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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>Phones are wireless, which is too slow to test anything.

As a random aside - I've been surprised by this recently. I got a new shiny Wifi 7 router(TPlink BE550) and my Samsung S24 Ultra can sustain 2.2Gbps over wifi, both to and from the router. At this point I'm not sure if that is the actual limit or if it's limited by the 2.5GbE port on the router since that had my NAS connected to it and I was testing transfer to and from it. And it wasn't like an inch from the router either - it did it while in my hand, on the other side of the room with me sitting on our sofa.

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When it comes to wireless, top speeds are misleading and the wrong way to look at it.

You can have the shittiest link possible with lots of dropouts and still get a decent speed test result because in between the dropouts you get max speed and TCP/etc is designed exactly to smooth over such packet loss, and browser-based tests aren't able to get low-level UDP access to defuse that.

Yet such a connection will be unusable for anything real-time, think gaming or videoconferencing. That's why so many people's connection still stutters on Zoom/etc calls - the "good" connection and super fancy router their ISP sold them isn't actually that good despite speed test results being satisfactory.

Honestly, most UK houses start out with a single ISP-provided wifi router, situated somewhere close to where the data cable enters the building.

For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building.

The issues arise when you've got a larger building, thick walls, lots of things competing for the same frequency band, a less great router, or you need the very lowest latency.

> For a lot of homes, that's enough to provide good-enough internet throughout the building.

It often isn't - it's just magic like TCP/etc that is doing its job and making it feel that way for bulk non-interactive transfers. But get those people on a Zoom call or anything real-time and it'll be painful (double pain if they've subsequently got terrible bluetooth headsets and/or accidentally use their laptop's internal mic).

Doesn't help stupid ISPs split their 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on separate SSIDs so now devices can't switch automatically and you've either got people constantly hogging the 2.4 band or barely trying to hang onto the 5GHz one in conditions where falling back to 2.4 would be appropriate.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did this to lower the support workload, since I have several 2.4Ghz devices that fail to connect to WiFi at all if I put both bands on the same SSID. I intentionally separated them for that reason and portable devices like phones know how to switch between multiple SSIDs based on signal strength anyway.

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