"802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks"

[Razer]

Semi-technical history and discussion (all technical terminology linked):


>
>
> When wireless networking based around the 802.11b standard first hit
> consumer markets in the late nineties, it looked pretty good on paper.
> Promising "11 Mbps" compared to original wired Ethernet's 10 Mbps, a
> reasonable person might have thought 802.11b was actually faster than
> 10Mbps wired Ethernet connections. It was a while before I was exposed
> to wireless networking—smartphones weren't a thing yet, and laptops
> were still hideously expensive, underpowered, and overweight. I was
> already rocking Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) wired networks in all my
> clients' offices and my own house, so the idea of cutting my speed by
> 90 percent really didn't appeal.
>
> In the early 2000s, things started to change. Laptops got smaller,
> lighter, and cheaper—and they had Wi-Fi built in right from the
> factory. Small businesses started eyeballing the "11Mbps" that 802.11b
> promised and deciding that 10Mbps had been enough for them in their
> last building, so why not just go wireless in the new one? My first
> real exposure to Wi-Fi was in dealing with the aftermath of that
> decision, and it didn't make for a good first impression. Turns out
> that "11Mbps" was the maximum physical layer bit rate, not a speed at
> which you could ever expect your actual data to flow from one machine
> to another. In practice, it wasn't a whole lot better than dial-up
> Internet—in speed or reliability. In real life, if you had your
> devices close enough to each other and to the access point, about the
> best you could reasonably expect was 1 Mbps—about 125 KB/sec. It only
> got worse from there—if you had ten PCs all trying to access a server,
> you could cut that 125 KB/sec down to 12.5 KB/sec for each one of them.
>
>     Image: D-Link's DI-514 802.11b router. It was a perfectly
>     cromulent router for its time... but those were dark days, friend,
>     dark days indeed.
>
>
> Just as everybody got used to the idea that 802.11b sucked, 802.11g
> came along. Promising 54 screaming Mbps, 802.11g was still only half
> the speed of Fast Ethernet, but five times faster than original
> Ethernet! Right? Well, no. Just like 802.11b, the advertised speed was
> really the maximum physical layer data rate, not anything you could
> ever expect to see on a progress bar. And also like 802.11b, your best
> case scenario tended to be about a tenth of that—5 Mbps or so—and
> you'd be splitting that 5 Mbps or so among all the computers on the
> network, not getting it for each one of them like you would with a
> switched network.
>
> 802.11n was introduced to the consumer public around 2010, promising
> six hundred Mbps. Wow! Okay, so it's not as fast as the gigabit wired
> Ethernet that just started getting affordable around the same time,
> but six times faster than wired Fast Ethernet, right? Once again, a
> reasonable real-life expectation was around a tenth of that. Maybe. On
> a good day. To a single device...
>
>
>
>
In full >
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/

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