Heck, I barely even need Wifi 5. Then, I also run wires to all of the bandwidth-heavy devices. Turns out when you have < gigabit internet downstream and < 25mbps upstream you don't actually need...
Heck, I barely even need Wifi 5. Then, I also run wires to all of the bandwidth-heavy devices.
Turns out when you have < gigabit internet downstream and < 25mbps upstream you don't actually need that much bandwidth.
I was looking at a list of current WiFi connected devices here at home. WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 devices are about the same number. I even have a couple WiFi 3 devices connected (cheap smart bulbs). The...
I was looking at a list of current WiFi connected devices here at home. WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 devices are about the same number. I even have a couple WiFi 3 devices connected (cheap smart bulbs). The only WiFi 6 device I have is my iPhone 13.
And I've had a WiFi 6 AP for the last 3yrs!
I have 1-up/1-down, but anything that I need/want to take advantage of those speeds is (or must) or can be hardwired. My ISP has been offering 2 gigabits (asymmetric) service for a few years now, yet I recently saw 5 or 8 gigabits (symmetric) from them!
Glad we have the tech for fatter pipes, especially at home, but I suspect it'll be some time more before we start seeing real need for all this at home.
I'm just rocking two of these in the same mobility domain for fast-failover. Works great, think I paid $150 for the first one then the second got for free as a hand-me-down. I also have an ancient...
I'm just rocking two of these in the same mobility domain for fast-failover.
Works great, think I paid $150 for the first one then the second got for free as a hand-me-down.
I also have an ancient WRT54G that I run for all those dumb IoT devices that tend to have poor support for properly secured wifi, and since its running far less securely, doesn't have a net connection most of the time, just my home assistant server connects to it as well to control and grab data. Good news is somebody is still putting out firmware builds. I was even able to turn the button on the front into a light switch for home assistant using nc. Man, I love that even that ancient wireless router was still more powerful than my first computer, by about 120MHz and 12 MB of RAM.
I moved recently and it's not as easy for my desktops to be wired as where I used to live, so tried out wireless with WiFi 6 APs from Ubiquiti and a larger external WiFi 6 adapter from tp link. I...
I moved recently and it's not as easy for my desktops to be wired as where I used to live, so tried out wireless with WiFi 6 APs from Ubiquiti and a larger external WiFi 6 adapter from tp link. I have to say it's been just fine. I do have 3 APs, and am close to one, but I typically have 1ms average latency to the gateway, and can get somewhere around 600-700mbps. I see a little more variability than on a wired connection, and it took some trial and error, but I'm happy with the results.
I would need to see some impressive improvements before I upgraded, since WiFi 6, for my environment, is handling my needs well.
Edit: I meant to add that I did feel a large improvement between WiFi 5 and WiFi 6. I have 1 WiFi 5 AP and two WiFi 6 APs, and when I did testing with the same locations it was 3x faster and lower latency on WiFi 6.
I suspect my ISP is more the bottleneck, and I haven't been motivated to set up a speed test plugged into the gateway to isolate wlan performance. Either way, yeah, don't see need at home for 7...
I suspect my ISP is more the bottleneck, and I haven't been motivated to set up a speed test plugged into the gateway to isolate wlan performance. Either way, yeah, don't see need at home for 7 yet. However, these might be good for improving roaming handoffs in enterprise campus network deployments.
My city doesn't even offer internet fast enough to justify wifi 6 yet. I'd love to live somewhere where 7 would even be a consideration. It seems like all this home tech is greatly outpacing the...
My city doesn't even offer internet fast enough to justify wifi 6 yet. I'd love to live somewhere where 7 would even be a consideration. It seems like all this home tech is greatly outpacing the infrastructure in most places.
Neat standard but I usually don't think expensive when I think about a router... Those prices are insane. They call it a glimmer of hope, but, lets be honest.. đź’€
Neat standard but I usually don't think expensive when I think about a router...
Netgear’s Nighthawk BE19000 WiFi router sells at Best Buy for $700. [...] TP-Link’s Archer BE19000 offering is $600. [...] A two pack of Amazon’s eero WiFi 7 system is $1,150.
Those prices are insane.
TP-Link’s BE9300 sells for $300
They call it a glimmer of hope, but, lets be honest.. đź’€
Those prices are about what I paid for the Protectli hardware I use for my (over built) firewall/router, the three Ubiquiti access points I installed, and the UPS for them all.
Those prices are about what I paid for the Protectli hardware I use for my (over built) firewall/router, the three Ubiquiti access points I installed, and the UPS for them all.
And your system is probably considerably more reliable than these junky consumer routers. I had an expensive Netgear once that got a firmware update adding some weird Disney software meant for...
And your system is probably considerably more reliable than these junky consumer routers.
I had an expensive Netgear once that got a firmware update adding some weird Disney software meant for managing kids' access. Neat idea in concept, but its mere presence absolutely tanked the router's performance even if you weren't using those features. Since then I've stuck with prosumer and enterprise equipment.
I paid more than $300 for the Asus router I use for streaming VR games from my PC to my VR headset, since Virtual Desktop will happily use a lot of bandwidth for providing high quality (high...
I paid more than $300 for the Asus router I use for streaming VR games from my PC to my VR headset, since Virtual Desktop will happily use a lot of bandwidth for providing high quality (high bitrate) video and latency is important too. But yes, it was still painful.
Ubiquiti's UniFi U7 Pro costs $190, the same as the original price of the WiFi 6 model it replaced. Granted, this is just an access point and not a whole router. I wonder why consumer WiFi 7...
Ubiquiti's UniFi U7 Pro costs $190, the same as the original price of the WiFi 6 model it replaced. Granted, this is just an access point and not a whole router.
I wonder why consumer WiFi 7 routers are so expensive.
There's a few things I think that have contributed to it. One thing is that many people just use the crappy commodity routers that their ISP rents out to them, so there's a smaller market for...
There's a few things I think that have contributed to it.
One thing is that many people just use the crappy commodity routers that their ISP rents out to them, so there's a smaller market for people who want quality ones, and those who opt out of the ISP provided ones are probably opting for the cheap basic models as well. It seems that the manufacturers are always looking for ways to make their premium offerings even more premium to get the prices up.
But probably more realistically, the router parts have become more expensive. Routers need to do a lot more and at higher speeds, which means that the computational load put on them has grown significantly. For most of my life 100Mbps was more than fast enough, but nowadays people are starting to feel the limits of 1000Mbps links and so 2.5 and 5 gig ethernet is becoming increasingly common. Those speed and capability demands mean expenentially more computational demand.
I feel like that is, myself of course included, an immensely bubble-influenced view. If you think about the average person, outside of job sites and home servers, which households really have a...
For most of my life 100Mbps was more than fast enough, but nowadays people are starting to feel the limits of 1000Mbps links and so 2.5 and 5 gig ethernet is becoming increasingly common.
I feel like that is, myself of course included, an immensely bubble-influenced view. If you think about the average person, outside of job sites and home servers, which households really have a use for more than a couple hundred Mbps concurrently?
Those speed and capability demands mean expenentially more computational demand.
Point still stands, though. I agree. Capable APs/routers should be equipped with equally capable hardware.
The “100Mbps aught to be enough for everyone” is a lot more likely to be a bubble than the other, I think. Internet service speeds at or beyond a gigabit is becoming increasingly more available,...
The “100Mbps aught to be enough for everyone” is a lot more likely to be a bubble than the other, I think. Internet service speeds at or beyond a gigabit is becoming increasingly more available, and right now I’m pretty sure my ISP’s cheapest plan is 250Mbps.
On a router, each connection should be able to reach the full rating (ideally), so right now gigabit Ethernet is probably more than enough for most homes, especially considering gig+ speeds are very limited in geographic and economic reach.
Becoming more available? Certainly, and it’s for the better. No question, it’s overdue. I know, because where I live, the best offer is still only 100 Mbps (and that’s theoretical, not actual...
Internet service speeds at or beyond a gigabit is becoming increasingly more available, and right now I’m pretty sure my ISP’s cheapest plan is 250Mbps.
Becoming more available? Certainly, and it’s for the better. No question, it’s overdue. I know, because where I live, the best offer is still only 100 Mbps (and that’s theoretical, not actual availability, as you alluded to), and up until 2020 my then-household of four made due with a laughable ~10 Mbps or so (max) stemming from an ancient mid-2000s contract, the reason that prompted an increase finally was three people needing to take part in video calls at the same time due to the pandemic.
But again, is even a gigabit truly needed? Video streaming doesn’t need anywhere close to that speed, and it’s the most taxing application I can think of where the speed would really matter – for absolutely average consumers. Of course it will absolutely not cover some people’s use cases, but I imagine those to be in a rather tiny minority. Most people don’t have a NAS (but then router speeds would only matter for the internal connection, not wrt what ISPs are offering), most people don’t have homelabs, heck apart from mobile phones, most people probably don’t store a lot of data in any cloud to begin with (if they even still have desktop/laptop computers, that is…)
A sidenote on those crappy commodity routers that ISPs rent. At least some ISPs seem to realize they suck, and current ones suck quite a bit less. Comcast rents the XB8, which is actually kind of...
A sidenote on those crappy commodity routers that ISPs rent. At least some ISPs seem to realize they suck, and current ones suck quite a bit less. Comcast rents the XB8, which is actually kind of a really good router. It has the latest DOCSIS modem as you would expect, along with one 2.5G ethernet port and 6GHZ wifi. It supports MU-MIMO. It is an unexpectedly good router. I still use my eero routers, but if I didn't have those, I would probably be quite happy with the XB8.
This may come across as a sales pitch, but I am not affiliated with comcast in any way. The only other ISP in my area is AT&T, and they have absolute shit tier routers, so it is refreshing to have a router that is quite decent from an ISP.
Those prices will very quickly come down, no one outside of rich enthusiasts will even think about buying $700+ router. The early adopter tax is always ridiculous.
Those prices will very quickly come down, no one outside of rich enthusiasts will even think about buying $700+ router. The early adopter tax is always ridiculous.
It's definitely worth upgrading to WiFi 6, the additional security of WPA3 is reason enough for me, but unless you do a lot of internal data transfers or you have a fast enough external connection...
It's definitely worth upgrading to WiFi 6, the additional security of WPA3 is reason enough for me, but unless you do a lot of internal data transfers or you have a fast enough external connection to make the speed benefits noticeable, I don't think 7 is worth it (yet).
Good Wifi equipment has always been expensive. The standards often tout super high speeds but the thing that the companies marketing it all conveniently leave out is that those require expensive...
Good Wifi equipment has always been expensive. The standards often tout super high speeds but the thing that the companies marketing it all conveniently leave out is that those require expensive multi-antenna arrays and complicated circuitry to drive them, and most of the stuff consumers buy simply don't have them.
Furthermore it's almost never a good deal to upgrade your WiFi hotspot when a new standard comes out unless you have a specific need. Many devices these days don't have swappable radios in them, which means you'd need to replace the whole thing in order to take advantage of the new capacity. In the meanwhile all the stuff with the new radios will still work on your old hotspot, ready for you whenever you are ready to make that investment.
Wifi 6 has been fine for my use case, though it’s slowed a bit as more devices have been added to the network. Don’t think I’ll upgrade to wifi 7, but I do plan to install Ethernet wiring and wall...
Wifi 6 has been fine for my use case, though it’s slowed a bit as more devices have been added to the network. Don’t think I’ll upgrade to wifi 7, but I do plan to install Ethernet wiring and wall jacks to hardwire devices that never move to free up airwaves for the things that need to be wireless.
Might be worth it for me as I live in a large downtown condo building. There are a lot of wifi networks in my area. Like, I don't know how many but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than...
Might be worth it for me as I live in a large downtown condo building. There are a lot of wifi networks in my area. Like, I don't know how many but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than a hundred that I could connect to. Just getting access to a rare bit of frequency space would probably get me past a lot of the congestion.
I do not. I hadn't even bothered to check before but I'm apparently connected to my router at 866.7mbps, I'm not even sure what WiFi standard this is but I'd guess maybe WiFi 5? It's just...
I do not.
I hadn't even bothered to check before but I'm apparently connected to my router at 866.7mbps, I'm not even sure what WiFi standard this is but I'd guess maybe WiFi 5?
It's just unimportant to me, my wireless devices are connected to a wireless network for the internet and my internet is 100mbps. If that can be delivered consistently - and it can, my house has two access points that give high signal strength anywhere - then I don't really care about upgrading it.
I can only assume in the future my devices will naturally support the newer standards that will enable the inevitability of gigabit+ internet to every device. Like most home users I'm not doing much transferring of files between computers or anything like that, at most I will stream a video file from a device to my TV on occasion and right now that works just fine of course.
Given that I used moving to a new place that had gigabit fiber available to upgrade my routers to two 6E mesh nodes, it's rather pointless. 6E gives me the 6GHz band that's great to have living in...
Given that I used moving to a new place that had gigabit fiber available to upgrade my routers to two 6E mesh nodes, it's rather pointless. 6E gives me the 6GHz band that's great to have living in an apartment building, and I paid ~$300 for two mesh nodes that even have 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, so they're decently futureproofed if/when my ISP starts offering faster than 1Gbps speeds. Mine and my partner's phones are 6E capable, as is our roommate's laptop, so we're getting some use out of it already.
If I was still using my old AC router, I might have gone straight to 7 instead of 6E, but this is good enough for our needs for the forseeable future.
Hell no! I definitely don't need it. I have my home network centralized with 24x 1Gbit switch (Mikrktik CRS326) which I use as a router too. My internet connection is 28/15Mbit, this router is...
Hell no! I definitely don't need it.
I have my home network centralized with 24x 1Gbit switch (Mikrktik CRS326) which I use as a router too. My internet connection is 28/15Mbit, this router is very much enough for that.
Recently (2022 I think) I bought two Ubiquiti's Unifi 6-Lite APs and I run the Network controller software for then on my Linux DIY NAS/server. Uplink to APs is 1Gbit, APs can theoretically do over 1Gbit wirelessly - I don't have any device that can do such speed. There is one phone that can do 866Mbit and I believe Steam Deck can do 866 too and several devices that can do 433Mbit. And there are usecases (downloading a movie from Jellyfin, that is media server on my server) when I actually run wireless that fast.
If I wanted to go faster than "just wifi 6", I would have to get higher uplink to the APs, 1Gbit from router kinda tops it even in current situation with wifi 6.
Where I can, I go wired. There is no reason for desktop, TV, gaming console or home automation to be connected wirelessly IMO.
Heck, I barely even need Wifi 5. Then, I also run wires to all of the bandwidth-heavy devices.
Turns out when you have < gigabit internet downstream and < 25mbps upstream you don't actually need that much bandwidth.
I was looking at a list of current WiFi connected devices here at home. WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 devices are about the same number. I even have a couple WiFi 3 devices connected (cheap smart bulbs). The only WiFi 6 device I have is my iPhone 13.
And I've had a WiFi 6 AP for the last 3yrs!
I have 1-up/1-down, but anything that I need/want to take advantage of those speeds is (or must) or can be hardwired. My ISP has been offering 2 gigabits (asymmetric) service for a few years now, yet I recently saw 5 or 8 gigabits (symmetric) from them!
Glad we have the tech for fatter pipes, especially at home, but I suspect it'll be some time more before we start seeing real need for all this at home.
I'm just rocking two of these in the same mobility domain for fast-failover.
Works great, think I paid $150 for the first one then the second got for free as a hand-me-down.
I also have an ancient WRT54G that I run for all those dumb IoT devices that tend to have poor support for properly secured wifi, and since its running far less securely, doesn't have a net connection most of the time, just my home assistant server connects to it as well to control and grab data. Good news is somebody is still putting out firmware builds. I was even able to turn the button on the front into a light switch for home assistant using nc. Man, I love that even that ancient wireless router was still more powerful than my first computer, by about 120MHz and 12 MB of RAM.
I moved recently and it's not as easy for my desktops to be wired as where I used to live, so tried out wireless with WiFi 6 APs from Ubiquiti and a larger external WiFi 6 adapter from tp link. I have to say it's been just fine. I do have 3 APs, and am close to one, but I typically have 1ms average latency to the gateway, and can get somewhere around 600-700mbps. I see a little more variability than on a wired connection, and it took some trial and error, but I'm happy with the results.
I would need to see some impressive improvements before I upgraded, since WiFi 6, for my environment, is handling my needs well.
Edit: I meant to add that I did feel a large improvement between WiFi 5 and WiFi 6. I have 1 WiFi 5 AP and two WiFi 6 APs, and when I did testing with the same locations it was 3x faster and lower latency on WiFi 6.
Interesting, I get about 5-600 down on my wifi 5 AP. Haven't seen a need yet to upgrade to 6, let alone 7!
I suspect my ISP is more the bottleneck, and I haven't been motivated to set up a speed test plugged into the gateway to isolate wlan performance. Either way, yeah, don't see need at home for 7 yet. However, these might be good for improving roaming handoffs in enterprise campus network deployments.
My city doesn't even offer internet fast enough to justify wifi 6 yet. I'd love to live somewhere where 7 would even be a consideration. It seems like all this home tech is greatly outpacing the infrastructure in most places.
Neat standard but I usually don't think expensive when I think about a router...
Those prices are insane.
They call it a glimmer of hope, but, lets be honest.. đź’€
Those prices are about what I paid for the Protectli hardware I use for my (over built) firewall/router, the three Ubiquiti access points I installed, and the UPS for them all.
And your system is probably considerably more reliable than these junky consumer routers.
I had an expensive Netgear once that got a firmware update adding some weird Disney software meant for managing kids' access. Neat idea in concept, but its mere presence absolutely tanked the router's performance even if you weren't using those features. Since then I've stuck with prosumer and enterprise equipment.
I paid more than $300 for the Asus router I use for streaming VR games from my PC to my VR headset, since Virtual Desktop will happily use a lot of bandwidth for providing high quality (high bitrate) video and latency is important too. But yes, it was still painful.
Ubiquiti's UniFi U7 Pro costs $190, the same as the original price of the WiFi 6 model it replaced. Granted, this is just an access point and not a whole router.
I wonder why consumer WiFi 7 routers are so expensive.
There's a few things I think that have contributed to it.
One thing is that many people just use the crappy commodity routers that their ISP rents out to them, so there's a smaller market for people who want quality ones, and those who opt out of the ISP provided ones are probably opting for the cheap basic models as well. It seems that the manufacturers are always looking for ways to make their premium offerings even more premium to get the prices up.
But probably more realistically, the router parts have become more expensive. Routers need to do a lot more and at higher speeds, which means that the computational load put on them has grown significantly. For most of my life 100Mbps was more than fast enough, but nowadays people are starting to feel the limits of 1000Mbps links and so 2.5 and 5 gig ethernet is becoming increasingly common. Those speed and capability demands mean expenentially more computational demand.
I feel like that is, myself of course included, an immensely bubble-influenced view. If you think about the average person, outside of job sites and home servers, which households really have a use for more than a couple hundred Mbps concurrently?
Point still stands, though. I agree. Capable APs/routers should be equipped with equally capable hardware.
The “100Mbps aught to be enough for everyone” is a lot more likely to be a bubble than the other, I think. Internet service speeds at or beyond a gigabit is becoming increasingly more available, and right now I’m pretty sure my ISP’s cheapest plan is 250Mbps.
On a router, each connection should be able to reach the full rating (ideally), so right now gigabit Ethernet is probably more than enough for most homes, especially considering gig+ speeds are very limited in geographic and economic reach.
Becoming more available? Certainly, and it’s for the better. No question, it’s overdue. I know, because where I live, the best offer is still only 100 Mbps (and that’s theoretical, not actual availability, as you alluded to), and up until 2020 my then-household of four made due with a laughable ~10 Mbps or so (max) stemming from an ancient mid-2000s contract, the reason that prompted an increase finally was three people needing to take part in video calls at the same time due to the pandemic.
But again, is even a gigabit truly needed? Video streaming doesn’t need anywhere close to that speed, and it’s the most taxing application I can think of where the speed would really matter – for absolutely average consumers. Of course it will absolutely not cover some people’s use cases, but I imagine those to be in a rather tiny minority. Most people don’t have a NAS (but then router speeds would only matter for the internal connection, not wrt what ISPs are offering), most people don’t have homelabs, heck apart from mobile phones, most people probably don’t store a lot of data in any cloud to begin with (if they even still have desktop/laptop computers, that is…)
A sidenote on those crappy commodity routers that ISPs rent. At least some ISPs seem to realize they suck, and current ones suck quite a bit less. Comcast rents the XB8, which is actually kind of a really good router. It has the latest DOCSIS modem as you would expect, along with one 2.5G ethernet port and 6GHZ wifi. It supports MU-MIMO. It is an unexpectedly good router. I still use my eero routers, but if I didn't have those, I would probably be quite happy with the XB8.
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/broadband-gateways-userguides
This may come across as a sales pitch, but I am not affiliated with comcast in any way. The only other ISP in my area is AT&T, and they have absolute shit tier routers, so it is refreshing to have a router that is quite decent from an ISP.
Those prices will very quickly come down, no one outside of rich enthusiasts will even think about buying $700+ router. The early adopter tax is always ridiculous.
It's definitely worth upgrading to WiFi 6, the additional security of WPA3 is reason enough for me, but unless you do a lot of internal data transfers or you have a fast enough external connection to make the speed benefits noticeable, I don't think 7 is worth it (yet).
Good Wifi equipment has always been expensive. The standards often tout super high speeds but the thing that the companies marketing it all conveniently leave out is that those require expensive multi-antenna arrays and complicated circuitry to drive them, and most of the stuff consumers buy simply don't have them.
Furthermore it's almost never a good deal to upgrade your WiFi hotspot when a new standard comes out unless you have a specific need. Many devices these days don't have swappable radios in them, which means you'd need to replace the whole thing in order to take advantage of the new capacity. In the meanwhile all the stuff with the new radios will still work on your old hotspot, ready for you whenever you are ready to make that investment.
If I need super fast internet I'm plugging in a cable anyway.
Theoretical lab speeds Vs congested air space... I'm going hard wire every time.
Wifi 6 has been fine for my use case, though it’s slowed a bit as more devices have been added to the network. Don’t think I’ll upgrade to wifi 7, but I do plan to install Ethernet wiring and wall jacks to hardwire devices that never move to free up airwaves for the things that need to be wireless.
Might be worth it for me as I live in a large downtown condo building. There are a lot of wifi networks in my area. Like, I don't know how many but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than a hundred that I could connect to. Just getting access to a rare bit of frequency space would probably get me past a lot of the congestion.
I do not.
I hadn't even bothered to check before but I'm apparently connected to my router at 866.7mbps, I'm not even sure what WiFi standard this is but I'd guess maybe WiFi 5?
It's just unimportant to me, my wireless devices are connected to a wireless network for the internet and my internet is 100mbps. If that can be delivered consistently - and it can, my house has two access points that give high signal strength anywhere - then I don't really care about upgrading it.
I can only assume in the future my devices will naturally support the newer standards that will enable the inevitability of gigabit+ internet to every device. Like most home users I'm not doing much transferring of files between computers or anything like that, at most I will stream a video file from a device to my TV on occasion and right now that works just fine of course.
Given that I used moving to a new place that had gigabit fiber available to upgrade my routers to two 6E mesh nodes, it's rather pointless. 6E gives me the 6GHz band that's great to have living in an apartment building, and I paid ~$300 for two mesh nodes that even have 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, so they're decently futureproofed if/when my ISP starts offering faster than 1Gbps speeds. Mine and my partner's phones are 6E capable, as is our roommate's laptop, so we're getting some use out of it already.
If I was still using my old AC router, I might have gone straight to 7 instead of 6E, but this is good enough for our needs for the forseeable future.
Hell no! I definitely don't need it.
I have my home network centralized with 24x 1Gbit switch (Mikrktik CRS326) which I use as a router too. My internet connection is 28/15Mbit, this router is very much enough for that.
Recently (2022 I think) I bought two Ubiquiti's Unifi 6-Lite APs and I run the Network controller software for then on my Linux DIY NAS/server. Uplink to APs is 1Gbit, APs can theoretically do over 1Gbit wirelessly - I don't have any device that can do such speed. There is one phone that can do 866Mbit and I believe Steam Deck can do 866 too and several devices that can do 433Mbit. And there are usecases (downloading a movie from Jellyfin, that is media server on my server) when I actually run wireless that fast.
If I wanted to go faster than "just wifi 6", I would have to get higher uplink to the APs, 1Gbit from router kinda tops it even in current situation with wifi 6.
Where I can, I go wired. There is no reason for desktop, TV, gaming console or home automation to be connected wirelessly IMO.