[fguerraz]

This is just corporate greed!

I live in a EU country in an apartment and 5GHz is completely crowded and pretty much unusable because of DFS (making your WiFi AP unexpectedly stop to do a complete scan and choose a new channel), so 6GHz is the only stable, high bandwidth option here, and we need more channels so that most peopole chan switch to it.

The cellular networks operators can have that shitty 5GHz part of the spectrum if they want it!

[drewg123]

Agreed. I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.

5Ghz is stuttery and laggy and makes it pretty much impossible to have a clean video call. I don't game, but gaming on it would be miserable. I've measured latency, and it regularly spikes above 1s.

6E is far, far better. Rock solid video calls. Latency testing sites show low, steady latency. The only real problem is signal attenuation seems to be far worse with 6E. Getting a signal 2 walls away from the router is nearly impossible. Though this is also a strength, as it limits the number of devices competing for spectrum.

[throw0101d]

> I live the USA in a 100 year old apartment building, and can see a zillion ISP provided routers, all squabbling over the same handful of 5GHz channels. 6E is a game changer.

What channel width (20/40/80/other) are you typically seeing?

[MichaelZuo]

How is this even possible?

Even a few sheets of drywall greatly attenuates 5 GHz. Your scenario simply seems impossible unless you have a weird router that can only utilize a tiny portion of the channels.

[Bombthecat]

And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?

It will be as crowded as 5

[topspin]

> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?

Wi-Fi 6E and later standards that unlock 6 GHz are designed to mitigate contention through several dynamic power management and multiplexing capabilities: TWT, MLO, OFDMA, improved TPC, etc. While these things aren't somehow inherent to 6 GHz, the 6 GHz band isn't crowded with legacy devices mindlessly blasting the spectrum at max power, so it is plausible that 6 GHz Wi-Fi will perform better in dense urban environments. The higher frequency also contributes because attenuation is substantially greater, although in really dense, thin-walled warrens that attenuation won't solve every problem.

I know if I had noisy Wi-Fi neighbors interfering with me, the few important Wi-Fi only devices I have would all be on at least 6E 6 GHz by now, not only because 6 GHz has fewer users, but also in the hope that ultimately, when the users do appear, their devices will be better neighbors by design. I don't actually have that problem, however. The nearest 5 GHz AP I can actually see (that isn't mine,) in Kismet (using rather high gain antennas) is -96 dB, and my actual APs hardly ever see those at all. I've yet to actually detect a 6 GHz device that isn't mine. I known there are a few because the manufacturers and model numbers of many APs are visible, but between the inherent attenuation and the power level controls, I don't see them.

[craftkiller]

There is significantly more spectrum available for wifi in the 6ghz band than in the 5ghz band, so even if we moved everything off of 5ghz and ignored the attenuation benefits of 6ghz, we'd still have significantly less congestion on 6ghz than 5ghz wifi. In my apartment, my laptop can see ~50 wifi networks, we need some spectrum elbow-room to spread that out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

[throw0101d]

> And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?

Yes.

5 Ghz has 12x 40MHz channels, 6 Ghz has (in the US/CA where it is basically 'fully unlocked' for Wifi) 29x 40Mhz channels. It's the difference between 500Mhz worth of total bandwidth and 1200Mhz: over double.

* https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-frequency-band-d...

* https://spectrum.potatofi.com

* http://www.potatofi.com/posts/spectrum-viewer/

And given attenuation increases as frequencies goes up, your neighbours' signals won't travel as far as the lower frequency bands, which helps with localization.

We just have to hope that vendors don't ship 80 or 160Mhz channels by default for residential devices, which will potentially eat up bandwidth (though Wifi 7 makes Punctured Transmission / Preamble Puncturing mandatory, where previously it was optional). Though even if they do, 6Ghz has more 160Mhz channels than 5Ghz has 80Mhz ones (7 vs. 6).

A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:

* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...

Even if you half that, it's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.

[xoa]

>And you think the same problem wouldn't exist with 6ghz?

Yes. Probably because they have some basic grasp of electromagnetic reality, which perhaps you might consider studying a bit before forming strong opinions?

>It will be as crowded as 5

Physically impossible. 6 GHz simply does not have the material penetration, that's the point. Having way more raw bandwidth on tap, all available all the time without DFS plopped in the middle too, is also extremely helpful of course too. But the signal just not traveling as far and not going through walls well is the core thing. You don't need special effort EM shielding for it so much, bulk material will do it. And WAPs are cheap now. Having a higher number of smaller cells has been best practice for awhile already, and 6 GHz takes that much further.

[exasperaited]

But perhaps all that matters is, does a band support more connections than there would be apartments or businesses in range? For some people in dense apartment complexes, 5Ghz evidently does not. But if 6Ghz supports twice as many, that might be a limit that gets hit by vastly fewer "localities" like that.

(Student wifi hotspots in a large lecture theatre, that's another problem entirely!)

[ux266478]

Higher frequency, more bandwidth.

[port11]

Hmm, I'm in a 60-apartments block and we don't have this problem at all. Heck, even my shitty Meross devices manage despite all the 2.4 and 2.4+5 GHz connections around. What I struggle with is reliable 4G, and even 5G is so shabby I might as well keep it disabled. More spectrum for network signal sounds like it would help much more than improving Wi-Fi, which is already very reliable and plenty fast. My 2 cents…

[ddalex]

that's why I'm running only 2.4Ghz APs, enough bandwidth for mobile common uses, all static hardware has wires to them. Far better then 5GHz band

[dietr1ch]

Same, if a wireless device needs more than 54Mbps (802.11g, what the ancient Linksys WRT54G already offered) then I feel I'm doing something wrong and I'd better off just plugging it to my USB-C dock to get ethernet and power.

It's enough to stream 4k video (though barely, and I'd be better off moving to a TV), has better wall penetration and is fast enough for browsing and updating software.

I don't have to deal with congestion though. I think I've only seen a neighbour's AP once and I doubt they started hiding their SSID. My guess is that congestion is an issue because transmission power isn't low enough and there's little you can do to fix someone else's AP other than be increasingly louder than them.

[freehorse]

Isn't 2.4GHz too congested already, esp considering a lot of wifi-connected devices still work at that range? I typically go the other way around to avoid congestion.

[matt-p]

Hahaha.

[matt-p]

There's still a load of non-DFS channels you could be using? At least in an apartment you can run an ethernet cable for the most important devices.

[mr_toad]

So few devices have Ethernet ports these days.

[wuming2]

I wonder if delegating LiFi to do downstream and very narrow bands of Wifi for upstream would solve congestion problems. As example if existing smartphones could receive LiFi signal with current front facing sensors.

[trueismywork]

Realn solution is to have houses not so close to each other.

[matt-p]

It's not even that, it's just build apartment blocks out of real materials like concrete and brick not wood and plasterboard.

I have lived in the centre of a city in a victorian apartment block and looking back it was a dream. About a foot of brick wall between me and the next flat either side. Never heard a peep, excellent WiFi.

[throwaway127482]

Not a realistic solution at all

[GuB-42]

A way to solve this would be to switch to a hyperbolic space. We should have evolved from Euclidean geometry long ago. R'lyeh has no problem with wireless networking, you never drop a call.

[sofixa]

This would come at the expense of lowering density and multiplying infrastructure costs by a few orders of magnitude, making everything less accessible in doing so.

Hard, hard no.

[kergonath]

Great one!

Or, if you are not being sarcastic, the solution to wireless networking issues is to… rebuild cities in which billions of people live and spread those people over… where? Never mind the fact that cities are the best way of arranging lots of people, where would you build those "houses not so close to each other" that is not a desert, a cliff, or an ocean?