But if there are any legacy 802.11 (especially pre-802.11n) or non-802.11 transmitters nearby, it can be catastrophic for throughput, both because you need protective measures when transmitting (so that older 802.11 versions can reliably detect your transmissions as occupying the carrier) and because some of them just don't cooperate well with 802.11 at all (e.g. Bluetooth, which will just happily transmit over 802.11 without any regard for CSMA/CA fairness at all).
Lets say you had a 5ghz 8x8 160mhz AP (maximum allowable by spec): if all you had were 1x1 20mhz clients, you could theoretically have 64 different clients concurrently communicating with the AP without any real problems.
2.4ghz does not have 160mhz channels, but allows up to 40mhz. Ignoring the fact that 2.4ghz is incredibly congested, and you will never achieve peak performance, you can still achieve a theoretical maximum (again, with 1x1 20mhz clients) of 16 concurrent clients.
That said, I'm more interested in 802.11be: MIMO across bands. Instead of hard disabling 2.4ghz (which I 100% recommend all people do: this cures all Wifi ills; and if you have a building that eats 5ghz, either move or spam APs), the AP will dynamically use 2.4ghz as a possible MIMO band.
Theoretical maximum configuration of 802.11be is 40+160+320 (one 40mhz 2.4ghz channel, one 160mhz 5ghz channel, 1 320mhz 6ghz channel), and 802.11be devices will simultaneously communicate across all of them; maximum MIMO configuration has also been increased to 16.
In other words, the future is an AP that looks like a hedgehog, and has 10gbit port.
The insanity of moving just to get better wifi reception aside, do you mean move to North America where houses are built out of cardboard and sticks? Most other countries build walls out of solid materials and 5 GHz isn't getting through more than maybe one of those.
As for spamming APs, I really wish it were that simple. Apple devices cling to their AP until speeds drop to the dialup days and other platforms aren't much better. How did we figure out GSM roaming in the 90s but WiFi roaming is still a disaster 30 years later?
Deploying Ubiquiti's APs in managed (as opposed to standalone) mode makes this easy; even iPhones will transparently be passed from one AP to the next. I agree, though, the OSX/iOS roaming preference tuning is a bit batshit; they also refuse to drop your house's Wifi as you're driving away and want to switch to LTE ASAP.
Commodity/consumer APs aren't designed for handoff.
Plus also 5GHz is more resilient than that. Even in a solid concrete new apartment building in London I'd see absolutely endless 5GHz networks.
I knew other countries had heavily walls but didn't make that connection.
I quite like our cardboard walls though, they are trivial to repair and upgrade, and they rarely get damaged in real life, except if a Real Tough Guy punches one.
There are plenty of home users with 5Ghz only networks, which in turn means anyone designing an IoT device will get user complaints and returns from all these users.
really? is this a configuration that some ISPs are shipping in their routers, or how is this happening? i've never heard of anybody with a 5GHz only home network.
But ISPs? Router manufaturers? No way in hell, why would they self-impose additional support burden by preventing the customer from connecting their 4-5yo old low-end laptop or their shiny new smart bulbs or their brand new Amazon Kindle?
Is it? Are there any competitors in the class have 5ghz support? Most of the radio MCUs I've seen are all 2.4ghz which includes thread/zigbee/wifi/etc.
Every IOT device I've ever seen is 2.4ghz
Things like $20 "wifi doorbell"'s.
The esp8266 range is for ultra low cost wifi - things like $5 "wifi bulb"'s
Can't the AP still use MU-MIMO even for single-antenna clients? That's still a significant improvement every time more than one STA is active, especially in the super-busy 2.4 GHz band.
If your network does have the capability, it should be able to make much better use of airtime, more so if you have lots of them in your network.
It's a bummer that it's not 5Ghz. Even at lower data rates it would be great.
LoRa will require some kind of bridge device, and since we can't agree on anything - each vendor will have their own bridge device.
Alternatives like Amazon Sidewalk and Helium could work, but:
- Helium means users will pay for traffic to someone and use someone's internet connection. Doubt it will fly. It would be cool in a post-apocalyptic world, though.
- Amazon Sidewalk isn't universal and, IMO, immoral (enabled on devices by default without informing the owner of the device). Good luck downloading updates to your light bulbs at 80Kbps.
Other ESP32's in the range don't get more than about 20Mbps throughput under ideal conditions, so it probably isn't exactly a beast in the wifi performance department.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't the same silicon with an upgraded firmware to enable this new functionality.