Seeing a random Briton on social media comparing “the cost of Wi-Fi” in London with how much she now pays at her new home in Perth, Western Australia, really drives home that for many people, wireless data is where their Internet begins these days.
This was reinforced recently with the Commerce Commission’s telecommunications monitoring department lamenting that people don’t get the expected performance from their high-speed fibre connections, because their Wi-Fi can’t keep up. It’s not really news as such, but a good reminder networks are as good as their weakest links so to speak.
Being able to move around, unfettered by cables, is how people connect to the Internet and locally available devices like printers, file servers, TVs, you name it. New laptops often don’t come with a port for wired networking, and smartphones hook up to Wi-Fi whenever they can.
This despite Wi-Fi being born out of 90s technology which wasn’t all that when it first came out. The wireless data tech runs in unlicensed radio frequency bands that everyone can and will use, making transmissions susceptible to interference.
What’s more, Wi-Fi wasn't designed to have separate data links for up and down traffic, like 4G mobile and Ethernet wired networks do. Instead, devices can’t send and receive at the same time and have to negotiate when to transmit data.
This may seem like an anarchic, suboptimal way to do wireless data connectivity but thanks to the hard work of radio frequency engineers there is now a raft of features added to Wi-Fi that work around the limitations of the technology.
The good news is that Wi-Fi can work really well, surpassing normal wired local area networks in speeds (albeit not consistent performance).
The bad news is that the technological advances have resulted in a jumble of acronyms and terminology that can be confusing and difficult to follow. There are intricate signal modulation schemes, multiple radios and antennas, and more. All pretty amazing stuff if wireless tech is your bag, but it does tend to make normal people’s eyes glaze over.
This is also a good time to remind everyone that the name Wi-Fi doesn’t mean anything. It was just a pun on Hi-Fi and it isn’t actually “wireless fidelity” abbreviated, which was a nonsensical afterthought.
Get the basics right
One of the most common support issues for Internet service providers is that customers don’t get the expected performance from their connections. This is more often than not due to customers' Wi-Fi being poorly set up, or not up to scratch, particularly for the very fast UFB fibre to the premises connections we’re lucky to have in New Zealand.
This is well known, and both internet service providers (ISPs) and Wi-Fi gear vendors are good sources for information on how to set things up correctly to avoid disappointing performance.
Read for example this guide from Chorus which is easy to follow, with much of the strange sounding terminology explained.
Yes, it matters where you place the Wi-Fi access points and no, they shouldn’t be hidden away in cupboards or behind furniture, or put on window sills where they cook in the sun. That last bit comes from an Internet provider with a customer whose network connection inexplicably started performing badly and even cut out during the day. It took a house visit to figure out why.
The original Wi-Fi band is the relatively low-frequency 2.4 gigahertz one. This has fairly long reach and good building and object penetration, but no longer cuts it for more demanding applications. All sorts of devices use 2.4 GHz and it’s congested and full of interference as a result.
Instead, most new gear will automatically look for the higher frequency 5 GHz range, and latch onto that.
Compared to 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz offers shorter reach and less wall penetration, but you get many more wide channels for data transmission, and high performance in return. It’s a night and day difference, so try to stick to 5 GHz whenever possible.
Demand for bandwidth is insatiable though. Even 5 GHz is starting to look a bit anaemic, especially for fast UFB HyperFibre connections that can reach symmetric (up and down) 2, 4 and 8 gigabit/s speeds.
To rectify that, the 6 GHz frequency range has been available for Wi-Fi. New Zealand followed Europe and Australia, so only half of the available fresh spectrum was allocated for Wi-Fi here compared to North America which limits the speed gains possible.
Speaking of speed, Wi-Fi vendors have an unfortunate marketing habit of simply tallying up the theoretical maximum of what each frequency band is capable of, and adding up the sum to get a multi-gigabits per second figure that no customer will ever see.
Dispel the curse of the old gear
Each new revision of Wi-Fi is usually a big jump forward in terms of performance, responsiveness, security and the ability to support multiple devices without network slowdowns and time-outs.
That last thing is increasingly important. It’s a safe bet that many people and organisations don’t realise just how many devices connect to their Wi-Fi networks at a given time. Because Wi-Fi is designed the way it is, older devices connecting to a wireless network won’t have the smarts to work around technology limitations even with newer routers and access points, and can become bottlenecks.
Then there’s the not insignificant issue of both ends of the Wi-Fi connection having to have matching capabilities for best results. If you want to use 5 and 6 GHz spectrum, you need radios that support these frequency ranges at both ends.
One recent example for the writer involved finding a site with a nearly two decades old Wi-Fi access point. This was able to connect using the by now ancient 802.11g standard, and it worked. Poorly, with speeds in the 3-5 Mbps downstream, and below 1 Mbps upstream, with dropouts and connection interruptions and only 2.4 GHz signal.
Swapping it out for a spare Netgear Orbi 802.11ac - which is quite old by now - mesh Wi-Fi system got speeds up to near the 300 Mbps UFB fibre connection, with much better responsiveness and the ability to support more devices.
Worth noting too is that newer Wi-Fi equipment supports faster and more secure authentication. This is called Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) and provides very strong encryption.
Ideally, you’d want all devices to use WPA3 but support for the newer protocol is still being rolled out, and not very many people even know about it. The older WPA2 protocol is still in use, but it has been demonstrated to be hackable. Which is probably unlikely to happen in the vast majority of cases. But WPA3 takes away that cyber security worry, and that is never wrong.
Do not configure your Wi-Fi with no password, or one that’s easily guessable. If you provide free Wi-Fi, there’s a reasonable chance that you will be deemed responsible for what users do on it. Opening yourself up to abuse with slack or no user management is a terrible idea.
Life’s too short for worries like that, and besides, it’s a security risk for your internal network as well.
The 2024 Wi-Fi baseline, and what’s coming up
Having made it this far, you’re probably keen to know what to go for. It’s a little bit confusing, but the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a worldwide industry standards body, uses a system with numbers and letters to differentiate between the technology iterations.
That is hard to memorise and confusing, so the marketing people in the Wi-Fi Alliance have come up with a different naming scheme.
Here’s what you’re likely to encounter:
- Wi-Fi 5 = 802.11ac, introduced in 2014
- Wi-Fi 6 = 802.11ax, introduced in 2019
- Wi-Fi 7 = 802.11be, introduced in 2024
- Wi-Fi 8 = 802.11bn, to be introduced in 2028
The naming convention works OK, except there’s also Wi-Fi 6E (Extended) from 2021 which is quite a big feature upgrade as it can use the above mentioned 6 GHz frequency band for better performance. And, it falls under 802.11ax still.
Long story short, in 2024, don’t go for anything less than Wi-Fi 6 to match your UFB fibre connection up to 900/550 Mbps speeds. Wi-Fi 6 is also well-supported on recent devices, and you can connect lots of them wirelessly (and with cables if there's an Ethernet switch) to the access points, plus you get WPA3 authentication.
Why not Wi-Fi 6E? Well, if you can get a good deal on Wi-Fi 6E gear and your newish devices support it, by all means go for it.
In practical testing with a Netgear Orbi RBE960 and two satellites in a mesh setup, connection (link) speeds can reach 2.1 to 2.2 Gbps near the access points with Wi-Fi 6E enabled gear.
The actual throughput speeds hit 1.1 to 1.3 Gbps. Which, over Wi-Fi, is amazing. And yes it’s a bit geeky and not everyone needs that, but that kind of Wi-Fi is a good match for connections like Orcon's 8 Gbps Hyper Fibre installed in a moment of techie exuberance.
Wi-Fi 6E access points still sell at a premium however, and the next-gen Wi-Fi 7 technology has appeared in stores.
Wi-Fi 7 adds very wide radio channels - in North America, you can have up to 320 MHz bandwidth. Along with advanced signal modulation, this gives you the fast speeds and low latencies to match UFB HyperFibre connections from 2 Gbps upwards.
There’s also the promise of multi-link operation (MLO) for Wi-Fi 7 which in theory should provide simultaneous up and down lanes for data traffic using different frequencies. That should help provide lower latency and higher throughput that ought to be a match for normal wired Ethernet networks. We hope to find out soon when devices start to arrive for reviews.
As our part of the world only has half of the bandwidth available to North Americans for 6 GHz, it might be difficult to configure more than one 320 MHz wide beam unless the government here sees sense and frees up more spectrum. Nevertheless, Wi-Fi 7 looks set to meet the network needs of demanding residential and business users, while adding future proofing for the next few years.
The inevitable drawback is that as it’s new tech, Wi-Fi 7 access points are pricey for now. Also, see above about both ends of the network connection supporting Wi-Fi 7. Big budgets required in other words.
Wireless data networks are both amazing and a rabbit hole with enough detail and edge cases to fill books with.
Do you for instance go with a neat looking mesh Wi-Fi system with multiple satellite access points, or use a multi-aerial router that looks like an alien headcrab from a video game? What wireless diagnostics utilities are good to figure out the best access point placement and frequencies to use? How annoying is it that Wi-Fi equipment vendors charge subscription money to enable features that should be included for free with their gear, and much more.
If you have Wi-Fi secret sauce recipes, let us know in the comments section.
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