𝗧𝗼𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 *𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑝𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry’s New Priority: Stability
RapidcreekKudos to the working group.
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!
I imagine many already exist. But the system should be designed to fail safe with WiFi in mind.
You could safely bet somebody already does
ThrashyI don’t know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I’m a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me
In industrial there are very few wireless systems unless they are either too remote from the CPU and aren’t safety sensitive. Safety is taken very seriously because any incident can mean injuries/death and ending up in the public eye. Any safety systems are hard wired because of reliability.
LinkerbaanAs long as they have a delay counter which immediately shuts the robot down when it a message 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.
Eager Eagleas 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.
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 Verizon or use Bluetooth.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
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.
I think the point is that that sort of safety critical stuff should be on board, not relying on a wireless connection.
I wouldn’t even rely it on wired connection it should be self contained.
Although to begin with there shouldn’t be a human there to begin with.
Better hope staff don’t Microwave their lunch at the wrong time….
This sounds like they’re talking about something specific. There was a guy that picked up/crushed by a robot recently that is eerily similar.
Flying SquidI 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…
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.
I’m guessing the bump to 6GHz means range is even lower. Seems we’re leaning towards a future of hardwired-equivalent speed and reliability… within 1 meter.
that guyThen you can buy a bunch of repeaters and the economy is saved
I know this is a joke but please do not buy repeaters they do not work how you would expect them to work.
Repeaters take an already weak signal and amplify that signal while increasing the latency. Sure this makes the signal go farther but it doesn’t increase the bandwidth and if you stand in between the originating wifi source and the repeater your device may not migrate to the source wifi even though it might be faster because the reapeter has the illusion of being a better signal because it’s louder.
The better route to go is to use multiple wifi APs through out the building connected back to your router with ethernet.
You could also go with mesh access points but you have to do a lot of research and planning; The two key things to look out for is they mesh system must have a dedicated backhaul and you must place them where each node has an excellent signal to the next node. Since most backhauls run on 5Ghz and 6Ghz this means there shouldn’t be any walls between them.
Exactly. I’m going to be running Ethernet through my house soon, and even if we stay full Wi-Fi, we’ll benefit by having physical cables connecting the APs. I already have a separate AP, just need to run the cables to get a second in our basement where the signal is weak.
Do yourself a favor and drop fiber at the same time. That’s my plan for whenever I get around to crawling in the attic.
My city is rolling out fiber in a year or two, so I’ll have to ask them how that works, because I’d like to plan out where they drop it.
They don’t drop it in your home most likely. In our home it’s a box on the side of the house with the modem and they ran cat5 to our media panel in the garage.
Ours will support >1gbit (up to 10gbit allegedly), so they probably won’t run cat5, but hopefully they don’t get lazy and just run cat6 or cat6a and actually run a fiber link to the house.
All the ONT boxes I’ve seen in houses have fiber directly to the box.
Is fiber really worth the extra complexity and expense? It’s strength is in longer distances with mostly straight runs. When you are doing short distances with multiple turns, copper is much easier and more forgiving. Splicing fiber is difficult if something breaks during or after installation, on top of the expense and skill needed for proper termination. Tools and hardware for copper are cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous.
I agree and really you can replace the copper with fiber by tying an end and pulling.
It really isn’t any more complex, and the price of it has dropped significantly. Plus, you don’t have to terminate the fiber, just pull it.
Yes but WiFi 7 FINALLY lets devices connect to multiple BANDS at the same time with a new feature called Multi-link operation (MLO)… IE the device can hold on to a longer range but slower band and more seamlessly transmit data over the best one at the time.
PHLAKI think the prevalence of mesh systems is intended to remedy this. Instead of a single AP that can cover your entire house you can mesh two or three APs to get the coverage desired.
That’s how I do it, except because I have all these AP’s I just set them up near the devices that will use it and plug them all into the AP’s and use the backhaul which is way more reliable. Phones and tablets are the only things that use the wifi and never really found an issue with speed or reliability since moving to mesh.
It’s probably still better to have wired backhaul with multiple APs than a mesh, but it’s definitely a decent option if you can’t wire it for whatever reason.
That’s an advantage if you utilize it right. Less range means your neighbor’s wifi is less likely to interfere with your own. Multiple access points are a superior way to get coverage of your whole house than some octopus antenna monstrosity.
The inverse square law doesn’t have to be a problem.
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.
Currently gigabit Ethernet is faster and more reliable than WiFi, despite WiFi theoretically being equivalent. The benefit of increased speed and scalability is never needing wired infrastructure at the home/office.
We’re in a race: on one side WiFi7 had great potential, but on the other side 2.5gE is becoming more common on new PCs. Who will win? Will consumers care, if they don’t have a home lab and can’t get an internet connection to match?
For those claiming current bandwidth is more than people need, I would agree in theory but it just doesn’t pan out in reality. There are always network glitches and irregularities, there’s ever more tracking and advertising, there’s ever more Interference. Recently my fiber provider had issues and my connection was downgraded to 350/150 with 44ms: theoretically still way faster than I need yet even “simple” web pages were noticeably slower.maybe I’m spoiled but I couldn’t imagine trying to game on that
I switched my house to 10gbe & 2.5gbe and never looked back. Not only is it fast, it’s so much more stable. I still have 1gbe for things like PoE cameras but man. My network is rock solid.
I resent wireless because I feel like we got led astray by the aesthetics crowd. It was never good-- contested bandwidth, poor penetration, paper-mache security, but it was so much more attractive than cables asunder that we’re throwing moonshot resources at it to try to make it good enough.
Meanwhile, consumer wired has stagnated. You can finally get 2.5GbE on a lot of new mainboards, but there are few affordable home router/AP devices, especially with multiple 2.5G ports. the local home centres still primarily stock spools of Cat5E, and even new-build developments treat networking as a low-priority line item, probably well below cable TV jacks, if they mention it at all.
If we had put the same emphasis on wired, there’d be 10/40Gb fibre NICs in commodity systems, and the Home Despot would sell all-inclusive fibre and Cat6A or 8 retrofit box kits.
My SFP 10GbE equipment was cheaper than the 1GbE equipment I installed 15 years ago. You can absolutely set up a home fiber network affordably if you want, NICs for tower hardware isn’t even the issue - even SFP USB dongles are widely available and not that expensive.
Yup, I went with MikroTik for my home network, and it’s been great, although the sfp switch I’m eying will set me back a bit.
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…
Fighting games with Wi-Fi instead of Ethernet? Sounds more like a dream. This genre is particularly demanding on stable low latency connections and current technology absolutely doesn’t offer it. Spreading across frequencies sounds like a latency vs reliability trade-off.
Back when 5G cellular was first rolling out, a professor brought in a Qualcomm senior level manager and the topic was how 6G was being developed for long distance low latency capabilities.
How much of that was industry bullshit, no idea but it sounds like they had a pulse on the tech now that we hear about it years later.
And 5G is mostly ass anyway. I feel like LTE is faster and EASILY more reliable everywhere I am. If I lose power at my house, I can barely send text only messages in any app.
What phone are you using? My first 5G phone didn’t support midband 5G, and yeah, my experience was similar. Lowband 5G was maybe slightly faster than LTE, but wasn’t worth the lower battery life, higher heat, and spottier performance that was associated with early 5G radios.
Now I’ve got a phone with midband 5G support and midband 5G kicks the shit out of LTE.
I am using LTE mostly because it always works and is plenty fast for what I need to do on a mobile device. 5G also uses more battery too.
The lowest latency links right now are already wireless point to point links.
Says who?
My PhD in electrical engineering.
Care to elaborate or point to a reliable source?
It should be fairly intuitive. Sending electromagnetic radiation through copper or fiber will add physical distance versus a direct line of sight link. And the refractive index of light in the atmosphere is significantly lower, so the radiation actually propagates faster. Over long distances, those microseconds will add up.
The best example of this is the stock exchange in Chicago (and elsewhere) uses a low latency microwave link to save several milliseconds over the fiber links.
In theory the speed of light is higher in free space than it is in copper.
Absolutely, the speed of light in copper is zero
Your comment faces resistance.
I feel like this is really dependent upon the game. Guilty Gear Strive for instance uses roll back net code and my personal experience playing it online over wifi is that it feels practically identical to playing locally. Here and there I might have minor issues if the person I’m playing against has horrible Ping but for the most part wifi is flawless.