Even 5.8Ghz is getting congested. There's a dedicated router in this case (a USB fob), but you still have to share spectrum with the other devices. And at the 160Mhz symbol rate mode on WiFi6, you only have one channel in the 5.8GHz spectrum that needs to be shared.
"6 GHz Wi-Fi" means Wi-Fi 6E (or newer) with a frequency range of 5.925–7.125 GHz, giving 7 non-overlapping 160 MHz channels (which is not the same thing as the symbol rate, it's just the channel bandwidth component of that). As another bonus, these frequencies penetrate walls even less than 5 GHz does.
I live on the 3rd floor of a large apartment complex. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is so congested that I can get better performance on 2.4 in a rural area, especially accounting for DFS troubles in 5 GHz. 6 GHz is open enough I have a non-conflicting 160 MHz channel assigned to my AP (and has no DFS troubles).
Interestingly, the headset supports Wi-Fi 7 but the adapter only supports Wi-Fi 6E.
This is part of my job, dealing with spectrum and Washington.
I communicate with the FCC and NTIA fairly often at this point.
You need to pay attention to Arielle Roth, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information
Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
"... administration’s investment in unlicensed access in 6 GHz ensures the benefits of the entire spectrum band are delivered directly to American families and businesses in the form of more innovation and faster and more reliable connectivity at home and on the go, which will continue to transform and deliver long-lasting impact for communities of all sizes across the country.
Charter applauds Administrator Roth's leadership, and her recognition of the critical role unlicensed spectrum plays today and in the future, both in the U.S. and across the globe."
"... To identify the remainder, NTIA plans to assess four targeted spectrum bands in the range set by Congress: 7125-7400 MHz; 1680-1695 MHz; 2700-2900 MHz; and 4400-4940 MHz."
"On the topic of on-the-ground realities, let’s also not forget what powers our networks today. While licensed spectrum is critical, the majority of mobile traffic is actually offloaded onto Wi-Fi. Born in America, led by America, Wi-Fi remains an area where we dominate, and we must continue to invest in this important technology. With Wi-Fi, the race has already been won. China knows it cannot compete and for that reason looks for ways to sabotage the very ingenuity that made Wi-Fi a global standard."
Roth is not going to take away 6GHz from current ISM allocation.
More of an issue when your phone's wifi or your partner watching a show while you game is eating into that one channel in bursts, particularly since the dedicated fob means that it's essentially another network conflicting with the regular WiFI rather than deeply collaborating for better real time guarantees (not that arbitrary wifi routers would even support real time scheduling).
MIMO helps here to separate the spectrum use by targeted physical location, but it's not perfect by any means.
IMO there is not much reason to use WiFi 6 for almost anything else. I have a WiFi 6 router set up for my Quest 3 for PC streaming, and everything else sits on its 5GHz network. And since it doesn't really go through walls, I think this is a non-issue?
The Frame itself here is a good example actually - using 6GHz for video streaming and 5GHz for wifi, on separate radios.
My main issue with the Quest in practice was that when I started moving my head quickly (which happens when playing faster-paced games) I would get lag spikes. I did some tuning on the bitrate / beam-forming / router positioning to get to an acceptable place, but I expect / hope that here the foveated streaming will solve these issues easily.
The thing is that I'd expect foveated rendering to increase latency issues, not help them like it does for bandwidth concerns. During a lag spike you're now looking at an extremely down sampled image instead of what in non foveated rendering had been just as high quality.
Now I also wonder if an ML model could also work to help predict fovea location based on screen content and recent eye trackng data. If the eyes are reading a paragraph, you have a pretty good idea where they're going to go next for instance. That way a latency spike that delays eye tracking updates can be hidden too.
My understanding is that the foveated rendering would reduce bandwidth requirements enough that latency spikes become effectively non-existent.
We’ll see in practice - so far all hands-on reviewers said the foveated rendering worked great, with one trying to break it (move eyes quickly left right up down from edge to edge) and not being able to - the foveated rendering always being faster.
I agree latency spikes would be really annoying if they end up being like you suggest.
On the LTT video he also said that Valve had claimed to have tested with a small number of devices in the same room, but hadn’t tried out larger scenarios like tens of devices.
My guess based on that is you likely dont need to totally clear 6GHz in the room the Frame is in, but rather just make sure its relatively clear.
We’ll know more once it ships and we can see people try it out and try and abuse the radio a bit.
Pretty funny to me that you're backseat engineering Valve on this one. If it didn't have a net benefit they wouldn't have announced it as a feature yet lmao
I'm not saying it doesn't work; I'm asking what special sauce they've added to make it work, and noting that despite the replies I've gotten, foveated streaming doesn't help latency, and in fact makes the effects of latency spikes worse.
