I don't understand what possesses these folks to continue making 2.4ghz devices. I understand there are use cases for low bandwidth, high range. But surely we've passed the point where that is more desirable to most than lower latency and high throughput, right?
Is what you described a truth for all IoT devices? If I have los of my AP, why do I need 2.4Ghz? Even so, what SNR do you truly need for this low bandwidth application? Where is the engineering here?
I have a unique position of having a data set over 8000 APs with 40k unique devices. If you design properly, there is no need for 2.4 ever. 2.4Ghz congestion (with nearly no actual 802.11 traffic) is very high. To the point where the IoT folks are struggling.
Yes. And 2.4 lives and dies by that sword. What downsides might there be in areas where dozens of APs hear each other and 100s of clients hear each other?
It's an IoT device, not a laptop. It does not really need 5ghz to fulfill its purpose as an embedded CPU, and adding 5ghz likely would require making some room for it by removing other functionality.
Yes and in some uses cases it works against you. 2.4 is incredibly crowded without adding 802.11 to the mix. My IoT admins would have less complaints if they could take advantage of my small cell 5Ghz spectrum. This isn't 2005 with widely deployed asymmetrical wireless networks.
I use ESP32s extensively. I also use wifi extensively around the house - I have about 8 wifi access points around the property, with a ton of commercial IoT stuff powered on including sensors, lights, cameras, you name it, I got it. It's about as wifi-congested as any house can get.
So, I was measuring about 250KBit/s on an ESP32, and I decided to test everything that might increase the speed. I tried all the available antenna options for the ESP32 including many exotic antennas using the IPEX antenna connector variant of the ESP32, the stock ESP32 pcb antenna, and several chip antennas. A couple of them got up to 300KBit/s.
I also decided to see what happens when I power everything else off except for a single wifi router. So I did that, and I found that the stock ESP32 pcb antenna still got only 250KBit/s, and the other antennas measured exactly the same as they did before shutting everything down, too.
So, I don't know... 2.4ghz seems fine to me from my anecdotal tests.
Can't you just underpower the antenna on a 2.4 radio if you need networks that don't bleed into each other as badly? Unless it's an issue because of the tiny antennas that usually come on microcontrollers.
True for devices under your control. But think venues with large BYOD counts. Add in that all client devices generally transmit at full power. End result is an environment with not a lot of headroom in the 2.4 space.
2.4ghz isn't the only problem - even cell towers have problems with large amounts of devices. And "large BYOD" events are not a normal use case for wireless, and even 5GHz will have problems in those situations.
My 2.4ghz is basically all IOT these days. Things that matter are on 5 or 6 ghz. Busy moving the entire thing to be entirely firewalled off given how clean the separation is
Don't think you're ever going to reclaim that spectrum successfully. There must be billions of devices on it. Pretty much any other ghz number is a better bet
And if I think back to my 30 years of IT, environments with NAT end up with lazy engineering from systems and application folks. It doesn't provide an environment that forces folks to understand their problems holistically. Thus, relying on perimeter firewalling and NAT as a large catch all. It's a bad security practice imo
The correct way is hard. You either have to manage firewalls on each host, or your switches need to have firewalls (I assume that’s a thing?). Hosts on the same subnet never hit layer 3 so IP-based firewalls don’t see them.
You either need very static infrastructure so you can hard-code firewalls on the hosts, or you need a system to dynamically manage the firewalls on each host, or an SDN that can sanely manage layer 2 flows. Little things like moving an app to a new server become a whole project unless you have really good tools to reconfigure the firewalls on everything that touches the app.
Then you need a way to let people self-service those rules or else security has to be involved in like everything just to do firewall rules.
It’s a good idea, but a huge pain and I’ve not seen good solutions
That's why I like mesh overlay networks (things like Tailscale, Nebula, etc.). You can largely set host firewalls to deny all, and access services over the overlay network which is software defined and more easily managed and deployed at scale.
It doesn't solve all problems, but its a good start, and modern MDMs & Group Policy (on the Windows side) make managing host firewalls easy enough.
It doesn't solve your self-service problem, though I'd argue self-service when it comes to host firewalls or otherwise shouldn't be a thing anyway.
Yep, rfc19188 addressing leads to accumulating complexity due to workarounds (end-to-end addressing is simple, there are very good reasons for that design), addressing ambiguity, and various practical security problems.
It's always important to remind one's self that "who you are" is simply the story one is attached to. Things like meditation or psilocybin can help bring that to light.
That’s interesting. My testing for EAP-TLS and OWE networks has shown modern clients will simply create another profile when it detects the change in the AKM suite. Hard roam between wpa2/wpa3, but still seem less for the client.
Listening and responding is just like singing. If you are "thinking about it while doing it" it feel off to everyone. Like how singing is best when you embody the lessons and move your focus away from "getting it right". It has to feel like you and not you playing a character.
I can see why someone might have that opinion. I think the author hasn't met himself yet. As one can only meet and understand another as deeply as they have met themselves. I do wonder if he would gain more awareness of his self after a couple 7g mushroom runs.
I hope we see this more at the municipal level. Just thinking about dense neighborhoods with sizable lithium storage solutions raises eyebrows. One house fire could spread so quickly.
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