• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    With wifi, everything is important, even the number of people connected on your channel… not the number of wifi networks on the channel, the number of total nodes using the same channel. The ap hardware factors in, your wifi card (client) factors in, even drivers and other things can factor in. The band (2.4/5/6 GHz), the non-wifi traffic, spurious emissions from other harmonic frequencies, even electrical noise from gadgets and other devices nearby. You can even factor in distance to the ap and cosmic background noise.

    On top of that, it’s half duplex, so only one node can successfully transmit at a time. So it interferes with itself.

    It’s a complete mess of unknowns and unknowable things, unless you have a very good spectrum analyser to look into it.

    IMO, this is what makes WiFi so terrible. There’s simply too many factors that can be slowing you down, most of which you can’t see and aren’t obvious.