[gerdesj]

I run roughly 60 site's wifi across the UK according to my Unifi VM, which has been trundling along for over five years now.

One of those sites is my home, another my brother's home and another my dad's and another is at work. At least one of the others, you might have heard of.

I'm not quite so jaded as @roboman. I suggest you keep up with the Joneses. The latest is wifi 7 and if we get a bit conservative, we might consider 6 as current and hence the advice is stick to wifi 4!

That's not my advice. I suggest that we embrace the latest stuff and learn how it works. If necessary you can always spin up another SSID with special properties.

I've got devices from fridges to ESP80266 wired thingies and laptops and phones and whatever all working fine.

[zamadatix]

Agreed, I left healthcare networking at a place with ~36,000 APs just around the time 6E was getting its first early release hardware and we had already deployed multiple hospitals with Wi-Fi 6 APs and laptops at the time. As you say, the absolute latest (especially when it's the first round of hardware) can be iffy but 2 back seems extraordinary over-conservative.

I'd even go as far as to say we had as many client tickes from bugs about old hardware from 2 standards (~10 years) ago that weren't receiving patches anymore as we did from the new hardware but at least the new stuff was still getting patches.

That said once you go to consumer/prosumer hardware I'm convinced everything has a litany of bugs that have no hope of getting meaningfully fixed regardless which version you use. For 99% of use cases it'll work fine enough and that's all any vendor selling it will care about, new or old. Often Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever-made-the-actual-wifi-chip-com will have patched things consumer APs and devices won't have actually updated to anyways.

[lostlogin]

36,000 is an impressive install.

I’d imagine that every single thing that could happen to an AP would happen.

What hardware did you use?

[zamadatix]

Mostly HPE Aruba whenever we could, the last model I was involved with testing was the AP 510 4x4 Wi-Fi 6. On the client side the Intel AX200 was the last I was involved in testing for devices we controlled but, being a hospital, tons of old devices came with what they had and we just had to make it work. We even had a WEP SSID (with a crapload of isolation and firewalling) because there were devices hardcoded to a certain WEP network with no WPA* support too expensive to replace. That said, it was also a world of mergers and divestitures so we supported just about every brand at some point since we couldn't justify going in and ripping the existing Wi-Fi out day 1 unless it was truly disastrously designed.

As far happenings to APs I'd say 90% of the time it was one of two classics on infinite repeat:

- (Particularly after a new install) "This AP near my work desk and I've been having headaches ever since" -> "We'll try turning it off, let us know if things stayed the same or got worse" -> we actually turn the LEDs off and leave the Wi-Fi on at first -> They mostly never follow up, if we do they say things are great. There were a few occasions they'd follow up and we'd really turn the AP off but it never resulted in anyone being able to tell when the AP was on or off without us telling them (or a few who knew enough to check the RSSI near the AP of course). The "happening to the AP part" was there were sometimes people would just take them down (you just need a ladder and then spin it unless you put every AP in offices in an enclosure) the AP as the first step and then we'd get outage alerts thinking it had just died.

- (Particularly by maintenance crew, presumably since they had the ladders and comfort level in taking things apart during work) we get an alert that an AP in a warehouse/break/hidden-office-cubby/etc area is down so send someone out -> arrive and maintenance person says the Wi-Fi has been bad today -> See the AP is not physically there, ask where they put it -> "Oh you mean this? I thought they were putting up a security camera to watch me work".

Neither of these things were particularly common at the individual level but when you have 36,000 you refresh every 5 years somehow it becomes something that happens somewhere every week. The other 10% is boring stuff, APs being ripped off by someone pushing a tall cart down the hall, someone decorating the APs with aluminum foil to make the hall look like it has disco balls, water/sewage leaks taking out a ceiling of APs because someone broke a toilet. For the most part these were extremely rare and I don't really blame people often ('cept the toilet one). E.g. you've got a bunch of old patients and try to make a disco hall, you're a good person - just know that'll kill your and the patient's Wi-Fi or you're just trying to get shit to where it's supposed to be and you stacked it on this thing too high - don't blame ya for being in a rush but keep safety #1 it could have easily been a different accident having stuff that high rushing down the hall.

[hackmiester]

If we count generations that way, then yeah, sure.

But we could also count like: 5, 5 Wave II, 6, 6E, 7.

In this case, 2 generations behind would be either Wi-Fi 5 Wave II or Wi-Fi 6. Those are both quite good! My workplace is just deploying Wi-Fi 6 now, and at home I still have Wi-Fi 5 Wave II.

[roboman]

Do you measure WiFi 7 for packet loss? UniFi might be better but I stand by my advice and still suggest 802.11AC or AX for consumer grade router.

[gerdesj]

I haven't seen any wifi 7 gear. I have a Unifi tri band wifi 6 AP in the next room at home which is a bit excessive. However, I live on the side of a hill and I get coverage across the entire valley.

Unifi tends to be a bit divisive in forums such as HN and r/networking and even their own forums! The wailing and gnashing of teeth at every version update is quite something to behold.

For me as an old school sysadmin, running a Linux VM as a Unifi gateway is fine and has been for years. I treat it with respect and read change logs and I have decent backups and so on.

The vast majority of my customers and my already installed gear is wifi5 and any new APs are 6 by default. I'll wait for 7 devices to actually be available but it doesn't bring much to the table. Wifi 6 with the addition of 6GHz was a major upgrade, 7 not so much.

My phone now has way more bandwidth to my home LAN via wifi than the LAN itself! It can use 2.4/5/6 GHz and each band has more than one MIMO. Its not quite that simple but I will be grabbing some 2.5 or 10Gb LAN switches soon. At work 10Gb with 40Gb uplinks is generally indicated ...