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Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by kbenson on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @12:37PM (#18131980)
> Wi-Fi Alliance is naming the not-yet-complete IEEE 802.11ax standard as Wi-Fi 6, with ac being 5, and n being 4. One can guess then a is supposed to 1, b as 2, and g as 3, but this isn't mentioned anywhere I can see.

Oh, I'm so happy it's a number that seems to correspond to something (as long as the next one is 7 or 8 or some integer slightly larger than 6).

I look at wifi tech so rarely that I've mostly skipped a standard once or twice, but that just means I'm confused when I look at what's being offered. 802.11n? 802.11ac? What's better? If it's not as clear cut, which one came out later and is likely to be backwards compatible with the prior one?

If it was single letter increasing without large gaps, that might have been easier, but from what I remember, b wasn't strictly better than a when they were both first out (from looking at the info now, a has a higher rate, but suffers from obstructions and other interference more).

> At least this naming is a good deal clearer than HDMI's confusing version and feature mix or USB's Speed names.

Yes. As I understand it, USB is particularly bad where there's often confusion over the connectors, cable, and protocol, especially at the USB-c level.

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by Gaelan on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @12:58PM (#18132261)
ac is later and presumably better. No idea if there are any trade offs
Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by chipperyman573 on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @02:30PM (#18133243)
AC only supports 5gz, which has significantly worse range and is impacted much more by walls or other solid objects. But if there aren't a problem it's generally better
Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by mrb on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @02:40PM (#18133375)
"AC only supports 5gz."

That's not an accurate statement. "802.11ac" denotes a set of features, and many of them apply to and benefit the 2.4 GHz band. For example 256QAM encoding boosts the max data rate by 20 or 33% on this band for, respectively, 20 and 40 MHz channels.

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by oasisbob on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @06:57PM (#18135496)
Isn't 256QAM on 2.4GHz a proprietary feature?

https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358

I always heard that 802.11ac was 5GHz only, and that on dual-band, stations would stick with 802.11n for 2.4GHz

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by DesertBattery on Friday October 05, 2018 @04:30AM (#18146606)
Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by chipperyman573 on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @03:47PM (#18134109)
Interesting. How come all the consumer routers I've used have always required 5ghz to use AC capabilities? Are the rest of the ac features enterprisey? Or have I just not interacted with enough routers to see these?
Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by derefr on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @03:40PM (#18134045)
Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices, and even interference between overlapping cells of a mesh network or a base station and its extenders. In practice, this means that the extenders can extend longer, so something like a convention center or work-sharing space can use approximately the same number of base stations it did before.

The only problem is that your phone might not be able to talk to your router through your bathroom wall any more. But that capability was always a sign of wi-fi being too noisy—imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;)

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by Nullabillity on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @04:24PM (#18134497)
> Those limitations are a good thing: they reduce interference from neighbouring apartments/offices

Sometimes. 5GHz is great for apartments (where you have lots of noise and a tiny area) and offices (where you have lots of noise and a large budget), but for a villa 2.4GHz usually hits the sweet spot between noise and coverage.

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by SEMW on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:55AM (#18139037)
> imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;)

Visible light has a wavelength of a few hundred nanometers; wifi is around 10 centimeters. Material penetrability varies enormously between different wavelengths (and between materials). Harm to humans also various enormously, and in a way very different from penetrability (for example, some wavelengths of UVC are very harmful to human skin but can be almost completely blocked by a thin sheet of clear glass). Equating penetrability with either 'power' or harmfulness is not a useful intuition.

(incidentally, an incandescent light bulb emits on a blackbody spectrum, so some very small proportion of the energy it uses will be emitted at e.g. radio wave frequencies, which will certainly penetrate the bathroom wall)

Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by lostlogin on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @01:06PM (#18132337)
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Re:Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 by cstrahan on Wednesday October 03, 2018 @01:11PM (#18132384)
What's the "oops" about?