Federal Court Ruling Will Make Wifi 6E a Reality (gizmodo.com) 52
Federal courts have opened the door for what may amount to the most substantial wifi upgrade in over twenty years. From a report: On Tuesday, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling where it supported the FCC's decision to divvy up 1,200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use, a move that paves the way for the eagerly anticipated move to wifi 6E. Prior to the ruling, wifi was limited to broadcasting over 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. That new spectrum represents the single largest addition since wifi was first introduced in 1989, the Verge notes. To put that in perspective, prior to the FCC's additions, wifi operated with just 400MHz of the spectrum. With that in mind, this new ruling should essentially increase the space available to wifi by four times.
When implemented, all this additional spectrum could provide enough capacity to allow seven maximum capacity wifi streams to broadcast in the same areas without interfering with one another, The Verge notes. Put more simply, this should translate to increased bandwidth with less interference for everyday users. Proponents of the FCC's decision, like agency Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, argue it will provide more wifi access in a greater number of places while simultaneously improving performance. All this extra space could also increase upload and download speeds as well.
When implemented, all this additional spectrum could provide enough capacity to allow seven maximum capacity wifi streams to broadcast in the same areas without interfering with one another, The Verge notes. Put more simply, this should translate to increased bandwidth with less interference for everyday users. Proponents of the FCC's decision, like agency Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, argue it will provide more wifi access in a greater number of places while simultaneously improving performance. All this extra space could also increase upload and download speeds as well.
Progress Marches On (Score:5, Funny)
So if 5G caused the Covid-19 pandemic just imagine what 6E will be able to do.
Re:Progress Marches On (Score:4, Funny)
How do 5G and 6e compare to 7z, which had been around for a long time now?
Re: Progress Marches On (Score:2)
Covid 6.0E10
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Re: Is this going to make that big a difference? (Score:3)
An AP per room would be a GOOD thing, compared to the present status quo where even 5.8ghz from neighbors causes major interference in townhomes & multifamily dwellings.
That said, Google, Apple, and Microsoft need to crack down on vendors & force them to properly implement wi-fi roaming with fast hand-offs. At least in Android-land, you basically need a rooted phone with custom kernel to make 80211.r actually WORK, because fsck'ng NOTHING supports 802.11r with a stock rom.
I really miss Ubiquiti's ze
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That is what I hear professional installers advocate anyway: Turn down the power, up the minimum association speed, (lengthen the beaconing interval,) and sprinkle APs around for minimum range, preferrably line-of-sight, to the actual users.
And, of course, for real big transfers and things that don't need to move, use wire anyway. WiFi is best used for a tiny teensy last hop only. Best reserved for things that actually benefit from not having to plug in a wire.
Compare and contrast with "home" use: Dump a
Re: Is this going to make that big a difference? (Score:2)
Your not wrong. When i wired my then new to me home i hardwired the tv and one bedroom and ran 2 unifi ap's. I cover my house and my entire backyard. And on clear days i can pick up stray signals from a 1/4 mile away. It is funny how many contractor trucks have thier own wifi network
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Hence... More to sell!
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> Hence... More to sell!
If we called them "boosters" would jump all over it then... as in 'signal boosters'.
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This means literally an AP per room in most buildings.
Baloney. 6 GHz isn't that much worse than 5.82 GHz which is already in use.
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Could make a big difference if you are in a densely populated area, like an apartment building. Between the less penetration and the additional bandwidth that could be quite an improvement.
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But like other responder said, 1 AP per room. I already do that for 5ghz so replacing some PoE AP's later will be trivial once 6E AP's get cheap.
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You might think of 60GHz, not 6GHz. With 6GHz it's still close to the 5GHz band with quite similar radio propagation.
60GHz have a lot less propagation since it's absorbed by oxygen molecules.
However what I'd like to see is a new band for unlicensed point to point communications, i.e. radio links over a bit longer distances than what 60GHz can do. You might get up to 2km with 60GHz unless you have heavy snow or rain. A relatively narrow lobe but with less propagation losses and only bandwidth penalty instead
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What you want is 801.11ah, but it's really hard to find hardware for it.
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> which is already tough to use in anything but the smallest spaces.
What's that you say? I can run wifi in an apartment building without my 40 neighbors wifi interfering? Sounds awesome.
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6GHz has even less penetration than 5GHz, which is already tough to use in anything but the smallest spaces. I mean, it's welcome, but I wonder if it'll make that big a difference in the grand scheme of things.
This is a HUGE deal for the WISP world.
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Yeah, my iPhone 12 mini's 5G does crap in rural areas. Older iPhones (4S, 6+, & 11 Pro Max) does better with their 3G & 4G LTE,
We need pair of low-power channels (Score:3)
I wish the FCC would explicitly set aside a pair of channels with power limited enough to be strictly "room-scale" (say, ~100 foot radius in open free space with a ceiling-mounted antenna, and generally contained by a room's drywall & doors in a dwelling) for use by people in multi-story multi-family buildings who are willing to run fiber or cat6e and put an access point in every room.
I live in a neighborhood with concrete-walled (and roofed, for the most part) townhomes, and 2.4ghz 802.11n is basically unusable due to something like 4-12 neighbors overlapping on every single frequency (and a bunch using "wrong" channel aggregations that just interfere with EVERYONE).
5ghz isn't much better... Comcast & U-verse autoconfigure the neighbors to all use 80 or 160mhz channel blocks (so they stomp on everyone), and the DFS channels are almost useless because wi-fi's designers didn't bother to define a way for an AP to tell clients, "I'm about to go silent on channel {n} for a minute to do the legally-mandated DFS check, so in the meantime, temporarily switch to inferior-but-still-working channel {x} on 2.4, or {y} on 5.8, to avoid connectivity interruption".
With 2 blocks of power-limited fast channels, I could put an AP in every room & twist my neighbors' arms to use the other one (if they set up similar multi-AP room-scale networks with wired/fiber backhaul), and we could all have fast wi-fi without stepping on each other's feet.
In theory, 802.11ad's 40ghz(?) channels would work... but almost no client devices actually support those channels.
I also think the FCC should take channel 14's spectrum by eminent domain, and enable it for low-power use... once again, to give people willing to set up room-scale wi-fi a channel almost any cheap device is capable of using with a firmware or software update (since channel 14 is legal in other countries, but in the US, someone technically owns half of it, so it can't be used here... but AFAIK, its owner is basically just sitting on it for the sake of speculation). Limiting the allowed power would avoid a repeat of the situation on channels 1-11/(12)/((13)) & preserve it for room-scale users.
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> Alternatively you might get together with the neighbours and propose a channel plan.
Society doesn't work like that in the US. I also noticed you spelled neighbours with ou so...
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I've used DFS channels pretty successfully with minimal issues in crowded environments (where I was the only user of DFS out of hundreds of detectable APs)?
that said, I've been using OpenWRT so that's probably a pretty good implementation of it (maybe it would go dark in the middle of the night - never really noticed though I was usually hardwired but everyone else who wasn't was thrilled with the DFS channels)
Re: We need pair of low-power channels (Score:2)
I really wish OpenWRT's developers could figure out how Ubiquiti used to do Zero-Handoff & implement it themselves, since Ubiquiti removed it completely from newer models of their APs.
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I wonder how compliant Ubiquiti really was if it's removed now...
Re: We need pair of low-power channels (Score:5, Informative)
Zero-handoff wasn't "compliant" with anything, and that was its advantage. It worked by having multiple access points all pretend to be the same one (same SSID, frequency, AND fake MAC address) and communicating with each other via wired ethernet. They all listened, compared notes to see which one saw the strongest and best signal from the client, and only THAT one transmitted to that client. As you moved around the house, the APs saw your relative signal strength change, and automatically switched transmitting APs.
The biggest drawback of ZH was that it couldn't scale beyond a few users, because it was kind of like the difference between using ethernet hubs (where data consumes network bandwidth across the entire network simultaneously) vs ethernet switches (where the device tries to avoid sending data to network segments that aren't interested in it).
So, for something like a school or office, ZH collapsed from its own weight. But, if you had a multi-floor house, in a crowded urban neighborhood, inhabited by only one or two people (who only really used wi-fi for their phone, tablet, and occasionally their computer when they weren't at their desk), the remaining devices were all plugged into ethernet (because your whole house was wired anyway), and you put an AP in every major room (so it could drown out the neighbors for any device within a few feet)... ZH worked SPECTACULARLY WELL, without all the grief and bullshit that plagues 802.11r.
Put another way, ZH wasn't good if your philosophy is "wireless for everything, everywhere" (especially if you had lots of devices), but was AWESOME if your philosophy was, "wired where I can, wireless where I must", and your biggest constraint was neighbors whose signal propagated more readily through your windows than your own signal propagated through drywall, floors, and doors.
ZH was a perfect example of how one size rarely fits all. As an enterprise solution, it was kind of dysfunctional. As a residential solution for use by a few people with a few devices in big houses with nearby neighbors, it was flawless (albeit expensive, since you needed multiple access points, and a house fully-wired for ethernet).
The biggest weakness of 802.11r is that it depends upon the client for everything... and in the real world, clients suck. Vendors use shitty wifi chipsets, disable functionality they don't want to support, and never update anything. ZH was a way to do an end-run around all of them, and make the shitty wi-fi in your Android device "just work" regardless of how awful your phone/tablet's vendor intended for it to be. Sadly, because Ubiquiti was never interested in home users (and only HAD home users because network admins fell in love with their gear, and bought it to use in their own homes), all they cared about was that ZH was dysfunctional as an enterprise solution & killed it.
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I wish the FCC would explicitly set aside a pair of channels with power limited enough to be strictly "room-scale"
Funny you mention that. It would appear as though the 6GHz band transmissions need to be significantly lower power than existing 5GHz, and routers are not allowed to be made weather resistant or have external antenna connectors (to prevent them being used outside).
This sounds like a step in the direction you want to go.
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I wish the FCC would explicitly set aside a pair of channels with power limited enough to be strictly "room-scale" (say, ~100 foot radius in open free space with a ceiling-mounted antenna, and generally contained by a room's drywall & doors in a dwelling)
DFS channels are already limited in power. The problem is the mouth-breathers and Chinese junk factories that crank out routers that ignore FCC rules.
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This is a big part of what 60 GHz .ad is supposed to do (along with the older WirelessHD): this sub-band is at a super absorption peak for both water and oxygen so the maximum distance even with horns or dishes only a km or 2.
The idea was that beam-forming would bounce the signal room to room through doorways, (open) windows, etc. The reality is that it never worked right especially with how most people put the router in the corner, behind the TV or curtains, under a ceiling tile, etc--ALL of which absorb t
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Even ~2.5GHz gets pummeled pretty badly by rain. Years ago, when I still had Sprint and they used ~2.5GHz Clearwire Wimax, I wrote an experimental Android app for my old Samsung Epic4G that could detect downpours by monitoring Wimax RSSI, along with the accelerometer and gyro. A sudden drop in Wimax RSSI unaccompanied by detected motion of the phone itself almost perfectly correlated with heavy rain outside (or at least, nearby, between my house and the cell tower).
All those allergic to wifi (Score:2)
grab your tinfoil hats and run now!
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If you put a Faraday's cage around your Wifi router, you'll never be hit by that evil radiation. Perfect solution.
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What about your neighbors wifi?
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That's what you have the tinfoil hat for.
Restrict It (Score:2)
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'Restricting' and 'unlicensed' are mutually exclusive.
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Surprising (Score:1)
6E hardware has been available for some time now. Here is an ASUS router [newegg.com] that claims 6E capability on 6 GHz. The story claims that although this hardware has been sold since 2019 devices have been "unable to access" the 6 GHz band. Presumably these devices can now do so, perhaps with a firmware update.
Is that the situation?
Nothing New (Score:1)
When implemented, all this additional spectrum could provide enough capacity to allow seven maximum capacity wifi streams to broadcast in the same areas without interfering with one another,
I can already do this with thousands of maximum capatity streams at the same time -- it is called fibre optic cable (or for less latency, copper cable).
Vendors celebrate! (Score:2)
It's not about signal integrity (mostly), but rather battery life. Mobile devices trash battery attempting to transmit. 6G requires 6/5 the power to cover the same range.
6Ghz however will not have bandwidth hogging 802.11a beacon frames. In a crowded space, this can open up nearly 50% of otherwise lost bandwidth. in fact, simply making this spectrum 802.11 r
Typical detached house construction... (Score:2)