works on licensed spectrum, as such, an LTE base station can just divide the time/spectrum blocks and allocate them to the various contending devices as it pleases (as it owns the spectrum), making almost optimal use of the spectrum that is available to it. 802.11ax will improve on this a bit (e.g. it will have OFDMA, which reduces the collision domain; it will allow the AP do to some coordination, via 'trigger' frames)

- Wifi has a lot of luggage; IEEE 801.11ax will be backward compatible with tens of billions of devices going all the way to IEEE 802.11b, which came out in 1999.

- Costumers don't like spending all that much money on Wifi. This cost-pressure means that we don't have as many people looking into WiFi as we should (people writing drivers; people debugging problems; radio engineers; investment in testing equipment).

- MIMO (introduced in 802.11n), downstream MU-MIMO (introduced in 802.11ac), and upstream MU-MIMO (to be introduced in 802.11ax) are all technically impressive, but also very hard to implement well. (But we are now starting to see the benefits of this, particularly the 802.11ac wave2 devices.)

Anyway, I have high hopes for WiFi, well beyond a billion WiFi chips are sold every year, and it is getting better all the time.

[m-j-fox]

Yeah. If your neighbor has one 802.11b device and your router sees it on its channel then it has to get out of it's way, dragging your whole Network into the pits.

If you detect anything older than 802.11n, change channels or start knocking on doors.

[JPLeRouzic]

That is not true, all newer (than 802.11b) frames are encapsulated in a 802.11b frame, precisely to be compatible with it. At IEEE there are always discussions about to drop compatibility with 802.11b but usually someone reminds that in fact it is not a real problem.

What is a problem is that the preambule time is wasted, but it would not be too hard to imagine that even this preambule could be used for newer amendments after some homework.

[mjevans]

It's extremely annoying as some devices /only/ support B. They're quite legacy at this point, but some people still use older Nintendo handhelds that infamously only work on 802.11b with /very/ 'compatibility minded' options.

IMO the entire 2.4ghz public spectrum block should be viewed as for legacy support. However far more spectrum should go to limited range use. (Also, building walls should have filter meshes that absorb frequencies not designed for use with mobile computer to cell towers / GPS).

[JPLeRouzic]

In theory, that is not necessary, you can transmit information even if the spectrum is completely saturated, by using Wi-Fi backscatter like in: http://passivewifi.cs.washington.edu/

You neighbour's 802.11b will never see that another Wi-fi network piggybacks on him and goes 100 times faster. There is even not the need to use the cumbersome CSMA/CA.

Indeed it is not an existing amendment, but if you are interested I would be happy to help someone to present a few ideas at IEEE 802.11.

[khedoros1]

> If you detect anything older than 802.11n, change channels or start knocking on doors.

How do you expect the "knocking on doors" part to go?

"Excuse me, something using an old wifi standard in your home is stomping on my speeds. Could you either turn it off or replace it?"

[walshemj]

I suspect that minority of responses will be "Get orf moi laaaand!"

[angry_octet]

Well, that's not really true.

But if you did want to force someone to upgrade, you could always jam them... pretty easy to selectively jam a radio. Or crack their WEP (most 11b)... So many bad things.

[yuhong]

All the way back to 802.11 DSSS in 1997 (only 1/2 Mbps)

[firebird84]

On your first bullet point you left out the most ubiquitous 2.4GHZ device of all: The microwave oven. Consumers don't even realize that microwaving popcorn can ruin their netflix streaming (depending on the oven's age and shielding).