I've been surprised by how many random devices experience terrible wifi interference. I just bought a new Mac Mini that experiences a ton of interference, sometimes going offline completely. I can browse the web fine but I can't screen share on Zoom or even speak in Discord without noticeable lag multiple times a minute. It's not in some Faraday cage or anything, it's just sitting on my desk not 3 feet from my Ubiquiti access point. But I do have a USB dongle plugged into it which I have heard can cause a lot of interference. My phone, even when sitting on top of the Mac, gets a solid 800 mbits down. It's silly to need an ethernet cable for 3 feet of distance from my switch but here we are.
Much as they've made other mistakes, lingering WiFi issues are not necessarily Apple's fault. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong.
For example, I've had routers be unstable with some particular devices because of specific encryption settings. Ironically, I learned about that chipset problem while I was getting ready to throw dd-wrt on the offending router in frustration. I've had access points give super-slow connections to new devices until the AP was rebooted. And on and on.
WiFi works most of the time, but when it doesn't it usually isn't easy to figure out what (or even where) the problem really is.
Lots of legacy tech is also one of the reasons why Wi-Fi sucks. If you do one thing today, disable 802.11b on your router. 802.11b beacons alone can completely jam a 2.4 GHz channel in dense deployments, exasperated by those ISPs that broadcast their own SSIDs from your home router.
The RF side of WiFi is hell. The modem side is work, yes, but getting the air interface to work, and then dealing with all the interference management side is a nightmare.
I am not certain, but I think part of the 'blob' thing on WiFi internal implementations is to prevent someone breaking certification, particularly for the interference mitigation for things like DFS.
This will probably get lost in the noise, but I want to make an important point about the WiFi issues: it's not because there were too many users, but rather that there were too many access points. There were _570_ access points in the room, probably the result of people bringing along their MiFis and similar devices. Running a 571th device would not have solved that problem.
I also wonder how much of this is caused by poorly tuned home WiFi setups. You have congested airwaves, poor channel choices (what’s this channel 2? Nobody’s on that!), and the tendency for everyone to run their access points on MAX power to increase their “range” - all ways to totally demolish real world multi client WiFi throughput.
So the failure in a demo of a prerelease hardware device with pre-release drivers having a problem to connect to WiFi in a room in which there are around 500 access points and who knows how many connected wifi nodes warrants this much of analysis and an article of this length?
Wifi does fail here and then. That's just a fact. Even more so if you factor in pre-release devices.
On a different note, in china a sack of rice just fell over.
This is a recurring theme with new chipsets. I'm sure it'll get cleaned up in firmware/driver updates as usual, but at some point, you'd think Apple would figure out a better QA strategy for wifi.
1. Google's Public WiFi in Mountain View, CA: never worked. It was a misconfigured mesh network, possibly with a slow backhaul.
2. If you were a starving student, you could get onto the supermarket's slow free WiFi across the street with a long-range, high power 802.11b/g/a card w/ an external directional antenna that looks suspicious on its own.
3. When you were slightly less starving but still "hungry", the main places with fast WiFi were Starbucks with "Google WiFI".
Great article, one problem: it's yet another lament.
Any ideas how to fix/prevent it?
Maybe we should get our wifi routers into a mesh network. Maybe we should start hosting our own stuff, or make simple tools for this, like YunoHost, iRedMail, etc.
But please, stop writing articles about how bad it is.
"I get things are bad. But what are we doing to fix it?"
— Casey Newton (Tomorrowland, 2015)
... and to make matters even worse the solutions being marketed for fixing a lot of these problems are... MORE ACCESS POINTS!
Every time a friend tells me about getting a mesh system to cover dead zones in their place I cringe at the thought of more 2.4 GHz blasting everywhere. 99% of the time the problem can be solved by better placing their current access point, whether that means moving their ISP provided router/AP, or installing a standalone AP and disabling whatever they're currently using for WiFi.
I don't really know the answer to fixing the issues but it seems to me it's not technical, it's better information about placing the devices. End users just want it to work but don't have the time to learn how to best do that. ISP installers are not incentivized to care either, install as cheap and quickly as possible and get out.
Mesh definitely isn't the answer though. It's the anti-answer.
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