This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision.
This example is a real WTF. I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
as a software developer, that example screams bad design
It screams "live service"
It also reflects something probably half the industry would push for since they can monetize it.
I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
Are you new to the planet? Let me tell you about this thing we have called capitalism...
Better hope staff don’t Microwave their lunch at the wrong time….
If your robot moves around, then it needs a wireless connection. And it doesn't really get any more reliable than wifi. I'm certainly not going to outsource that to a Verizon cellular connection.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
Wifi can work really well, especially with high end networking gear (and not, for example, the wifi access point you get for free from Verizon).
I think you've missed the point.
Anything automated that could be a threat needs to have safeguards. Needing constant wifi to prevent death or injury is not an acceptable safeguard.
Consider consumer/professional drones. If they lose connection they have on board protocols to mitigate hazards. Even then they are still governed by laws to isolate then from people because even those safeguards aren't good enough. Suggesting that a robot could completely rely on wifi is preposterous.
I think the point is that that sort of safety critical stuff should be on board, not relying on a wireless connection.
Yesh it should be self contained. Although to be fair there shouldn't be a way for a human to be there to begin with.
As someone using various wireless standards over over twenty years and in IT dealing with wifi instability on basically a daily basis. No.
Wifi is a series of compromises to be convenient. It's "good enough" for most of those but generally and increasingly in newer standards, the compromise is to drop stability for things speed. You'll see this to be the case in a lot of professional wifi gear that will transfer you to a lower standard if it sees weaker signals to improve stability.
To make that concrete, a problem with wifi in an office is an embarrassing "I'll call back on my phone" but a factory floor that could be millions of dollars of downtime to restart an entire chain of machines. Hardened industrial wiring and connections is well established and wifi is just not at that level. The poorly formed example of the robot was trying to convey their intention to start addressing that level of hardening.
All that said, based on my experience reading ieee articles this is all exaggerated. in reality we're probably just getting more stable video calls at higher bandwidths. Still a win for the help desk techs everywhere and people with a heavy wall making Netflix flaky.
This sounds like they're talking about something specific. There was a guy that was picked up/crushed by a robot recently that is eerily similar.
As long as they have a delay counter which immediately shuts the robot down when it hasn't been answered within a certain time period it shouldn't pose much of a problem if it has an E stop. Just inconvenient when it keeps shutting down all day.
I work in autonomous vehicle engineering. That's not even on the table for something we'd consider doing. But China is trying to enter the market hard, and I am less sure they wouldnt do that.
You could safely bet somebody already does
Glad to see stability and QoS being prioritised over throughput this time around. I feel like once WiFi broke through the 300 Mbps barrier with the 5GHz band, strictly focusing on further improvements in throughput would just yield diminishing returns for most people.
However, latency and signal strength have been notoriously annoying long-term problems that I'm happy to see finally being acknowledged.
Is this supposed to be the wi-fi standard that would allow for wireless VR? I'd love to have a standard that makes such a setup possible.
Wireless VR has been a thing since wifi 5ghz. And from first hand experience, it works great.
If you can work through all of the weird issues it works great, but it can definitely be finicky to setup for some people. Im in an apartment and the wifi in 5ghz range is so congested i had stuttering every few seconds. Had to switch to use DFS and it was super smooth after that.
Big true, I happen to know network engineering so it was easy. And steam's new steam link quest app makes it sooooooo simple and good. Legit never touched settings for it and it just looks and plays so nice.
Yeah, but you'll need to be within 5 feet of the access point. I kid, but i am curious how range will be.
I work with WiFi all the time and let me tell you that after looking at usage graphs for what feels like forever, you don't need 1Gbps WiFi.
Most clients aren't averaging 50Mbps, nevermind 500-1000. What you want is consistent wifi. Something that doesn't show down because you dumped everything and the kitchen sink onto it. There's a lot of good ways to ensure this and nobody wants to pay for it.
Simply put, dumping 30-50 client devices, between cellphones, tablets, laptops, TVs, gaming consoles, IoT things (like smart lightbulbs, fridges, etc), and in more cases than I'd like to admit, desktops... Onto a single multifunction wireless router, with little more than dual band WiFi, is generally going to suck.
I usually hear a chorus of responses to this because people don't really put together that their smart watch, Alexa, smart smoke detectors and thermostats, all count as wifi devices. It usually doesn't make a huge difference how much each device is actually using the wifi, the fact that all of them are connected at the same time is, in and of itself, a problem with only a single access point where that contact can be made.... Dual band or not.
I don't consider mesh solutions to be solving the core issue since all of the client traffic needs to end up at a single device with all the same problems. The fact that they get filtered through what is essentially, fancy repeaters, isn't super relevant. The problem still exists. But if you suggest an infrastructure network with multiple wired access points, people generally take one look at the price, then leave and go buy the latest night hawk from Netgear at the nearest electronics store and put it out of their mind, since it's "good enough" (which it isn't, in the current WiFi climate).
I want people to have better wifi, but I can't save you all from yourselves. Now the IEEE is taking on the job, I suppose. Trying to "fix" wifi because most people can't be arsed to install a reasonable solution for what they actually need. They'd rather spend literally thousands of dollars a year on fast internet service that they don't need and can't use because it's all getting filtered through their sub $300 network that they've had (or will have) for two+ years, and then have the gall to complain that their wifi sucks, and they don't get it because they're paying $100+ a month for their fancy gigabit or multi-gigabit internet connection.
I agree when it comes to average usage, but having >=1Gbps headroom for bursty traffic, e.g., when moving files locally between devices, is awesome.
Oh yeah, having headroom for microbursts is great, and factors into the precieved speed of the connection. It's a requirement for most users to have that headroom to make the connection feel fast. But a lot more goes into the apparent "speed" of the connection than that. Having quick DNS and high-speed routing to the wireline internet connection is also important, but harder for most to grasp what will actually achieve that goal versus other products.
The main thing is that headroom for burst traffic is mostly shared, since the channel gets used and then freed almost as fast. In this way, others can burst traffic into the channel shortly afterwards, with no detrimental effect.
The headroom doesn't need to be gigabits of capability in most cases. 300-450mbps is often very sufficient and may be more than what is required, depending on the usage.
I don't have the option for multiple access points in my home even though I would like them (I rent). But considering that I just had to explain the difference between Bandwidth and Frequency to someone on another thread because they couldn't fathom that someone's experience might be that 5G is unreliable and they have better service with 3G, I don't think this is going to take off. Don't even know if most internet providers in the US will do dual access points without it being prohibitively expensive, and I'm not sure the cost is justified.
On top of that, part of the problem with IOT is that those devices are required to run on the same network in order to talk to each other. I had at one point just had my IOT things on 2G band and the other devices (phones and computers) on the 5G band and that caused all kinds of problems on my network. Devices that wouldn't communicate properly or would drop off randomly.
I do agree though with your solution, dubious though I am about it being implemented.
I had multiple wired access points in a rental apartment with high wife approval factor by running cables in cup hooks along the ceiling lines. They self-tap into the wall and leave little more damage than would be caused by hanging a picture. I put a hook every 18 or so inches for support, and ran a cable under a door, up the door frame, down a hallway and into the living room (from a bedroom where we had the network gear). From there, I only had to mount the access point and connect everything. The cables were always out of the way, and I used white cables to help hide them against the walls. It wasn't perfect, but the limits of renting are a bit limiting.
I only had two in that place, which was plenty, and we never had bandwidth issues accessing the internet from the wifi.
The fact is, nobody is building homes with wireless access points in mind. Whether rentals, condos, or new homes, they don't have access point hookups. Many are now being wired with Ethernet in the walls, but nothing in the ceiling. A skilled wireless engineer can easily take a floorplan and build a wireless design with access points in ideal locations for maximum coverage and speed. Simply doing this pre-work and installing ethernet in the ceiling at these locations, is all that is required, yet, I have yet to see any builder do it. The same can be done to retrofit rentals as people vacate units and updates/renovations are done, yet, nobody is doing it.
Those that own their home need only to find placements and pay someone to wire them in. The whole thing only needs to be done once, ever, and the locations should be fine for use for the long term.
Fact is, neither builders, nor property owners, nor homeowners seem to have any interest in the practice. The only time I have personally seen or known of any location that is properly wired for wifi, is when someone has hired such wires to be custom installed. If it was done by default, rather than as an afterthought, retrofit or renovation, then it may be more common that people pursue such solutions. The price problem is another major hurdle, though I stand by the analysis of people paying literally several thousand dollars on internet access from an ISP, compared to a few hundred at most for a router during the same timespan (usually 1-3 years). IMO, that's a bit like paying $50,000 over 10 years for access to the highway, but never buying a car worth more than $1000. It's silly.
My main point is, solutions to these problems exist, but people simply won't pay more than a few months worth of ISP fees for their wifi hardware, then they expect it to perform well and last for many years. They will turn a blind eye to the environmental issues that plague them and instead blame everything on lackluster devices that underperform that they will continue to refuse to pay a reasonable amount to actually get quality access equipment.
I have popcorn ceilings (and those crumble quite a bit), and textured walls. I also have only one cable hookup. But either way, I agree with you. I'm also not really the person complaining my wifi sucks. 3 phones, 4 computers, and a handful of IOT devices. Plus a couple of gaming consoles and none of those things in use all at the same time to cause the kind of strain that would cause wifi drops and so on. I'm just pointing out that it's not feasible for some people at all but more often than not it's that nobody wants to up front expense. Thank you for clarifying though.
Yeah this was a big change for my parents who always complained about slow wifi speeds. I spent a summer wiring the walls with cat6 and plugged everything I could directly into a big switch I got for them. Printers, desktops, start tvs, the lot. Then I set them up with multiple access points and voilà, the wifi is suddenly fast again without upgrading their plan
This is the way.
What about my older 2.4 ghz stuff wifi6 don't play well with those
Why do you think the routers wouldn't support 2.4?
AX mode on my Asus XD6 Mesh router.
Secondary 2.4 GHz AP? Throw away or upgrade old stuff? Idk...
Keep 2.4 on on your access points
I'd honestly like distance and stability crossed. Shorter distance than wifi6 isn't very useful at least at my house where one wall seems to block most of the signal.
By time I'm at my garage it's all 2.4g.
Good. I almost never need speeds in excess of those possible with WiFi 2, and 90% of the time WiFi 1 speeds are enough, but very often my speeds drop below 1mbps, rendering accessing the Internet on my phone or tablet essentially useless.
You might just have a crappy router in general...? Not as in, you need the newest router with fastest speeds to tide over the slower times. What I mean is that there's lots of cheap, no-name routers that are just extremely unreliable. Many ISPs hand them out.
Investing into a more expensive router from a widely known brand is usually well worth the money, in my experience. You can probably even buy a used one and still have a better experience.
Currently I'm a college student, so I don't have my own router but I use my university WiFi. And that frequently goes below 1mbps.
In that case, in assuming interference is the issue. A lot of college housing is made of solid concrete block which is great at blocking WiFi signal
There's some of that, but even in the open dining hall space I get terrible Internet speeds, even when it isn't particularly crowded there.
Ah, yeah, that would do it, too. I don't necessarily feel like a new standard will help with that either, but who knows, maybe in a decade or two, every university WiFi router is on WiFi 7...
