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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Wi-Fi is surprisingly bad. Sitting less than 10 feet from my access point (802.11ax) with a clear line of sight, my ping to Google.com varies from 7.4 ms to 88.6 ms. SSH-ed into my router, which is connected directly to Comcast fiber, it varies from 5.74 ms to 5.83 ms (less than 90 microseconds jitter).

Wi-Fi is a shared medium in a crowded and noisy spectrum environment. I can see a dozen networks from my house, and I'm in a (dense) neighborhood of single family homes--it's much worse in a high rise office building. It can have decent bandwidth (almost a gigabit when it gets going) but reliability, latency, and jitter are bad.

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I am guessing this point is totally unnecessary based on how overall well-informed your comment was, but in case you weren’t aware, it is frequently helpful to run a wifi analyzer of some sort to figure out which channels are heavily utilized in your area so you can set your router to one with less interference. I used to use the Mac network utility that I think may have been deprecated, but it worked like a charm. I do this for my friends all the time and it dramatically improves their network performance in 90% of cases. The only places I found it was pointless were in the middle of nowhere and my own apartment not too far from MIT’s campus, where I assume I was surrounded by equally (probably much more) knowledgeable nerds so the neighboring networks were surprisingly evenly distributed across the available channels.

Most of the modern APs actually move their channel around, so this helps less!

Thanks, it's appreciated. I'll give it a shot sometime.

Other places where it is useless is when your neighbours move in bringing dodgy out-of-spec 5g and 2.4ghz wireless trash like baby monitors or "Security cams" that smash the entire spectrum.

I've had another neighbour buy a wireless landline from China that was because "sometimes the phone would crackle, and i hated that" meanwhile it would bring every 5ghz wifi network to its knees when she was taking a phone call.

So, there are other cases, maybe this is a bit more prevalent in countries closer to those with lax spectrum laws.

Problem with unlicensed spectrum is that it becomes tragedy of the commons. Much like SF, anyone is free to loiter and shit on the street, shoot up heroin, other kinds of degeneracy and whatnot.

The licensed frequency bands, in contrast, are congestion free and more polite let’s say. I’d be willing to pay a monthly fee for use of one of those frequency bands. But good luck getting permission from the FCC to do that.

You say tragedy of the commons, but IMHO the unlicensed spectrum is by far the most economically productive spectrum allocation ever made.

>wireless landline

You mean a cordless phone?

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