
Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions - rdslw
https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-us.html
======
zbrozek
I can't say that AFC excites me:
[https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf)

Devices will be sending their GPS coordinates and serial numbers to the FCC to
verify what frequencies they can use.

It's unclear to me why the serial numbers need to be sent.

~~~
teruakohatu
Surley the FCC could just publish a data file that clients download and lookup
their frequencies.

~~~
jrockway
They tried the honor system, it was called DFS. According to Wikipedia: "Prior
to the introduction of Wi-Fi, one of the biggest applications of 5GHz band was
the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. The decision to use 5 GHz spectrum for Wi-
Fi was finalized in World Radiocommunication Conference in 2003; however,
meteorological community was not involved in the process. The subsequent lax
implementation and misconfiguration of DFS had caused significant disruption
in weather radar operations in a number of countries around the world. In
Hungary, the weather radar system was declared non-operational for more than a
month. Due to the severity of interference, South African weather services
ended up abandoning C band operation, switching their radar network to S
band."

TWDR is a high-resolution doppler radar that measures winds on airport
approach paths to detect wind shear and microbursts. It's a life-critical
system. It would be nice to use the bandwidth for WiFi, and the FCC made every
opportunity to allow it, but WiFi vendors didn't play nice.

~~~
stefan_
And yet here we are, lives still.. living?

The FCC needs to do this much more, radio spectrum is a massively valuable
limited resource and you either demonstrate technological excellence or you
get out of the way of those who can. We can't have GHz worth of spectrum
untouched because people don't want to upgrade their 1960s hardware and/or
technology.

~~~
Steltek
And behind the scenes, engineers were working quickly to identify and fix
problems on what was previously reserved spectrum for a life safety system.
It's also a quintessential public good; saying that it should be taken for
private use is absurd and extremely short sighted.

Further, TDWR was developed in the 90's and has undergone upgrades since then.
Don't dismiss it as some Apollo-era PDP-11 sitting in a closet somewhere just
because you don't know what it is.

------
zxcvgm
This is a really helpful guide to understand wireless networking. For in-depth
reviews, I like to check out SmallNetBuilder [0] as they feature thorough
tests and sometimes teardown of the wireless routers. Most "reviews" these
days are pretty much just regurgitating the marketing spiel from
manufacturers, which really doesn't help much.

Recently, I also stumbled upon a Chinese site [1] which does similar
teardowns, but only in Chinese.

[0] [https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/](https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/)

[1]
[https://www.acwifi.net/category/information](https://www.acwifi.net/category/information)

~~~
Yizahi
I highly recommend SNB portal, for all WiFi related stuff - current industry
state and news (relevant to buying APs/routers), in-depth reviews, comparison
reviews. I only wish they would ease off on Captcha usage, I sometimes need to
click for minutes on bicycles and street lights over and over again.

I used it to upgrade from my overheating and low range Linksys to a strange
rare but efficient Synology router and it was a very good buy in the end.

------
milankragujevic
This article is so awesome!

I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is
their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1
802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.

Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets
you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel.

Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz the PHY
rate drops to <100 Mbps, so in those cases I recommend 802.11n 40MHz on 5GHz
band.

The AP/Router/Modem combo that all the ISPs give in my country is very much
capable of fast WiFi. It has 4x4 MIMO at 802.11ac with 80MHz + 2x2 MIMO at
802.11n up to 40 MHz (I always tell people to avoid 40 MHz on 2.4GHz band!).

On a good phone, this gets you around 600 Mbps with 867 Mbps PHY, on a cheaper
device, between 250 and 290 Mbps on 433 Mbps PHY. Devices with 4x4 can get
1.7Gbps PHY, but I do not have any.

This does not stop people from complaining about the free modem they get,
demand it is put into bridge mode, buy an ASUS router for >400€, and get the
same result. Some (smartly) return the router they bought right away, and
request the ISP put the device back into routing mode, but some keep the
useless and expensive trophy of stupidity...

~~~
Dahoon
I'd rather have that ASUS stupidity trophy than a backdoored router, which
pretty much all of them are when from an ISP. Not many of them (none?) even
care to update regularly.

~~~
milankragujevic
You can pretty easily disable the backdoors with the backdoor admin account I
discovered by extracting the firmware from the TR069 ACS server, and posted on
my blog.

You have a TR069 interface that operates on a VLAN, you can disable that
interface and it does not have the ability to contact the ISP or be contacted
(this is not DOCSIS, I'm talking about GPON or xDSL).

In general all ISP combo devices are firewalled off from the WAN side, don't
reply to pings and no open ports. If there was a kernel network stack bug, you
can't bypass that with your own router, unless it's xDSL in which case you can
buy ANY compatible modem and use it with the PPPoE login you can extract from
your ISP combo device using instructions on my blog.

If it's GPON you can't do anything, it's a full Huawei system (ONT and OLT)
and it needs to authorize with a serial number over OMCI, which you cannot
replicate cheaply.

You can use a MikroTik router and a Huawei SFP+ transceiver, but that is too
expensive to justify it for moderate-level geeks :)

------
PaulKeeble
This article strongly suggests that modern hardware reviews for consumer grade
routers have become mostly useless. This has a wealth of practical knowledge
in it the likes of which you never see in a review of a router. So much of the
modern internet for product reviews is really advertorials.

~~~
taneq
It sounds like the specs are largely useless for ranking consumer routers, but
crowdsourced user reviews are still useful.

A couple of years ago I bought a Netgear D7000v2 VDSL modem/router and it was
a piece of junk. It took minutes to start up after power-on, any attempt to
use the USB drive sharing functionality would lock up the router requiring a
power cycle, one firmware upgrade broke its ability to sync to VDSL (luckily I
still had an old firmware binary handy, so I could revert it) and when I
finally threw in the towel on it and switched to the $1 bundled modem that
came with my new broadband service, suddenly I was synching at 25% higher
speed. Never buying another Netgear product again. They used to be good,
dammit.

------
leokennis
Superb article, high on info, low on confusion!

For my own home, I used to try to optimize the hell out of it (regularly
switching channels, trying new routers etc.)

Now I "installed" a TP-Link Deco M9 system. I have 250 Mbps coming in, and at
the worst part of my house, my iPhone will still get 100 Mbps from that. That
is more than enough even for streaming 4K. So I have now arrived at the "why
bother tinkering with a good enough system" stage of WiFi, which is a huge
relief.

------
cyrialize
If you're interested in learning some networking, I recommend Ubiquiti. If you
want to save money, I recommend used Ubiquiti.

My rationale for buying used is that basically normal consumers typically do
not buy Ubiquiti enterprise products - so anyone who does is someone who has
experience with technology and will take care of it well.

I haven't had a chance to test this out yet, but I hope it works!

I picked up an Edgerouter X SFP for $40 on FB Marketplace (retails for $99),
the guy selling it is a mobility architect. It came in great condition. After
I bought it I found an Edgerouter PoE5 ALSO being sold for $40 - this retails
at $275. I don't really need it, but I've thought about buying it since it's
so cheap anyways. I'm also going to purchase an AP AC Long Range for $50 -
this retails at $109.

The Edgerouters do not come with an AP built in, so you have to buy one
separately. I don't mind doing this since I think it's easier to mount an
access point than it is to mount a router since you have to worry about less
wires (just ethernet if the ap can be poe'd).

For about $90 total I'll have an enterprise router and AP that'll work much
better than the cheap sagecom router I'm renting from my ISP.

~~~
rmrfstar
> I picked up an Edgerouter X SFP for $40 on FB Marketplace

Be careful buying second-hand electronics, particularly networking kit!

You should re-flash the device's firmware. The OpenWRT website should be able
to guide you to stock firmware images for most modern SOHO devices.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
You should do that regardless with any new equipment where possible. At the
very least, it'll be up to date. Networking gear makes it especially easy to
flash new firmware so it's just a few extra minutes of setup.

And in the case of some of Ubiquiti's gear, you have to reflash to just get
started unforunately (my UDM Pro couldn't complete setup without a reflash and
my Unifi Switch 8 couldn't be discovered by the new UDM until a reflash).
That's a real fun software issue from Ubiquiti.

~~~
rmrfstar
It's probably best to avoid the built-in update utilities for the first re-
flash. Uboot can load a kernel via TFTP over serial.

What you are worried about is backdoored firmware.

If this is too much work, just buy new kit in sealed packages. Saving a couple
hundred bucks just isn't worth the risk.

------
agurk
It's interesting that the he says in the guide that it's definitely worth
getting a 4x4 MIMO AP/router:

> It is easy to overlook and miss, but beamforming and diversity are the key
> reasons why you want a 4×4 MIMO router even though most clients are still
> only 2×2 MIMO. The extra antennas are actually used and offer value (a
> stronger signal, which translate to better connect speeds for some users)!

Having been a keen user of the TP-Link Omada series of APs I went to check
what their capability was. No wonder they don't mention anywhere on the site -
it's only 2x2 (for the EAP225). I was able to confirm this by using their
maximum speed and the access speeds table in the article.

I don't know how much I'm actually missing out on, but I'm going to stop
automatically recommending these products now.

~~~
phonon
EAP330 goes up to 1300 mbits/s...[1]

[1] [https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/ceiling-
mount...](https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/ceiling-mount-access-
point/eap330/)

~~~
agurk
Yes, which must mean it's a 3x3 (same as the EAP245). Of their upcoming HD620
and 660 Wifi 6 models the former is 2x2 and the latter 4x4[0]. And there is an
somewhat oblique reference to this with the marketing copy talking about "4
streams". The article did say to hold off from purchasing wifi 6 equipment
however.

[0] [https://www.tp-link.com/uk/business-networking/ceiling-
mount...](https://www.tp-link.com/uk/business-networking/ceiling-mount-
ap/eap660-hd/)

------
MR4D
Awesome reference! Looks like someone took notes over a nice span of time and
compiled them into a tech guide for WiFi.

~~~
sq_
Yeah, this is really cool. WiFi hardware is one of those things that I find
even a lot of more "techy" people like you'll find on HN view as a black box.
It's awesome when someone aggregates a bunch of information and then shares it
so that we can all develop a better understanding.

------
jonathanlydall
This article's comprehensiveness is amazing and worth a read.

While I love WiFi for my mobile devices or occasionally when my laptop isn't
at my desk, I can't recommend to people enough to prefer actual network cables
for their devices which are in "fixed" locations, for example your normal work
area for your laptop, or where your TV is with consoles or something like an
AppleTV.

Once you move at least mostly to wires, you'll find that most (if not all)
your network problems just go away.

If you're worried about aesthetics, my laptop has power, networking, screens
and everything working through a single USB-C port, so my desk is quite
pristine. Around TVs and their connected devices it's pretty much always super
easy to hide wires.

Wireless is a shared medium with everyone in range who is also on wireless, it
just can't scale like individual wires (very inexpensively) at 1Gb/s speed
EACH. So put everything you practically can on wires, that way your airwaves
remain largely open as they're only used by things like mobile phones or light
browsing on laptops.

I understand that if you're renting then it may not be possible to do wires.
My hope is that in the same way that most houses started being built to
accommodate cable tv / telephone points, in the future they'll be built to
accomodate network points by at least TVs.

Offices trying to be all wireless are almost certainly never going to be able
to provide high speeds to everyone for the foreseeable future. Employees at
their desks should use wired connections and wireless should only be used for
mobile phones or people not at their desk for some reason (like being in a
meeting).

------
focus2020
Buy a router that supports flashing openwrt. It is very transparent to debug
and supports lots of features in addition to adblock, monitoring, etc at the
router level.

~~~
couchridr
I also like ddwrt. But I didn’t see it mentioned in the long article, which is
mostly about the wireless channel. Can you recommend a recent router (or
brand) that supports ddwrt?

------
goihoiholi
Nice article!

However, roaming support is entirely missing. Handover between access points
is really important in my experience. It would have been nice to have an
overview on the current situation in WiFi.

~~~
miek
I don't think you'll find a system with automatic access point adjustment to
maximize handoff quality.I think the basic best practices for overlapping wifi
access points are something like this: -set each to a different channel
-adjust power settings to reduce coverage overlap (some is necessary; too much
is bad)

~~~
goihoiholi
[edit: re-read your post; you're well aware what handoff is, so sorry for the
overly vivid explanation]

That's 'cell planning'. Roaming is different:

Let's say you're moving from your bedroom to the kitchen. The bedroom AP's
signal suddenly drops. Your smartphone needs to find the kitchen AP, re-
connect, and re-transmit all the packets that might have been lost.

Mobile networks assist the smartphone: it tells the smartphone that the
kitchen AP will soon be in range. It already allocates and configures
resources at the target AP. Then the handover is more seamless.

In theory, WiFi can do this too. But last time I checked, it seemed a vendor-
specific mess.

~~~
RulerOf
>In theory, WiFi can do this too.

WiFi actually can't do this. It's a shame, but fully network-directed roaming
is not a thing in 802.11 yet, and I don't know when it's going to bother to
show up.

The major protocol extensions you can use are 802.11k, 802.11r, and 802.11v.
They have a compounding increase in roaming performance in roughly that level
of significance.

802.11k is a pure win. It should always be used.

802.11r is hit or miss. When it works, roaming can take under 10ms. When it
doesn't, you disassociate entirely and reconnect. I have an SSID with it
enabled but never use it.

802.11v is a pure win, but not very well supported.

I use Cisco hardware specifically for this feature set, but I can't really say
I recommend it. I kinda hate the controller software, and it's licensed
separately. Cheap hardware on eBay though.

~~~
goihoiholi
Thanks!

Do those extensions require client support, and if so, is it supported by
consumer devices?

~~~
RulerOf
Yes.

iOS supports them all: [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT202628](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202628)

Mac OS doesn't support any of them (much to my chagrin).

On Windows, it has to be implemented by the driver. I suggest using Intel:
[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000021562/network-
and-i-o/wireless-networking.html)

With Android, it's hit or miss. All modern flagships support them AFAIK. Going
back in time, it's limited to premium vendors. I'd expect the majority of
devices to support 802.11k, although they're quiet about it. You'd have to
check logs on your AP (if available) to determine if it's in use.

------
tibbydudeza
I went through so many routers until I bought two Ubiquity Wireless AC's.

Definitely not consumer friendly to configure using a java webbased
application but I never had to reboot or change anything.

They just work day in and day out and the family is happy.

------
labawi
> 650 → 390: MAC efficiency > there are 'housekeeping' packets that MUST be
> sent at the SLOWEST possible modulation

True, but it's actually the slowest _supported_ / _enabled_ modulation, which
can be increased. In a crowded 2.4GHz environment (1Mbps min. modulation),
raising it to 12Mbps or more can cut 50+% fluff (SSID, ARP, data broadcasts..)
down to <5% fluff.

> 2166 → 1083: Client MIMO > You must use the minimum MIMO common to both
> devices

MU-MIMO should enable the router to split its numerous MIMO channels to
multiple devices with less MIMO channels. I have no idea whether it actually
works.

------
jbb67
Nice article. I find that 5Ghz bands are entirely useless in my house though.
Old solid walls and heavy floors mean that I'd need an AP in every room at
5Ghz. At 2.4 I can get away with two good access points.

------
davidhyde
Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time
now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home
and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out
there?

~~~
Dahoon
Something made to have open source flashed safely. I use OpenWRT on my access
points and router. Maybe not as easy but on the other hand nothing comes close
in functionality (unless you buy products made for big business).

~~~
davidhyde
Thanks! Can you recommend a particular model?

~~~
jabl
For 802.11n, choose something with the ath9k driver. For 802.11ac, there's
unfortunately nothing with an open firmware, but it seems ath10k and mt76
receive the most attention by developers working on bufferbloat reduction etc.

For 802.11ax, not sure there's anything available in the openwrt or mainline
kernels yet. You might end up with something with a binary blob and you can't
upgrade your kernel.

------
ausjke
Very informative.

I use a TP Link 1750AC cheap router($60) that seems work perfectly fine for
the whole house for streaming and surfing.

My internet is about 20mbps down and 6mbps up.

I never felt the need that my bandwidth is too slow somehow. What's the super
1Gbps wifi + ISP for? I never need it, maybe until I'm doing VR on Internet
some day.

Transfer large files inside the house over wifi is the only time I felt wifi
is not fast enough, but that happens once a year, for huge size files I can do
USB transfer anyways.

In short, $60 router suffices for me. I see no needs for wifi6 yet for 99% of
the households.

------
hyko
Great article, what we come to hacker news for.

Edited to add: I'm starting to think that wireless communications were–on
balance–a terrible mistake.

------
mnm1
Wi-Fi 6 looks promising for people with really fast Internet connections that
are not capped. For capped internet connections it's almost irrelevant. In my
experience, it just reaches the cap quicker and ends up in charges or having
to carefully manage things to not reach the cap before the end of the month. I
downgraded my connection from 350mbps to 200mbps as I was breaching the 1tb
cap too quickly (Comcast). I can't imagine having a 1gbps connection with a
1tb cap. It might last a week or two before getting hit with massive overages.
It's been nice not having this problem the last few months, but I don't expect
to upgrade my router anytime soon. There's simply no service here that would
warrant it as Comcast has a monopoly.

~~~
tzs
For a large majority of consumers the amount of data they use per month is
only slightly correlated with their internet speed.

They have a certain amount of data they want to use in a month. If their speed
goes up or down the amount of data they want to use stays about the same--the
speed just determines how long they have to wait for downloads.

You might look into Comcast's XFi Advantage plan, which includes unlimited
data. The cost varies by location but I think it is around $15/month in most.
You also have to be renting their modem, so add another $10-14/month. You can
add unlimited data to any plan, but that's $50/month. Doing it via XFi
Advantage is about half of that.

~~~
lotsofpulp
>For a large majority of consumers the amount of data they use per month is
only slightly correlated with their internet speed.

This will change once the cable boxes go out and all media comes through the
internet pipe. I don't know anyone in my network (mid 30s and below) who
subscribes to television service. Even the old people in my family have been
setup with iPads or Apple TVs or whatnot so they can watch everything on
demand.

------
beagle3
This is an excellent reference about the WiFi side. It would be even more
awesome if it included software setup -- for my lazy self that's "make sure it
runs OpenWRT and does firewalling quickly enough".

------
pedrocr
Very good information to get great performance. It would be nice if it
explained how much to go for for a given WAN speed and LAN requirements. The
links I have are 100Mb/s symmetrical so spending 250€ on the recommended
router would probably not help compared to the 70€ Archer C7/AC1750 I've
installed in a couple of places already.

It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to
get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support. Add some affiliate links and it
could be a nice income stream.

~~~
jlgaddis
> _It would be awesome to have a simple table somewhere that described what to
> get based on WAN speed and OpenWRT support._

FWIW, OpenWRT has a "recommended routers" page [0].

\---

[0]:
[https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers](https://openwrt.org/toh/recommended_routers)

~~~
pedrocr
I know. Unfortunately that page doesn't actually recommend any routers as that
section is no longer maintained.

------
acqq
Living in the place where the list of "available networks" can never fit to a
single screen of anything, I like the major point:

"15\. How to improve speeds

Use Ethernet whenever possible"

------
devwastaken
In my experience all in one routers with WiFi at a consumer level will fail
after a year, or have other problems. Typically it only fails on the wifi
side, so I turn them into ethernet only and hook up an ubiquiti AP. They're
configured through a phone app and a QR code, haven't had to worry about it
ever again.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I have not had to touch my AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule since first
plugging them in, ~6 years ago. Maybe there was a software update once or
twice.

------
chrisweekly
Wow, thank you so much for sharing this fantastic resource. Saved me a ton of
time, and hugely increased my confidence in how I'm setting things up in my
"new" home.

------
Jack5500
The article is really great, but I hoped it would touch more on extending the
wireless range. Are there any good comparable articles out there?

~~~
solstice
He talks a bit about the channel width/range relationship in appendix H:
[https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-
us.html#channelwid...](https://www.duckware.com/tech/wifi-in-the-
us.html#channelwidthrange) There's some more in appendix I

------
xamlhacker
This talks about performance. What about security? Many newer routers come
with WPA3. Does it offer substantial benefits over WPA2?

------
ksec
Great Articles. Jotting down some notes as I am reading it.

>Greatly complicating a decision is that Wi-Fi 6E is just around the corner
(early devices expected late 2020) that will require (yet again) new hardware
-- existing Wi-Fi 6 devices will not support Wi-Fi 6E.

We _could_ technically have WiFi 6 devices working with WiFI 6E as long as
they were designed as such. I recall one of the ASUS engineers said their
router would work, the problem is compliance and passing FCC certification and
if Upgrade were _allowed_. Yes may be practically we need to buy new hardware.
( Profits )

And I could rant about WiFi 6/ 802.11ax for hours. Basically either buy a
decent WiFi 5 or wait for 6E in hope they fix their mess.

MacBook Pro - As far as I know All 2016+ MacBook Pros has 802.11ac 3x3 WiFi by
default. Giving you a "marketing" speed of 1300Mbps. Older Generation MacBook
Pros has 3x3 for 15", 2x2 for MacBook Pro 13". All non-pros MacBook has always
had 2x2 WiFi.

The reason is simply because only Broadcom make WiFI Client chipset that
support 3x3. May be at the request of Apple. And the notebook market is
basically an Intel only game. You get incentives and bundle pricing from Intel
CPU for using Intel WiFi. And Intel doesn't make 3x3 WiFi ( Or they did but
only in _Centrino_ era... ) . Not in 802.11ac and likely not in 802.11ax.

Since demand for 3x3 802.11ac continues to be a niche, PC vendors fail to
market better WiFi speed as added value. And Intel doesn't want to do a custom
WiFi controller just for ~5M unit of MacBook Pro annually. And why innovate
when there is no competition? Intel has 90%+ of Notebook PC market shares
anyway.

In case anyone is wondering, there is an Broadcom 3x3 WiFi 6E client chipset
announced last year. Hopefully you will see this in the next MacBook Pro
Upgrade.

One reason people may have heard about the rumours of Broadcom selling their
client WiFi business late last year. Their WiFi PC market is limited by
Intel's domination, Smartphone market is a similar situation with Qualcomm.
And Broadcom's Client WiFi business is primarily an Apple business. For nearly
4 years I have been anticipating Apple doing WiFi on their own before doing
4G/5G Modem. Considering they use more WiFi unit than Intel's current annual
WiFi shipment. But so far only ultra low power chip W3 is being used in Apple
Watch.

Samsung S20 is also an 2x2 Devices. May be worth an update in the WiFi 6
table.

>The AC#### naming ......

Those naming are confusing, but one way to look at it is the number represent
the theoretical maximum _capacity_ of the WiFi network. Those were never
intended to be speed. But of course marketing is working is way. So
_hypothetically_ speaking a higher speed router gets you faster speed when you
have multiple client.

Nice! Turns out all of my 802,11ax Rant is included in the its own Section.

>(1) 802.11ax is not even expected to be made an official IEEE standard until
"Sep 2020" (source),

It should be noted the date is _prediction_. And that date has been moving up
a quarter for every meeting since 2018. Draft 3.0 was suppose to be the last
Draft, then Draft 5.0 and now Draft 6.0......

> 160Mhz

It should be noted none of the current Mobile Devices ( Or basically Non Intel
Wifi 6 devices irrespective of their form factor ) supports 160Mhz ( 160Mhz /
80+80 ). Both Samsung and Apple are on 80Mhz only. This will likely change
with WiFi 6E.

>Not all wifi clients are DFS capable!

Wow. I was always under the assumption DFS is a router problem. This sucks.

Such a great site that explains so much what is wrong about WiFi and its
industry as a whole. And how it seems no cares about the user experience.
There are increasing amount of people who just want to use a simple and
working 4G/5G connection than their WiFi.

This is such a great resource I wish I could pay the authors some money as
gratitude. It also reminds me of the Internet in the 90s where people spend
their time, heart and soul into making something. It is not for SEO, or Ads
Revenue. Simply wrote out of passion. ( or may be anger )

Thank You.

~~~
kalleboo
I was actually idly curious about why the latest iPhones got WiFi 6 but the
MacBook Pro 16" didn't, from your (fantastic) comment I guess it's because
Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset out and I guess whoever does the
iPhone chipset (iFixit identifies it as "Apple/USI") doesn't have a 3x3
version?

~~~
ksec
> iPhone chipset.....

That was Broadcom as well.

>I guess it's because Broadcom doesn't have their WiFI 6 chipset

They did, as per iPhone. But Broadcom didn't have a WiFi 6 3x3 implementation
then, and I guess Apple doesn't want to compromise to WiFi 6 2x2 ( 80Mhz )
implementation on 16" Macbook which would actually be slower ( On paper ) than
its previous 3x3 WiFi 5 / 802.11ac.

All these is on the assumption Apple wants to continue with 3x3 WiFi. They
could wait for WiFi 6E and call it a day. A 160Mhz on WiFi 6E gives you
2400Mbps on paper.

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guzy
Thanks!! this is easily the most awesome, comprehensive guide I've ever seen
for routers

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hdanirwin
Can someone TLDR and tell me what the best router is for $75-$150?

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avalexandrov
Netgear R7800 or ASUS AC86U. Both are good. Netgear supports OpenWRT.

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Havoc
Yup. Haven’t managed to get a single device to actually utilize WiFi 6. It’s
such a minefield

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dzhiurgis
It’s amazing that OpenWRT praises themselves as performance oriented router
firmware yet I can’t find any mainstream router model that can reach practical
limit of 3x3 speed...

