Broadband Speed

[Kodikid]

The motorway is a good analogy.

Why buy a car that has a top speed above 70?

[WSH]

@Kodikid   Wires send and receive simultaneously using separate wires.  This is “Full-Duplex”.  So a “gigabit port“ is both 1000Mb/s send and 1000Mb/s receive at the same time.

Wireless cannot send and receive simultaneously.  (Basically, it’s so loud when it transmits it can’t hear anything else).  Wireless is send then listen for a reply.  Send a bit more then listen again.  It only sends half its time and listens for the other half, a system call “Half-Duplex”.  Consequently, you always have to be careful what the manufacturers mean with the figures.  Is that 520Mb/s send and 520Mb/s receive or 260Mb/s send + 260Mb/s receive = 520

[pddco]

Apart from just seeing how fast the connection is, just what are people using 200Mbps+ WiFi on a mobile device  for? Is it just about  waiting less time for content to be downloaded ( software updates perhaps?) or uploaded ( cloud storage) rather than say data used for streaming TV  or playing games which uses relatively low data rates. 

[Crimliar]

@pddco Try all of those things together; it's about different people doing different things at the same time, there are 34 WiFi devices here plus 8 hard-wired (about the same number using 433MHz and 866MHz too), and there being no impacts on performance!  And if you go back to my "fast.com" speed test, that was over WiFi and the latency means there is absolutely no problem with a couple of people gaming at the same time.  The point is that (at least once it's set up), it should all work so smoothly that you forget it's there.

*My 3yr old router was bought to replace a previous 3rd party router that had started having issues (common fault, poor cooling).  But I bought it "open box" (it'd been used for a catalogue shoot that's all) through my works, using staff vouchers and staff discount - so I paid a tiny fraction of the catalogue price.

**WiFi 7 and beyond bring the possibility of simultaneous tx/rx thanks to MLO, but even then two transceivers so close together might well be slower than half-duplex!

[WSH]

@Crimliar   "WiFi 7 and beyond bring the possibility of simultaneous tx/rx thanks to MLO"

Interesting.  I've not really looked at the 802.11be spec. yet.  Is that definite that it will finally be full-duplex?  Of course, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 ax) was always rumoured to be but it never happened, so I'll believe it when I see it.  Much more difficult to separate radio frequencies effectively than it is to separate light bands in fibre, so it's been a dream for many years now.

Although it's not expected until 2028, be interesting to see what 82.11bn comes up with.

[pddco]

@Crimliar  Appreciate multiple devices but  with all this talk of people wanting WiFi 6 or 7 for zillions of Mbps it just seems overkill. When even 34 wireless devices at 10Mbps (when would that happen?) is 340Mbps.. Think there needs to be a sense of proportion there. Now, if WiFi 6 and greater offers better spectrum efficiency, greater range / coverage etc then I can see benefits. But speed? Hmm not sure. 

[Crimliar]

Phrasing this is not the easiest thing in the world!  It's having the individual connections between the devices be full-duplex that's the sticking point.  If you have WiFi 7 and MLO it's likely that the devices are already regularly transmitting and receiving at the same time on different bands.  But it's "on demand" so it's probably more like 2/3 or 3/4 duplex.

Think of your mesh extender with it's uplink on one band, it won't be synchronising it's transmits and receives on the other band to the uplink!

[WSH]

@Crimliar   Thanks for that.

Still a big improvement though.  I'll have to do some reading up.  (That's the trouble with being retired, you start to lose touch).

[Crimliar]

@pddco You'd be surprised how few devices you need on a consumer router for it to start struggling, it not the pure bandwidth so much as band utilization.  And you are perfectly correct that an AC1900 such as the SH2 is fine for a great many people, but not everyone.  I'm kinda with you on this when it comes some of the monster 3 & 4 band routers that are out there, but I'm not really seeing anyone advocating for those in here.  If my current Asus GT-AX6000 gets retired or repurposed it'll be as part of a network that has enhanced capabilities, not necessarily greater WiFi speed, though I'm likely to pick a newer protocol over an older one if everything else is equal!