This is all good, but will it be able to penetrate the 12-inch German walls in my apartment effortlessly? WiFi reception was pretty good when I used to live in cardboard houses. But now 5GHz struggles a lot with the thick concrete walls at my place.
2.4Ghz should penetrate your walls better, but maybe not enough better to matter? Wifi 6 and 7 run on 2.4, 5, and 6 Ghz (wifi 6e), as opposed to wifi 5 (ac) which was 5ghz only, so if 2.4ghz is viable for you, you'll get some help from an upgrade.
Some of the coordination stuff might help you run multiple APs, but with strong attenuation from walls, you might not have much overlap anyway.
pros and cons of very thick walls i guess…it’s difficult to make changes to your home.
Wifi 7 (6ghz) barely penetrates a single “drywall” wall (in U.S.). It will have a very hard time penetrating thick concrete / brick walls.
in your case if you wanted good wifi 7 signal in all rooms you’d probably need to run wired backhaul and install an access point per room. Probably not worth it. It might make sense to have wifi 7 in your living / dining space though. Especially if you have an open kitchen.
Why the scare quotes around drywall? It's just gypsum board. If you have plastered walls it's the same thing. But it needs far less skill to install correctly since the sheets are manufactured, smooth, and you just have to hang them.
depends on the user. The short answer is it’s worth it if your wifi airspace is very congested or if you have a use case for wifi 7 speeds, such as moving large files around your LAN often.
The 6ghz band has poor range but this can be a benefit actually. It means your neighbors 6ghz signal can’t flood your home like their 2.4ghz and 5ghz can. So there’s very little interference on the 6ghz band. This also means a more stable connection and a little lower latency.
If your wifi works well today i wouldn’t bother upgrading. Unless it’s a fun hobby purchase.
Any benefit of thick concrete walls other than weird flex?
AFAIK modern building materials are better for environment, insulation, repairs, build time and cost.
Source: dad was a builder and inspector for 50 years in eastern europe. I’ve grown up in german house from 1890. He’s helping to work on my “cardboard” house in NZ now. Big aspect of course is - houses are built to the local conditions and market, but he loathes block/concrete houses back home. They are being replaced by cardboard homes too.
And I'm not entirely sure what part of the house they're calling cardboard. It's typically concrete foundation, wood framing, and drywall (i.e. gypsum i.e. stone) walls.
Drywall doesn't deserve the hate, it's fantastic. Flame resistant, cheap to repair and replace, easy to cut and penetrate to install drops run wires. Wiring my whole house with ethernet was a single day affair because of it.
Thermal insulation is usually better in concrete apartments. Also, when I was working in the US, the places I lived were mostly "cardboard" houses by default. In Germany, I don't have much choice. So in my case, it's not even weird flex.
"cardboard" houses have insulation in the walls. Meanwhile I can't imagine how solid (?) concrete would have better insulating properties than fiberglass insulation sandwiched between two "cardboard" walls.
