WiFi already manages this. Systems set up like eduroam have a student sign in to their university WiFi one time and have access to WiFi across their campus and all other universities that support eduroam.
There are also commercial options. ISPs offer a similar service where you enable your home router to broadcast a ISP connection point alongside your normal WiFi access point. This enables you to join any other ISP connection point where ever you go.
The issue with this is control. You would have to give up control of your access point to the centralised system. So your internet access may be limited by other people using your line.
And not to mention liability issues if you share a network like that with neighbors. If they start doing illegal stuff while connected to your router, you are on the hook for it.
No, that possibility is why you’re not on the hook for it. An ip address is not enough to prove what person did it.
I have to imagine that on routers where the ISP offers a parallel portal through your gear, they isolate the other user’s traffic from your home network and will trace any illegal activity back to that particular subscriber.
Granted, this is probably a good reason to ditch your ISPs hardware and use your own where you can. Even AT&Ts gear can be set up in bridge mode to where it acts as simply a modem for your own hardware. Like hell if I want random people posted up outside my house to use the internet.
Good. I almost never need speeds in excess of those possible with WiFi 2, and 90% of the time WiFi 1 speeds are enough, but very often my speeds drop below 1mbps, rendering accessing the Internet on my phone or tablet essentially useless.
Currently gigabit Ethernet is faster and more reliable than WiFi, despite WiFi theoretically being equivalent. The benefit of increased speed and scalability is never needing wired infrastructure at the home/office.
We’re in a race: on one side WiFi7 had great potential, but on the other side 2.5gE is becoming more common on new PCs. Who will win? Will consumers care, if they don’t have a home lab and can’t get an internet connection to match?
For those claiming current bandwidth is more than people need, I would agree in theory but it just doesn’t pan out in reality. There are always network glitches and irregularities, there’s ever more tracking and advertising, there’s ever more Interference.
Recently my fiber provider had issues and my connection was downgraded to 350/150 with 44ms: theoretically still way faster than I need yet even “simple” web pages were noticeably slower.maybe I’m spoiled but I couldn’t imagine trying to game on that
I resent wireless because I feel like we got led astray by the aesthetics crowd. It was never good-- contested bandwidth, poor penetration, paper-mache security, but it was so much more attractive than cables asunder that we’re throwing moonshot resources at it to try to make it good enough.
Meanwhile, consumer wired has stagnated. You can finally get 2.5GbE on a lot of new mainboards, but there are few affordable home router/AP devices, especially with multiple 2.5G ports. the local home centres still primarily stock spools of Cat5E, and even new-build developments treat networking as a low-priority line item, probably well below cable TV jacks, if they mention it at all.
If we had put the same emphasis on wired, there’d be 10/40Gb fibre NICs in commodity systems, and the Home Despot would sell all-inclusive fibre and Cat6A or 8 retrofit box kits.
My SFP 10GbE equipment was cheaper than the 1GbE equipment I installed 15 years ago. You can absolutely set up a home fiber network affordably if you want, NICs for tower hardware isn’t even the issue - even SFP USB dongles are widely available and not that expensive.
You might just have a crappy router in general…? Not as in, you need the newest router with fastest speeds to tide over the slower times. What I mean is that there’s lots of cheap, no-name routers that are just extremely unreliable. Many ISPs hand them out.
Investing into a more expensive router from a widely known brand is usually well worth the money, in my experience. You can probably even buy a used one and still have a better experience.
Currently I’m a college student, so I don’t have my own router but I use my university WiFi. And that frequently goes below 1mbps.
In that case, in assuming interference is the issue. A lot of college housing is made of solid concrete block which is great at blocking WiFi signal
The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision.
This example is a real WTF. I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
If your robot moves around, then it needs a wireless connection. And it doesn’t really get any more reliable than wifi. I’m certainly not going to outsource that to a Verizon cellular connection.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
Wifi can work really well, especially with high end networking gear (and not, for example, the wifi access point you get for free from Verizon).
As someone using various wireless standards over over twenty years and in IT dealing with wifi instability on basically a daily basis. No.
Wifi is a series of compromises to be convenient. It’s “good enough” for most of those but generally and increasingly in newer standards, the compromise is to drop stability for things speed. You’ll see this to be the case in a lot of professional wifi gear that will transfer you to a lower standard if it sees weaker signals to improve stability.
To make that concrete, a problem with wifi in an office is an embarrassing “I’ll call back on my phone” but a factory floor that could be millions of dollars of downtime to restart an entire chain of machines. Hardened industrial wiring and connections is well established and wifi is just not at that level. The poorly formed example of the robot was trying to convey their intention to start addressing that level of hardening.
All that said, based on my experience reading ieee articles this is all exaggerated. in reality we’re probably just getting more stable video calls at higher bandwidths. Still a win for the help desk techs everywhere and people with a heavy wall making Netflix flaky.
I think you’ve missed the point.
Anything automated that could be a threat needs to have safeguards. Needing constant wifi to prevent death or injury is not an acceptable safeguard.
Consider consumer/professional drones. If they lose connection they have on board protocols to mitigate hazards. Even then they are still governed by laws to isolate then from people because even those safeguards aren’t good enough. Suggesting that a robot could completely rely on wifi is preposterous.
I think the point is that that sort of safety critical stuff should be on board, not relying on a wireless connection.
I don’t know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I’m a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me
In industrial there are very few wireless systems unless they are either too remote from the CPU and aren’t safety sensitive. Safety is taken very seriously because any incident can mean injuries/death and ending up in the public eye. Any safety systems are hard wired because of reliability.
Pixel 7. It’s the worst where I live. When I get off the freeway to make my way towards my house, that’s pretty much where it cuts off. If I’m in the city it’s fine, though I think not as fast as I would expect.
What about my older 2.4 ghz stuff wifi6 don’t play well with those
