[sgtnoodle]

Many APs have buggy radio firmware that won't ever be fixed. The manufacturers hastily implemented DFS to pass FCC certification, which was a lot easier to do than implement it to work robustly. Due to detection false positives, the radios will only use any given DFS channel for a few minutes at a time. If you have the AP set to "auto", then it probably just needlessly hops around channels every few minutes; you get a brief latency spike and it's mildly annoying. If you have the AP set to a specific channel, then your wifi frequently cuts out and you go insane.

It's interesting. If you're a typical consumer and use default settings, you end up with a mostly working setup that's glitchy but not quite broken enough for anyone to notice because Netflix still works. If you're a tech enthusiast and tweak seemingly harmless settings that should unambiguously improve things, you end up with a completely broken network.

[TeMPOraL]

> If you're a typical consumer and use default settings, you end up with a mostly working setup that's glitchy but not quite broken enough for anyone to notice because Netflix still works.

But Skype/Teams/Zoom gets visibly glitchy, which may be annoying during remote schooling or work. In the past two years, a sizeable fraction of "typical consumers" started to use real-time applications a lot.

Not to mention, while Netflix "still works", TikTok may not. Or YouTube, if you happen to switch between videos at the moment. Or Facebook or Twitter or anything that relies on the "infinite scroll" dark pattern.

Point being, regular, non-tech users definitely notice. We may think that they don't, but that's because they don't know how to frame what's going on, and have been conditioned to accept that digital technologies are just shitty and glitchy. They think it's their fault, or the problem with "their Internet", or that their computer "has viruses" - and won't tell you until you're close enough with them they feel they can vent to you, or hope you can fix it for them.

[sgtnoodle]

Oh for sure, it's one of the main reasons why people believe wifi sucks.

One of my favorite visualizations is Steam Remote Play's debug graph that shows the latency stack up. Playing a game over wifi on a smart phone, it can make subtle stutters significantly easier to track down. In one case, I was able to attribute a periodic latency spike to the Bluetooth radio.

I've been trying to go pretty deep understanding 802.11 the last couple years, between trying to make my home wifi setup work flawlessly, and using it extensively at work for real-time communication between embedded systems.

At home, I have converged on WRT1x00ac devices (with useless DFS). Three as APs, one as the main router, and a couple more to play around with. They can be had for $30 on ebay, have dual core ARM CPUs, and run OpenWRT well. The only reason they work well for me, though, is because I am an embedded engineer and stubborn. Recently I had to desolder failed TVS diodes from a couple of them...

[spmurrayzzz]

I've worked with vendors for years to debug/fix that class of bugs you reference.

Cherry picking one example very recently, we discovered a certain router model shipping in calibration mode such that only 1-2 STAs could transmit at any given time. Essentially rendering an AC router into the performance class of a mixed-mode a/b/g router from 2004. Working with the upstream vendors to fix this took several weeks.

Sometimes though its not even phy or mac layer bugs we find, its more banal nonsense like a poorly configured firewall that eats up all the NPU clock cycles when it sees a 30 pps rate of unsolicited UDP ingress. Or my personal favorite was the erase block management on flash that would remount the data partition as read-only whenever a single ECC cycle would fail on a given sector and permabrick the unit until reboot.

[sgtnoodle]

Any recommendations for modern access point hardware that is well made?

[spmurrayzzz]

Hardware isn't often the issue, its usually firmware/driver related when the problems occur in my experience. So no matter what hardware you have, running something like OpenWRT et al. can be a massive quality-of-life improvement.

With that said, I've had the best luck with Broadcom chipsets over the years. I'm currently using a Netgear R8000P (which is the BCM4906 chipset), but not on stock firmware.

EDIT: should add an addendum to my initial comment that hardware and software is obviously connected because the radio vendors are writing the driver software in most cases, but my Broadcom recommendation still stands even with that throat clearing.

[sgtnoodle]

Cool, I just ordered one to play with. $40 on ebay. The prospect of effective beam forming is appealing. Do you run OpenWRT?

[spmurrayzzz]

I do. yes. But the latest stock firmware on that router is surprisingly stable and performant. Not a bad idea to do some burn-in testing with that to see if it meets your needs. If you need to tweak phy layer knobs like tx power etc, you'd have to switch but otherwise there's probably not a need for most folks.

Also, open driver support for broadcom chipsets is very lean, so getting openwrt to work on the wireless side is a bit of an effort. Doable, but definitely not simple out of the box.

[sgtnoodle]

Are you sure you don't have an R8000 rather than an R8000P? As far as I can tell, the only alternative firmware for the R8000P is OpenWRT, and the documentation claims only 802.11b/g rates are supported. DD-WRT and Tomato, which would have better driver support, only target the R8000.

At least I had fun connecting to the console UART in order to flash the latest firmware on this R8000P. The one I bought was stuck on an older version with a bug that prevented it from accepting firmware ever again.

[sgtnoodle]

I got the hardware in hand. Did you need to connect a UART in order to flash OpenWRT? Any tips or links you can recommend would be appreciated.

[Dalewyn]

The virtues of knowing enough to be dangerous but not enough to be safe.

Though one will never learn without at least some modicum of living dangerously.