[gruez]

>and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever

Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013

[admax88qqq]

I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.

Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.

[ineedasername]

I have ~7 year old bog standard wifi router that has more than enough speed to saturate my 200Mbs downlink. Up to 7 or 8 devices online at a time when all family members are home, and there's never a contention issue. I can hog the connection w/ a huge Steam download, and then when they kids start streaming netflix to the TV it's still all shared nicely with me getting a reduced speed as the stream kicks in, everything still working perfectly & taking full advantage of the 200Mbs speed.

That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app.

And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.

[vel0city]

I'd highly recommend looking at just getting a wired AP to put in the basement and have it ceiling mounted. It really depends on how your house was designed, but it could be relatively easy to drop a cable down from an above floor to the ceiling. You'll get much better performance having a wire carrying the signal than trying to do WiFi mesh setups, especially when you're trying to cover an area that already has terrible WiFi performance.

[mook]

In my experience even Ethernet over powerline is better than using WiFi mesh, since there's still a wire, even if it's noisy. That is, it provided a more stable connection, even if the peak speed is not theoretically as fast.

Your mileage may vary.

[vel0city]

Your mileage can definitely vary with Powerline Ethernet adapters. When they work they're amazing, when they stop working it can be rather annoying. Most don't have any real feedback other than a small handful of LEDs on the device. I've had several different models from different vendors over the years using a few of the various revisions of standard and different electrical system setups. They would usually work pretty well for weeks, then suddenly lose their sync for unknown reasons requiring a hard reset. Often this happens right when you're in the middle of watching a movie or playing a game, requiring you to stop what you're doing, unplug both devices, wait a few seconds, plug both back in, and it magically starts working fine again. I've had that experience on all of the units I've used. It has been about 5 years since the last time I used one, I'm sure they've constantly had improvements.

That said though when they work I got pretty much the rated speeds all the time without any intermediate dropouts or other issues. Stupid simple to use, just plug both sides in and suddenly network. This was sometimes even without both units being on the same circuit, but at least one of the legs had a decently short run to the electrical panel.

[thetinguy]

You live in a house. In an apartment there are 50 other networks within a 100 feet of you.

[ineedasername]

You actually don't know my residential environment. I don't live in an apartment with 50 networks, but I can see ~30 SSID's right now. On a semi-regular basis I benefit from going into my router config to choose the channel with the least congestion. For me, that's not worth spending $$ to upgrade when speed & latency are not otherwise an issue. I don't begrudge people who decide to upgrade to get that incremental boost, but I don't think it should be forced on them. Because I'm not claiming there are no benefits to upgrading. I'm saying that people who have lived with their current WiFi setup-- hiccups & all-- for years shouldn't be required to pay more if they're satisfied with their own status quo.

[gruez]

>I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.

You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.

Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.

[lmns]

802.11n with 5 GHz is okayish, but using 2.4 GHz can be brutal. It's not just the bandwidth, the whole frequency band is just bad. My latency regularly goes through the roof and voice calls are noticeably worse than with 5 GHz wifi.

802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.

[wtallis]

At the moment, I would definitely choose an older 802.11ac device with mature open-source drivers over any 802.11ax device. Especially since last I checked, the only affordable 802.11ax routers were limited to 2T2R, so they would be a step backwards in peak throughout for some client devices.

[diamondo25]

Latency is a thing, and newer networks have lower latency or are affected by other clients being slower (eg MIMO and improved channeling), though other ethernet devices can still have a big effect (eg remote server latency, dns latency, retransmissions).

[wtallis]

Latency is exactly why I'd prefer a last-gen radio with open-source drivers. An 802.11ac router with the latest open-source drivers (ath10k and mt76) will give you better real-world latency, because there are open-source developers working to optimize for the metrics that actually improve real-world user experiences rather than seeking the largest achievable throughput numbers on naive speed tests.

802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable

[baskethead]

Faster is not always better.

I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had.

I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything.

We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.

[nitrogen]

We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.

To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.

[vel0city]

> I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all

How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences.

The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.

[pantalaimon]

> I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.

Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.

[jjav]

> Faster is always better.

For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.

[jordanthoms]

I ran a Asus ac-68u at home at home for years and was generally happy, but the speed bump from upgrading to a ax-86u has actually been very substantial even for ac devices.

BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…

[YokoZar]

> Do people actually need next-gen wifi?

Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

The question isn't whether people need it, question is whether people were going to use it as a reason for upgrading anyways

[basch]

is Bandwidth the only factor?

What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?

[gruez]

I don't have an IOT house, so I don't know how well they'll cope. That said, most IOT chips (eg. the famed ESP8266 and most variants of its successor, ESP32) seem to only support 802.11n, a standard from 2009. Therefore any benefits are probably not going to be gained by upgrading to an 802.11ac router. Newer routers might have beefier cpu/ram, but IOT devices are pretty low bandwidth, so I doubt they'll be taking up much cpu/ram to handle them.

[Tijdreiziger]

For smarthome, I would recommend Zigbee devices. That way, you limit your attack surface to just your Zigbee gateway, rather than every single light bulb in your house, with the added benefit that those don't clog up your Wi-Fi.

We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.

[prmoustache]

Why would you want to cram 50 so called "smart" devices is the real question. Is your quality of life improved by having your lightbulbs and switch connected to the internet. Why do you need sensors at all?

My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Well, if you want an example, I have about about a dozen PM and CO₂ sensors spread around the apartment, and some outside of it. I live in an extremely polluted area and it allows me to make decisions on when it's (relatively) safe to open windows (or even inside doors if it's really bad outside).

PM 2.5 may be in the range of a couple micrograms/m³ in one room (with air purification) and 100× that in the other adjacent room, so it makes sense to have sensors everywhere.

Still very far from 50, though.

[pydry]

My quality of life is improved by heating that can be turned on remotely (while im on my way home) or on a timer (before i wake up).

Lightbulbs not so much.

[vel0city]

You don't need to have it internet connected to have your thermostat on a timer. My home has responded to heat or cool the house based on when I wake up, when I leave, when I come home, and when I go to bed for well over a decade all without needing an internet connection to do so. My thermostat doesn't go dumb just because the internet went down or because it became unsupported and got bricked.

The only thing I wish it would do would have better multi-zone temperature and humidity sensing to know to turn on the circulation fan when the edges of the house get too hot/cold compared to where the thermostat is. Even then that doesn't require the internet, it could be done with cheap 433MHz temp/humidity probes running on button cell batteries for years.

[pydry]

I do need internet if i want to tell my heating to turn on 1hr-30 mins before i come home though.

Or to respond to the weather (e.g. start warming the house earlier coz it's a particularly cold day).

If your life is very strictly regimented maybe it's less useful.

This doesnt mean I want a cloud connected thermostat. I want something that talks to homeassistant.

[vel0city]

I tell my thermostat my schedule once and how I want my house to be, and it makes sure to hit those temperatures when I want it to. I shouldn't have to "tell it" I'm coming home, it should just do it.

Respond to the weather? Its a thermostat. Even a decent bi-metallic strip thermostat will "respond to the weather". Its not like the thermostat needs to do anything different if its an especially cold day outside, it will keep the indoor environment as you programmed it. How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?

The only "respond to the weather" idea I'd like would be to account for especially humid days as sometimes the temperature is fine but its really humid in the house. But once again it doesn't need to reach out to an API to figure out the humidity outside at some airport 20mi away, it just needs a local humidity sensor.