[Havoc]

Nice detailed article!

Finding it increasingly difficult to avoid bottlenecks though. Even with wifi 7 I still get 1.3 on my mac and 0.5 on iphone. More than enough realistically, but upstream internet is 1.7 so tiny bit unfortunately

Think I'm just going to wire the place with 10 gig fiber

>The speed advantages that Access Points have over mesh systems will become much more obvious with Wi-Fi 7.

From what I've read mesh devices generally can detect when they've got wired backhaul so they can stay in mesh mode for the clean handovers while not relying on it for actually moving data

[anyfoo]

Due to boring circumstances outside of my control, I have to use WiFi for the most part, so I've got quite some experience with making it run optimally (or rather, as optimally as I managed to, not as optimally as I would like it to).

And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not near radar, which intentionally causes you to get kicked off those channels and lose connection entirely.) And even then you might have to mess about a lot with positioning, because of reflections and generally multipath propagation.

I'd say it's not worth the headache. I would love to lay down Ethernet cable, even if it was just cabling only suitable for 1 Gbps (for which there's no good reason to, might as well do 10 Gbps).

But yeah, any mesh system worth its salt figures out the topology and absolutely favors wired links over WiFi for the back haul. Anything else wouldn't make any sense at all, there is basically no situation where you'd prefer an RF channel over a wire, unless the wire is maybe made of wet string.

[walrus01]

> And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps

If one considers that the higher speeds in 802.11ac and 802.11be require 256QAM modulation or better, this is completely expected (assuming 5 GHz band of course, which doesn't go through material very well at all). If you've sen a live eyeball chart of a 256QAM or 1024QAM constellation on test equipment for clear-air microwave link purposes, and seen how quickly it can degrade or get fuzzy if there's anything in the way of the link, it becomes more readily apparent. MCS levels 8 and onwards here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7

"Clean" eyeball example of 256QAM: https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-is-256-qam-modul...

examples of "fuzzy qam" in 16QAM, same principle applies to denser QAM

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-eye-diagram-Symb...

[dnemmers]

Have you thought about using powerline devices? I’ve successfully used them in place where running my own cable wasn’t a possibility, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-a-powerline...

[martinald]

Powerline is in my experience vastly worse than WiFi in nearly all cases. It's slow, suffers from bad jitter/interference (often worse than WiFi) and the chips run so hot (especially the last gen ones, AV2000 iirc - I believe they don't sell them any more because they overheat and fail, or at least 2/2 of the ones I had did this).

Even with many walls I was getting 300-400mbit/sec on WiFi vs 100mbit/sec on powerline.

[izacus]

Powerline in practice does not come anywhere near performance of a good WiFI7 setup - even through walls WiFi tends to be more stable and faster outside special conditions (e.g. multiple floors or thick walls).

[Havoc]

Yeah, used to run a wifi bridge by necessity for years (yay rental). I could get stable 1gig over wifi6 which is why I'm a little puzzled that 7 isn't much better

[kalleboo]

My house is built out of reinforced concrete, so wireless signals reach almost nowhere. I got Ethernet put into the living room and bedroom and put in 2.5 Gbps USB ethernet dongles on powered hubs, so when I plug into my phone/laptop to charge they get wired ethernet automatically.

[walrus01]

how many spatial streams are you using (2x2, 3x3, etc) and are you using an 80 or 160 MHz channel?

If you have a set of full capability 802.11be clients you'll see the best performance with a 3x3 AP and 160 MHz channels.

[Havoc]

160hz channel & 2 spatial streams.

It's unfortunately consumer grade tp-links so while they have actually been pretty good...you don't get a lot of knobs to tweak.

Still need to try MLO at some stage and they're currently acting as a bridge so (i.e. wifi backhaul) so think it might get better once I've laid fiber backhaul between them

[walrus01]

Would recommend one of the ubiquiti 3x3 802.11be APs for better performance. The U7 Pro or similar. The unifi controller software is a monolithic package you can install on a bare bones debian system. Wifi backhaul definitely also a problem as using any kind of wifi-to-wifi extender stuff will cut your throughput a lot, keep in mind that all 802.11.whatever is a half duplex medium.

[Havoc]

>3x3

The ones I have seem to be 2x2...with backhaul on wifi the 1.3 I'm seeing is probably just 1 then.

Aware of ubiquiti popularity in homelab circles. It's not for me tbh.

I've been through a couple of iterations of wifi gear - including a mainland china no-english Xiaomi...that was an adventure.

At this stage I don't think I'm tearing it out and buying new. "slow" gigabit internet on mobile device is an annoyance to my perfectionist side but I'll survive. And with a bit of luck adding fiber backhaul gets me above internet speed.