"The Rise of the Stupid Network" (1997) is the quintessential essay on this topic, and unfortunately still relevant today. http://www.isen.com/stupid.html

In case anyone wants it, I created an epub of it.

https://r.kyaa.sg/vknoez.epub

LTE probably is more efficient (due to OFDMA vs. CSMA) and I'd be happy for my phone to use femtocells instead of Wi-Fi... as long as the femtos are free and don't stomp on anything. But we shouldn't allow some kind of "protocol Darwinism", especially if it exclusively benefits one particular industry.

I have a very hard time conceiving an at-least-legally-legitimate business as evil as telcos.

Banks, insurance, finance, those generally are perceived as devil spawn, but I really can't imagine another business with such mediocrity, such an ingrained disregard for the customer.

The VA (veteran's affairs)

That's really not a thing in my country (Portugal), although we do have quite a few veterans from our lovely`colonialist wars [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Colonial_War

Indeed, my dad got called a "Circuit switch bigot" by Vint Cerf just a few years ago.

> arguing that local LTE is more efficient than wifi; and handsets should use local LTE base stations instead of wifi.

Interesting, I do exactly this. In parts of my home the Verizon coverage is more reliable than my own wifi.

> In parts of my home the Verizon coverage is more reliable than my own wifi.

This is fixable.

I just wish there was some sort of automated handover for APs on the same subnet. I had the same problem as GP, bu I now have two APs connected to my LAN over powerline, but I have to manually switch them over when I go from one side of the house to the other.

If you set the same SSID, encryption scheme and password on your 2 APs, your devices should roam automatically between them. Though some devices do this more intelligent than others, and if your devices and APs both support 802.11r and 802.11k, you're even better off.

Are 802.11r/k branded somehow? Sometimes spec sheets omit these kind of features. Is there a way to see if the feature's enabled from the NIC's host?

Will this work even if both APs choose the same channel? (In both cases the APs get stronger signals from other networks than from each other, so it's a realistic possibility).

It's your device that roam, it'll chose the AP with the stronger signal, regardless of channel as long as the other parameters match. The APs arn't coordinated, unless you use a controller based setup(which is more an feature of enterprise APs.)

There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_distribution_system

I don't care about wireless interconnection, but wired interconnection.

Of course it is, but when I have great coverage already why bother? Also it can be a pita to fix.

Viewed from this prospective then interference would be a feature, not a bug. Degrading WiFi would result in the use of less WiFi.

Yeah, and users can't even run their own LTE-U base stations because - last I heard - it requires signalling on the licensed LTE frequencies to tell the end device to use the unlicensed LTE-U band for data. So if they make 5.8GHz unusable for anything except LTE-U, users will effectively have to pay the mobile telcos to run their own 5.8GHz access points on their own wired internet connections.