While they were happy with what the fairphone 4 brought to the table, they seem to like what was changed for the fairphone 5.
What are you guys’ opinions on this? A welcome change? would you get one if your phone died within the next year?
so gaming with reliable latency is a special usecase
Yes, yes it is. Most people couldn’t care less, they just want convenience.
What are the physics you’re talking about?
Wi-Fi is a shared medium where airtime is split amongst multiple clients on a radio spectrum that is open for all the public to use… Wired gives each device dedicated bandwidth with no interference. Wireless gets better and better, but it can never, and will never, be faster than a dedicated cable.
None of that are physical limitations, it’s purely implementational. Legacy ethernet was half-duplex as well, before switching and dedicated pairs for tx/rx became the norm. Handling of the shared medium is done with CSMA-CA and not -CD, which was used for ethernet, so at least we learned something.
Copper is also susceptible to interference, both RFI and EMI. Sure you can mitigate the effect by shielding and twisting the wire pairs with different amounts of twists pr length. But in the end, copper is also susceptible to interference.
I’m not an RF engineer, and I don’t have an idea of what can be done to mitigate noise in wifi even further. But claiming that it’s an inherent physical limitation, that can’t be mitigated, that’s just defeatism. It’s about the implementation, not physical constraints.
It’s absolutely a physical limitation and to argue otherwise is a waste of time. You can use complex multiplexing algorithms to squeeze more out of a single wireless channel, but at the end of the day you’re sharing that airspace with anything from another WiFi signal to a microwave oven. To go faster with wired all you have to do is, like you said, add another pair.
EMI can be sheilded, yes, or you can move to optical and then you’re literally transferring at the speed of light on a dedicated medium. You simply can’t do that with radio. It’s not physically possible unless there is some signaling technological breakthrough that we have not yet conceived.
