We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam.
I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
I've had similar issues with clients (Blink camera sync modules) connecting to far-away APs instead of the much closer router. I could not force them to connect directly to the router no matter what.
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
And actually debugging this unless you have a bunch of enterprise level kit, or know exactly what the failure you’re looking for is is absolutely impossible
I used Wireless Diagnostics.app on macOS ("Scan" window) and looked for the 2.4 GHz radio's MAC address which was nowhere to be found. But yeah, you have to have a hunch.
I was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs).
> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam
The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better.
Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
Ethernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.
It's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
One of the core features (MLO) is currently mostly scam. APs/Clients negotiate the protocol (and it shows up in the status) but doesn't it to either increase robustness or bandwidth (by combining/switching between two frequency bands).
Also the driver quality is a huge mess.
(We tested it using the latest generation Cisco Enterprise gear but also with Prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti or TP-Link)
But honestly: we need WiFi-8. It finally brings infrastructure-controlled roaming which is super important for any VoIP service.
That's not controlled, seamless hand-over like we know it from GSM/3G/LTE/5G for 30 years now.
We basically miss all data (received stations/signal levels from both sides, Bit Rate errors, etc.) for making roaming decisions and then to softly connect them to an AP you want them to be on.
Enterprise WiFi is currently mostly "This is a list of APs you maybe can connect to.. have fun.. if you can connect we pre-seeded the AP with some crypto data, so it doesn't take ages to negotiate. Here's your (more or less friendly) disassoc.". It does somehow work for stationary setups - but as soon as you are mobile the quality hit the shitter.
It sounds like you're talking about throughput aggregation, which indeed no device currently supports. Not even Apple's most recent devices have any sign of it, except that M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models are tested for simultaneous transmission on 2.4+5GHz and 2.4+6GHz: https://mrncciew.com/2026/03/17/macbook-pro-m5-wi-fi-7-missi...
The upgrade to 6E was a big jump in my network (Wifi7 Unifi Wall AP). On the same spot, the M3 MacBook (6E) has basically zero lag over VNC, while the M1 MacBook (6) has a noticeable lag. It’s a bit mind blowing how big the difference is.
That is likely because of AWDL and your WiFi card doing channel hopping to listen between packets.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
My family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".
You can’t blame them, though. I live in the industry for over 25 years now, and when 5 Ghz wifi got introduced, and started to live alongside 2.4 Ghz with all the different protocols, I was like: "Nah. Screw it." I honestly have no idea what the current hot stuff in terms of wifi is.^^
That is true everywhere. I think operating systems could do a better job at informing about the health of the internet connection in words the user understands. What seems to be the current bottleneck:
Makes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
Makes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
It's nice to have the fastest Wi-Fi possible even if your upstream internet is slower. Sometimes you want to transfer files locally between devices, or run backups etc. Faster Wi-Fi here can make a huge difference to those tasks.
I have found that higher tier WiFi aids local game streaming significantly, but most of that benefit seems to be the 6Ghz band that you get with WiFi 6E.
When talking about network bandwidth, it is custom to measure in bit-per-second therefore the "bps" notation. If you convert to bytes, it is highly recommended to use "b/s" notation instead, i.e 150MB/s, to avoid confusion.
But IIRC the de facto unit for network transmission speeds are bits - not bytes - pr second, and when it’s more the rule than the exception than people write ‘B’ in stead of ‘b’ then the confusion gets even higher..
I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-)
That conversion made it confusing because when you say “only” 150MBps that verbiage and the other context of your comment implies slowness, when you’re really talking about very fast WAN speeds, so fast that they actually benefit from having WiFi 7 equipment rather than earlier standards.
It’s also not really very common to talk about speeds that are 1.2Gbps, that’s a pretty unusually specific speed. I.e., I can buy 500Mbps, 1Gbps, or 2Gbps…not 1.2Gbps.
So when I first read your comment I totally thought you meant 150Mbps, which is just a whole different ball game of WiFi needs.
The peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum.
The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.
My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.
We need reliable, real-world ~20mbit/s for our warehouse scanners, not 382722 theoretical Gbit/s 5cm from the access point. And roaming that works instead of stupid clients clinging to somewhere or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam. I know this is theoretically possible today. But in the real world, I have inherited the setup, so AP locations are fixed for now, clients are some random old handhold motorola android devices and interference is high.
In comparison, DECT has been flawless in the same space. Set and forget, just works. I always wondered if we could have a kind of DECT proxy on the LAN, and have the ERP application talk to that proxy using DECT... I mean, it's a few EANs and stuff, DECT could handle this easily.
I've had similar issues with clients (Blink camera sync modules) connecting to far-away APs instead of the much closer router. I could not force them to connect directly to the router no matter what.
Turns out the 2.4 GHz radio of my router had died (Fritzbox 7590, apparently a common issue), thus forcing 2.4 GHz-only clients to use those other APs.
[delayed]
And actually debugging this unless you have a bunch of enterprise level kit, or know exactly what the failure you’re looking for is is absolutely impossible
I used Wireless Diagnostics.app on macOS ("Scan" window) and looked for the 2.4 GHz radio's MAC address which was nowhere to be found. But yeah, you have to have a hunch.
I was recently made aware of WiFi HaLow. Official standard, ranges into the hundreds of meters. Speed suffers at long ranges of course, but still respectable (50-100kbs).
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
Difficult within the EU due to ISM limits.
Maybe ok for your garden camera where the authorities just don't care. But no go for any industrial usage.
Ensure your network has no <WiFi6 devices.
Easier said than done when you’re dealing with warehouse equipment.
Care to expand?
Sounds like your old, random clients might be a problem?
> or being thrown into a reconnect loop when the AP tries to get them to roam
The AP does not have visibility into what the client actually sees, and no, a coordinator that has knowledge what the APs see isn't that much better.
Imagine a situation with two APs and a client being in the middle of the two in a RF-impeded situation (i.e. your typical office building). AP1 may "hear" the client better (i.e. it gets a higher RSSI and SNR), but the client may reject it in favor of AP2 because the client sees a better signal coming from AP2 due to reflections, a powerful RF signal from a floor above interfering with the channel of AP1 or God knows what else.
RF is a weird world.
DECT or DECT-NR+?
I do kind of want to play with this.
Any DECT stuff is super expensive if you build embedded software/hardware for it. It's basically Nordic-only.
> with Wi-Fi 7 reaching a maximum theoretical throughput of 23Gbit per band
Note to tech reports: do not EVER quote this metric as it is the most useless piece of information.
"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz
It's slightly better than the aggregate number :p
I recently upgraded from a WiFi 5 router to a WiFi 7 one, and my bandwidth increase was a grand 0% (that's ok though I was actually just sick of my old router's shitty UI!)
There is about 10m and a brick wall between my AP and my desk so yeah, a fancy new MCS that can theoretically deliver 25Gbps was just never gonna be useful to me.
Also I've worked on (other non-WiFi) 802.11 products where our competitive edge was all about interference motivation. Our competitors at trade shows would see the demos and say "that's fake, you guys are cheating". So I have the feeling that in general there might be alpha in more resilient wireless links.
How often do you see your router's UI to justify any change?
I have a multi AP setup for the same reasons as the parent - large thick internal walls (and a “long” home instead of evenly shaped), and frustratingly more than I want to is the answer…
It's the first because we finally caught up on speed. We have it better than I imagined possible.
Last year, I saw 1600 Mbit/s from the Internet at a normie's place with an ISP-provided router. Still have a cat 6 cable around the living room but haven't used it in the last 2 years. Not exactly wifi but I routinely get 600-800 Mbit on 5g networks in crowded areas.
Ethernet isn't just about speed, it's about reliability. Before I wired my office, I regularly experienced latency spikes and hangs on video calls. After upgrading, I essentially never do.
It's 2026 and I'm running more cat-6 in my home to all my static devices. My theory is using wires lowers wireless contention, leaving more WiFi for the mobile devices.
I put in 2 CAT6 wires to every room in the house (4 in my office, 4 in garage), with one big PoE switch in the garage.
Everything with an Ethernet port is wired, wifi is for phones and tablets only (a few UniFi WiFi 6 APS).
Works great!
Internet has never dropped for me while working, family loves the always working NAS streaming via wired Apple TV.
Oh no. I haven't even upgraded to WiFi 7 yet!
You are not missing too much.
One of the core features (MLO) is currently mostly scam. APs/Clients negotiate the protocol (and it shows up in the status) but doesn't it to either increase robustness or bandwidth (by combining/switching between two frequency bands).
Also the driver quality is a huge mess.
(We tested it using the latest generation Cisco Enterprise gear but also with Prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti or TP-Link)
But honestly: we need WiFi-8. It finally brings infrastructure-controlled roaming which is super important for any VoIP service.
> infrastructure-controlled roaming
802.11 r/k/v exists
That's not controlled, seamless hand-over like we know it from GSM/3G/LTE/5G for 30 years now.
We basically miss all data (received stations/signal levels from both sides, Bit Rate errors, etc.) for making roaming decisions and then to softly connect them to an AP you want them to be on.
Enterprise WiFi is currently mostly "This is a list of APs you maybe can connect to.. have fun.. if you can connect we pre-seeded the AP with some crypto data, so it doesn't take ages to negotiate. Here's your (more or less friendly) disassoc.". It does somehow work for stationary setups - but as soon as you are mobile the quality hit the shitter.
On paper, yes. In the real world, that random Android client is clinging to an AP that can barely hear it while a better one would be available.
It sounds like you're talking about throughput aggregation, which indeed no device currently supports. Not even Apple's most recent devices have any sign of it, except that M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models are tested for simultaneous transmission on 2.4+5GHz and 2.4+6GHz: https://mrncciew.com/2026/03/17/macbook-pro-m5-wi-fi-7-missi...
UniFi UDB-Switch has throughput aggregation for 5GHz + 6GHz.
5GHz? Surely you mean 5000000kHz ;P
The upgrade to 6E was a big jump in my network (Wifi7 Unifi Wall AP). On the same spot, the M3 MacBook (6E) has basically zero lag over VNC, while the M1 MacBook (6) has a noticeable lag. It’s a bit mind blowing how big the difference is.
That is likely because of AWDL and your WiFi card doing channel hopping to listen between packets.
Set your channels to 6/149/37 and the lag will probably vanish. Exactly because of this, I only run those channels, even across multiple APs.
In Europe, you may need to use 44 instead of 149.
There is currently no good way to keep AWDL off other than a script that just turns it off every 200ms, because of course Apple. Also, not always an option with work issued Macs.
I have a Wi-Fi 7 AP and this confused some members of my family that didn't even know it went higher than 6. I thought it was pretty funny
My family doesn't know that the WiFi AP is not the DECT base. They understand when I tell them, but that's gone after a week. They use the words WiFi (or, as we say in Germany, WLAN) and "Internet" almost interchangeably. At work, too. "Internet kaputt" can mean anything from "my device is broken" to "our ERP app is not doing the right thing / responding too slow".
You can’t blame them, though. I live in the industry for over 25 years now, and when 5 Ghz wifi got introduced, and started to live alongside 2.4 Ghz with all the different protocols, I was like: "Nah. Screw it." I honestly have no idea what the current hot stuff in terms of wifi is.^^
Yeah, I guess I draw the line at the workplace. Some of these "Internet kaputt" cases turned out to be a rejected login to our bespoke ERP website.
That is true everywhere. I think operating systems could do a better job at informing about the health of the internet connection in words the user understands. What seems to be the current bottleneck:
Your router does not respond. Turn it off and on.
This comes close: https://www.getapp.com/all-software/a/breakdown/
> (…) while further increments have been smaller in percentage, speeds have always increased very significantly.
Off topic, but that sounds sort of contradictory, or misleading at the very least.
Makes sense. Last router upgrade I reached the point where my wifi speeds (at least near the router) were indistinguishable from plugging into gigabit ethernet - that's fast enough for any home task, and the same speed as my fibre uplink. I can't see chasing speed further, outside of very specialised setups.
Makes sense since a lot of networks don't have access to speed. The highest speeds in my area are around 150MBps, so 5-6GBps or whatever is a perfectly fine upper bound for me. Range and congestion however has been an issue.
It's nice to have the fastest Wi-Fi possible even if your upstream internet is slower. Sometimes you want to transfer files locally between devices, or run backups etc. Faster Wi-Fi here can make a huge difference to those tasks.
I have found that higher tier WiFi aids local game streaming significantly, but most of that benefit seems to be the 6Ghz band that you get with WiFi 6E.
Yeah. I ran ethernet from my router specifically to improve games streaming (GeForce NOW). It was a huge improvement over standard 5 Ghz WiFi.
Oh yeah, to be clear, my host PC is always wired.
You can still make use of more. Local video streaming from your PC to tv, file transfers between nearby devices etc.
Modern wifi is fast enough that using cables is often not required.
You used the wrong units there. Should be Mbps and Gbps.
I did not use the wrong units, I converted them. The speeds available in my area currently max out at 1.2Gbps which is 150MBps.
When talking about network bandwidth, it is custom to measure in bit-per-second therefore the "bps" notation. If you convert to bytes, it is highly recommended to use "b/s" notation instead, i.e 150MB/s, to avoid confusion.
But IIRC the de facto unit for network transmission speeds are bits - not bytes - pr second, and when it’s more the rule than the exception than people write ‘B’ in stead of ‘b’ then the confusion gets even higher..
I would expect this crowd here to not make these mistakes as ofte. :-)
B is defacto for storage…
Then we calculate the Bytes to see how fast we can download a file.
That conversion made it confusing because when you say “only” 150MBps that verbiage and the other context of your comment implies slowness, when you’re really talking about very fast WAN speeds, so fast that they actually benefit from having WiFi 7 equipment rather than earlier standards.
It’s also not really very common to talk about speeds that are 1.2Gbps, that’s a pretty unusually specific speed. I.e., I can buy 500Mbps, 1Gbps, or 2Gbps…not 1.2Gbps.
So when I first read your comment I totally thought you meant 150Mbps, which is just a whole different ball game of WiFi needs.
The widely-accepted convention is to use bits when discussing line speeds (as the article does).
The peak-speed arms race stopped being interesting to me a while ago. I don't need 20+ Gbit/s theoretical Wi-Fi. I need the connection to stay boring when I'm at the edge of coverage or the neighbours are hammering the same spectrum.
The 95th-percentile latency and packet-loss targets here seem much more meaningful than another 2x headline speed increase.
My only scepticism is how much of this survives real consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 had things like OFDMA that sounded great on paper, but support/implementation was pretty uneven.
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.
I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.
> Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users.
Higher speeds automatically means less latency and that does matter, especially if you are into stuff like games where every millisecond matters.
I think the point is that these numbers are theoretical, and only reachable in a lab. So in practice you do not really benefit.
My neighbor thinks that they can increase their 100Mbps ISP speed by having 5 or 6 access points at 2.4GHz in their 1400sq ft (~140m2) apartment.
There’s so much interference that the package dropout rate is around 40% at 2.4GHz usually.
2.4ghz is pretty bad but the 5 and 6ghz bands don’t really travel far. I’m in a dense area and 5ghz works great while 6 has basically no detectable traffic.