00:00SPEAKERsomething miraculous has happened. Okay. I was having kind of a crummy evening the other night.
00:05SPEAKERI was just kind of flopped on the couch, scrolling Twitter as one does. And I just kept scrolling and
00:11SPEAKERall of a sudden it was like the clouds parted. - The kids called that doom scrolling for a
00:16SPEAKERreason, Brad. - Yes. Yes. I get it. I get it. But sometimes light shines through. And in fact,
00:21SPEAKERliterally I landed on a thread. It's like the clouds parted overhead and a ray of light shone
00:25SPEAKERdown. Thread by none other than Vincent Teo of HDTV Test. Panasonic is returning to the American TV
00:34SPEAKERmarket. - Wow. My dreams and hard waiting have finally paid off. - You've been losing sleep for
00:40SPEAKERa decade waiting for this moment. - I don't even think about it anymore. I just occasionally plug
00:45SPEAKERin a console and I'm like, "Oh, right. It's 1080p out here." - Yeah. I know. You've got different
00:50SPEAKERneeds these days. But yeah, like Panasonic basically since I bought my plasma in 2012 has not
00:55SPEAKERsold TVs in America. - Yeah. We got the tail end because I bought my TV in fall of winter of 2012
01:02SPEAKERand then they immediately divested of this market and stopped talking about TVs in English at all.
01:07SPEAKERWhat are they doing? Are they doing plasmas? Are they doing OLEDs? - No, no. They're doing OLEDs.
01:11SPEAKERLike that's the thing. They never stopped making TVs in Europe and Japan. - Oh, of course. - They
01:16SPEAKERjust stopped selling them in America for some reason. But I have been for like the last three
01:20SPEAKERyears as before and after I bought this TV even now, like I've been kind of like quietly salivating
01:25SPEAKERat the Panasonic line of OLEDs. They are super highly respected. They put a lot of work into
01:31SPEAKERcolor accuracy. They work with like Hollywood color. What's the... - Colorists. - Colorists,
01:36SPEAKERI guess is the professional term, right? Like they are kind of seen as like these are the most
01:40SPEAKERaccurate out of the box with colors. They have like the filmmaker mode they do on a lot of TVs
01:44SPEAKERwhere it's like, "Hey, we're not going to add any extra processing. We're going to take the HDR
01:48SPEAKERmapping just like they intended. We're going to give it to you exactly like the filmmaker made it."
01:52SPEAKERThe Panasonics have that, but for games, effectively it's a filmmaker mode for games where...
01:57SPEAKER- How are they doing that with games? - I barely understand like what is the HDR,
02:02SPEAKERHDIG standard. Do you know what I'm talking about? - Yeah, well, there's a whole bunch of them,
02:06SPEAKERright? There's Dolby Vision and the HDR 10 and all that. We did an episode. - Yes. So we didn't
02:13SPEAKERcover HDIG. I just looked it up. It stands for HDR Gaming Interest Group, I guess. But anyway,
02:18SPEAKERlike I was reading like some TVs will do like double tone mapping when I'm guessing HDIG is
02:24SPEAKERlike there's like a tone mapping metadata in there already. And then the TV will try to do its own
02:28SPEAKERthing on top of that. - Well, I wonder if it's a latency thing too, right? - That's probably also
02:32SPEAKERpart of it, but well, there's the automatic low latency built into HDMI 2.1. Anyway, long story
02:38SPEAKERshort, like a lot of people look at these Panasonic's as like, okay, these are the like serious
02:43SPEAKERcinephile or hardcore gamer. Like you just want your stuff to look exactly like it's supposed to
02:47SPEAKERlook right out of the box type TVs to the point that some people have been importing Panasonic's
02:52SPEAKERinto the US. - That's madness. - They're so sought after. And then out of nowhere,
02:57SPEAKERthey put out a press release and it's not even like, hey, next year's models will be available.
03:00SPEAKERIt's, hey, they're shipping in two weeks. - I wonder if that means they're not selling
03:04SPEAKERenough in other regions or if it's going really well. Like maybe, maybe this is like the,
03:10SPEAKERthe lemon soaked paper napkins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe they just had to wait
03:14SPEAKERfor the civilization to rebuild enough that we were ready for their TVs again. - America
03:18SPEAKERwas not prepared for such color accuracy. - We did not deserve it. We did not warrant that. We
03:23SPEAKERdid not warrant that fidelity. - Yeah, I guess not. Anyway, it's, yeah, it's nuts. It's just like,
03:27SPEAKERyou can pre-order them right now. I think they're shipping on like the 18th. - Well,
03:30SPEAKERI'm going to get my gold-plated HDMI cables ready and warmed up. - All right.
04:01SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. - I'm Brad. Hello. - Hello, Brad. How are you?
04:08SPEAKER- Now I'm doing well. Now the Panasonic's back, I'm doing just peachy. - This is all it took to
04:11SPEAKERbreak you out of a doom scroll. That's amazing. A 14, 13 year re-entry into the market. What,
04:19SPEAKERwhat, what, what? Like this has been a busy week for video games and a slow week for tech.
04:23SPEAKER- Oh God. Yeah. Jeez. Busy week for Sony for that matter. Not, not even just video games,
04:30SPEAKERjust one company has had like perhaps the most highs and lows of a single week for a single
04:36SPEAKERcompany ever. - Yeah. It's been a hard swing for them. Well, I mean, Intel's had a, had a,
04:40SPEAKERIntel had a big up and down cause you know, they. - Sure. Yeah. Sorry. I'm in, I'm in video games,
04:44SPEAKERlike major game publishers, the, the ups and downs this week for Sony have been severe.
04:49SPEAKER- The Concord shutdown, the interesting thing about the Concord shutdown is they didn't,
04:53SPEAKERlike I expected them to say, Hey, we're going to shut this down and retool it and make it free to
04:56SPEAKERplay or something. - Yeah. And I think that they still could do that. But if you look at the
04:59SPEAKERlanguage in the blog post, it was so noncommittal that I'm not even, I'm not a hundred percent sure
05:03SPEAKEReven that's going to happen. - Yeah. I'm not holding my breath after reading, reading the
05:07SPEAKERblog post directly. The Intel stuff, Intel put out another update. They have a name,
05:12SPEAKERthey have a name for the 13th and 14th gen problem now. - Oh, I saw that. I don't have it in front
05:17SPEAKERof me, but I saw them using capital letters on something as if to say, Hey, we have identified
05:22SPEAKERit fully and now we can put it in that. Yes. It is uncovered the ancient evil. - It is the VMIN,
05:29SPEAKERhold on, I got to get it right. I can't find the blog post now. - Is it the VMIN shift instability?
05:34SPEAKER- VMIN shift instability. That is it. Yes. - Oh, right. Cause I saw they put out that,
05:40SPEAKERthey put out that thing about like, Hey, here are the products that are not fucked up. - Well,
05:43SPEAKERso last week, last week they did a Friday news dump that was like, Hey, this thing has a name.
05:47SPEAKERThey didn't say it has a name, but they used a name for the first time. And then they,
05:52SPEAKERthen they followed that up with, here's all the stuff that's not affected. And it's like
05:57SPEAKERmost mobile stuff, including HX processors, non K 13th, 14th gen core. - Oh, is that right?
06:06SPEAKERThere are still 13th and 14th. Cause I saw, I believe I saw them say that all 12th gen is
06:11SPEAKERunaffected. - All 12th gen was totally clear as Xeon and core ultras, which is the meteor lake.
06:16SPEAKER- I've actually seen people out there on like places like Reddit, where 12th gen,
06:20SPEAKERlike 12, the 12 900 K for example, is becoming kind of sought after again because people want,
06:25SPEAKERpeople want a top end park that they know a thousand percent is, is good to go. - The price
06:30SPEAKERon the 12 900 Ks, I believe has spiked in recent, recent months. - Yeah. At the same time, this is
06:34SPEAKERsuper random. I also landed on a Reddit thread where some guy found one for $75 new inbox at
06:39SPEAKERWalmart. Walmart was like clearing out their 12 900 Ks. - I didn't know Walmart had processors.
06:44SPEAKERThat's crazy. - I didn't either, I didn't either, but. - Well, so, and then Monday they rolled out
06:48SPEAKERthe lunar lake stuff. - Yeah. I've seen lunar lake trending a lot, like Air Lake stuff seems to be
06:54SPEAKERtrickling out more too. I'm very curious about Air Lake. - Well, so there at IFA, IFA is happening,
06:58SPEAKERIFA happened this week and the, the, the lunar lake mobile, which is their mobile next gen
07:05SPEAKERnew architecture part, basically. So it's, it's their, their equivalent to Ryzen. They kind of
07:11SPEAKERtrickled this out with meteor lake earlier this year or late last year, I guess. And then. - Meteor
07:16SPEAKERLake was their first, was their first disaggregated architecture. The first one with like chiplets
07:21SPEAKERtiles. - Yeah. Yeah. For the most part, I believe I think there were some, I think there's some
07:25SPEAKERweird offshoots that don't really count, but in the main line stuff that people actually buy. Yeah.
07:30SPEAKERAnd yeah. So anyway, we're the lunar lake benchmarks and they're, Hey, here's how this
07:35SPEAKERworks. Looks real promising. They were really clear on that Friday news dump to say, Hey man,
07:40SPEAKERlunar lake, meteor lake, both cool. You can buy those. You're not going to have any of this, this
07:45SPEAKERV-min shift instability problem. - Yes. And I think Arrow Lake is the same. I mean, you know,
07:51SPEAKERit's, it's a brand new architecture. It's not super surprising. - Yeah. Arrow Lake, Arrow Lake
07:56SPEAKERwill like going forward. This shouldn't be a problem anymore. It's just with the, with the
08:01SPEAKERpost 12th gen, 12th gen refreshes, basically. - The thing that gets me the most excited is,
08:07SPEAKERand the thing I've seen discussed the most on Twitter about lunar lake is the,
08:11SPEAKERthe performance per watt is dramatically better. It's not quite in Snapdragon X elite and Apple M
08:19SPEAKERchip territory, but it's like, it's like kind of edging into that territory. - So they said in
08:24SPEAKERtheir press conference that they have a couple of vendors that want to put the exact same hardware,
08:29SPEAKERlike take the exact same laptop frame, screen drive, all that stuff. And, and pair it up
08:34SPEAKERagainst, put it in Snapdragon chassis and put Intel hardware in the Snapdragon chassis. So
08:39SPEAKERpeople can compare directly. - That's interesting. I'm super, and that bodes very well for Arrow
08:44SPEAKERLake. I'm very curious to see how that goes. I think, I think, I think people like writing
08:48SPEAKERoff Intel or proclaiming the death of Intel are wildly premature. I think that it's just taking
08:54SPEAKERnumerous years to right the ship from how badly things have gone and both on the fab business and
08:59SPEAKERwith the desktop and laptop parts. - I don't think it's even fair to say that the fab business is
09:03SPEAKERgoing badly. Building new fabs is always hard, right? It always is a huge investment. The only
09:07SPEAKERreason we don't hear about it from TSMC is that they've been doing it for 30 years. And they
09:12SPEAKERalways, they, they, they know the cycle real, they're real good at it. - They're, they're
09:15SPEAKERliterally the global leader. So, but I mean, I'm a little out of my depth here, but my understanding
09:20SPEAKERis like a lot of Intel's tooling for fabrication was like Intel specific and not industry standard
09:25SPEAKERfor a long time. And it sounds like they are transitioning to industry standard stuff. - Well,
09:29SPEAKERyeah, doing, doing Intel specific stuff used to be a real advantage for them. And then less so
09:33SPEAKERover the last few years. - But the point is though, it's like, this is the, the, the, the hole they
09:38SPEAKERwere in is a, is a several years to dig out of kind of hole. And so people that are like, well,
09:43SPEAKERGelsinger's been on for like two years already. What's going on? It's like, that's. - Like fabs
09:48SPEAKERaren't built in a day. It turns out much like Rome. So anyway, a big digression, but it was
09:54SPEAKERinteresting. The reason I brought up the lunar, like the, the Intel stuff is that with all the
09:58SPEAKERnew games coming out, outlaws, space Marine and, and PC, other PC stuff we were seeing,
10:07SPEAKERI was seeing a lot more, Hey, my 13th gen Intel machines are really wobbly now what's going on.
10:13SPEAKERAnd then, you know, here we are. So. - Is Space Marine UB5? - Space Marine is UB5. I'm not,
10:20SPEAKERI'm not a hundred percent. - I think UB5 is the best way to stress one of those chips and see if
10:25SPEAKERyou've got problems is my understanding. - I think, I think the shader compilation seems to
10:30SPEAKERbe the thing that, yeah, that hurts it. It says Space Marine 2. Oh no swarm engine for Space
10:36SPEAKERMarine 2. - Oh, that must be an in-house engine. - I don't, I don't actually know what swarm engine
10:41SPEAKERis. - Pretty much any time I hear an engine that is, I've never heard of it has to be in-house,
10:45SPEAKERright? Cause there's only like three commercial engines at this point. - It's the World War Z
10:50SPEAKERengine. - Okay. - But it was used for World War Z by Saber. So that makes sense. Cause I think,
10:55SPEAKERI think Space Marine is a Saber game too, isn't it? - Yeah. No, it was a THQ game. I'm not sure
11:02SPEAKERanyway. - I can't remember in the post-embracer world. I can't, yeah. Space Marine 2 is built
11:08SPEAKERby Saber. - Oh yes, 2 is Saber. I'm sorry. I thought you had the first one. - No, the first
11:13SPEAKERone. Well, THQ. - Long gone. - Got split up into Saber and it got embraced. - Yeah. Or their IP
11:20SPEAKERgot sold off. - Yeah, yeah. - Is what it was. Anyway. - Anyway. - All those digressions aside,
11:24SPEAKERstress those CPU's. - Yeah. You maybe, maybe, you know, update your BIOS if you have an Intel 13th
11:31SPEAKERor 14th gen K processor. - My, my performance, we're never going to get to our topic at this
11:36SPEAKERrate, but my performance got better after I'd, I put the last BIOS update on that had the final
11:40SPEAKERmicrocode update. - Oh yeah. - The, Hey, we have fixed this problem. This will not happen anymore.
11:44SPEAKERMicrocode. I didn't change any other settings. Other, I mean, I set everything back to the same
11:48SPEAKERsettings I had. I haven't done real benchmarks. The only thing I've looked at is encoding this
11:52SPEAKERpodcast and other podcasts. - Yeah. - And that's a single threaded encoder. So I guess this is
11:57SPEAKERsingle threaded performance, but the speed of encoding an MP3 went up dramatically. I'm not
12:01SPEAKERsure why. - Got to get those boost clocks. - I guess. Yeah. Maybe, maybe better voltage management
12:06SPEAKERis allowing it to boost better or something. Or, I mean, I guess it's possible. Maybe I should double
12:10SPEAKERcheck my settings and make sure I didn't like leave on some setting that's making it boost more
12:14SPEAKERor something. - Well, I mean, if your thermals are better than your boost will stay boosted longer,
12:19SPEAKERwhich, you know, better thermal management could be better single-threaded. But I don't know,
12:23SPEAKERthat's weird. You probably missed a setting when you're flipping your BIOS. - I will go check.
12:27SPEAKERCause I, they would normally would encode at about 210 X and it was more like 245 X after the update.
12:34SPEAKER- So it's funny. I, when I hit the button on the podcast master, I just walk away and go get a cup
12:38SPEAKERof coffee or something. I don't ever look at it and just, I come back in 10 minutes and it's always
12:43SPEAKERdone. - Yeah. Well, I encode the podcast in a terminal so I can just look and see. - Oh, of
12:47SPEAKERcourse. - Look and see what FFmpeg said about how fast it went. - You know, we, at some point we
12:52SPEAKERshould read the Neil Stevenson book. In the beginning, there was the command line. - Yes,
12:56SPEAKERwe should do that. - We would quite like that. Somebody also suggested we should read Neuromancer
13:00SPEAKERin the lead up for the TV show, which I think I'm going to, I'm going to plant that seed right now
13:04SPEAKERthat maybe get a copy of Neuromancer from the library and read it. - I have one. - I'm talking
13:08SPEAKERto them. - Well, no, but I'm putting myself on blast here too, as if to say I've had a copy of
13:13SPEAKERNeuromancer for like a decade plus and never actually read it. - Neuromancer is one of those
13:19SPEAKERones that I bought in probably college, post college. And I literally read it in one sitting.
13:26SPEAKERI read the first like chapter and I was like, I'm not going to stop. And it was three o'clock
13:30SPEAKERin the morning, finished it. - I could see that. It's pretty short, right? - It's short. Yeah,
13:33SPEAKERit's good. It's good. It's a fast read. - I did not realize there was a TV show forthcoming.
13:37SPEAKER- Yeah. Everything's a TV show now, it turns out. Brad, what are we going to talk about
13:43SPEAKERthis week though? Speaking of not TV shows. - Wireless Fireless. - I think it's Wireless
13:49SPEAKERFidelity is what it started out as. - Somebody made that joke at some point, right? - Is it?
13:53SPEAKERIs it Fidelity? - No, they said, okay, so I took a meeting with the wifi consortium when they
13:59SPEAKERintroduced wifi, when they were doing the first pitch for it in like 2000, 2001. - No kidding.
14:04SPEAKERThe consortium? - Consortium. They have a consortium. - Not even a manufacturer, just like
14:09SPEAKERfood. - No, they were like, look, here's the deal. Wireless networks are a mess. We're going to
14:13SPEAKERunmess them. And we've got, we've got it with brand. We got the branding under control and then
14:18SPEAKERthey absolutely did not have the branding under control. - 802.11b. - But, so their, their pitch
14:24SPEAKERwas it was supposed to evoke hi-fi, high fidelity, like audio, meaning quality and good and, and,
14:33SPEAKERand reliable. - Talk about a reference that nobody under the age of 50 is going to understand
14:38SPEAKERthese days. - Well, then they would have though, cause this was 20 years ago. - Yeah, sure. Okay,
14:42SPEAKERsure. - So, cause you know, like at the time I had the, my first electronics purchase was to go to the,
14:49SPEAKERthe Rex's in Bristol and buy a, a receiver and a, and a CD player, right? Like I was thrilled to do
14:55SPEAKERthat. That was, that was what I spent my lawn mowing money on. But it didn't, but they explicitly
15:01SPEAKERsaid, doesn't stand for anything. It's not short for, it's not short for wireless fidelity. It's
15:06SPEAKERjust meant to evoke high fidelity. - No kidding. - Yes. - Learn something new every day. - There
15:11SPEAKERyou go. I don't, I, my guess is that they've retconned that by now and it probably does stand
15:15SPEAKERfor something, but I don't know. - Sure. - Anyway. Yeah, so we're talking about Wi-Fi 7. - Yeah.
15:20SPEAKER- It's the new Wi-Fi. - Yes, this is the secret. This was the secret third topic last week that
15:24SPEAKERwe were going to cram into the show and did not, but also I think this is a whole show. - I don't
15:29SPEAKERknow what you're talking about. I've never heard of a secret third topic, but yeah, it is. So we
15:35SPEAKERdidn't, we, we did a Wi-Fi episode about two years ago, maybe a little bit longer than that now,
15:40SPEAKERthat we, that, that kicked off with Wi-Fi 6, that ended up with Wi-Fi 6. So this is basically,
15:46SPEAKERwe're not going to, we're not going to re-go over all the radio stuff that we talked about then.
15:51SPEAKERYou can go back and listen to that whole episode. We'll put a link in the show notes. We didn't talk
15:55SPEAKERabout 6E, which basically extended 6 by adding more spectrum, a different spectrum. And there's
16:01SPEAKERsome other stuff as well, but we'll, we'll touch a little bit on that, but Wi-Fi 7, which is
16:07SPEAKERtechnically IEEE 802.11 BE. - Yes, BE. - Yes, that's, that's a boxcar elephant, I guess. - Yes,
16:16SPEAKERthis is, so I'm just going to say this, this is the exact moment where I came around on their
16:20SPEAKERnew naming on Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7, as opposed to the 802.11 standards, because they started with
16:27SPEAKER802.11 B and now they're back to BE. So if they're wrapping around two, the same letters again,
16:32SPEAKERit's going to get way too confusing. Like, you know what, you were right, numbers make sense.
16:37SPEAKER- Yeah, cause there's, there's other, I mean, this happened before with AC and AX, right?
16:42SPEAKER- Yeah. - Like this is,
16:43SPEAKERwe've had this problem. - And I didn't actually looking at,
16:45SPEAKERsorry, looking at this chart, I didn't realize 6E was AXE.
16:48SPEAKER- Yeah. - It's just too much.
16:51SPEAKER- It also makes middle school kids smell less bad. So.
16:54SPEAKER- Although honestly, 802.11 AX is a pretty good. - It's, it's, look, so the problem is
17:01SPEAKERnormal people don't know what to do with 802.11, right? Like they look at that and they're like,
17:05SPEAKERwell, where, where's, where's the other ones? And the answer is the other ones are like the
17:08SPEAKERsupplemental specs that handle things like authentication and hardware key encryption
17:14SPEAKERand all that stuff if you're, if you're connected to corporate networks. But yeah,
17:18SPEAKERso the cert was ratified in January of this year. It builds on top of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E,
17:24SPEAKERit's backwards compatible in the same way that every other Wi-Fi has, has been. So that if you
17:29SPEAKERconnect a Wi-Fi seven device, a Wi-Fi six device to a Wi-Fi seven router, it's going to give you
17:36SPEAKERWi-Fi six features, but not Wi-Fi seven features on the six device. - Yeah. Which probably mentioned,
17:42SPEAKERyou know, you, you mentioned it was ratified in January of this year, but I guess like the
17:45SPEAKERkind of, I don't, I don't know what the terminology is here. The way that specs get
17:49SPEAKERstandardized in the tech industry is so bizarre because Wi-Fi seven has been around in some form
17:53SPEAKERsince 2021. And there were Wi-Fi seven products shipping well before this January when the spec
17:59SPEAKERwas finalized. So there are Wi-Fi seven products on the shelf that may not be fully compliant with
18:05SPEAKERwhat ended up becoming the codified Wi-Fi seven standard. - So typically what happens is people
18:11SPEAKERship pre, pre-final spec hardware that will be the, because the min spec is determined early,
18:18SPEAKERit's the add on stuff that's, that's, that gets tacked on late. And realistically,
18:24SPEAKERmy understanding is that these certain committees move so slowly that like the final shape of the
18:28SPEAKERspec is known for a year before it's finally ratified. - That, that, I find that believable.
18:33SPEAKERThat's, that's fine. Although this does, this does kind of reinforce my later in life tendency
18:38SPEAKERtoward not early adopting things like buying into the late period of a standard seems safer in
18:43SPEAKERgeneral these days. - Well, it's definitely cheaper. Like right now, right now, if you're
18:47SPEAKERbuying Wi-Fi seven gear, you're into a really expensive routers, pretty expensive access points.
18:54SPEAKERAnd there aren't frankly, a ton of devices that support Wi-Fi seven, like your, your iPhone and
18:58SPEAKERmost Android phones aren't going to support Wi-Fi seven. Anything bought before 2020 definitely won't
19:03SPEAKERsupport Wi-Fi seven. - Yeah, it is, it is getting there. I did a quick, like very unscientific survey.
19:08SPEAKERYou're right. Like I don't think there are any Apple devices on the market that do seven yet.
19:12SPEAKERThe iPhone 16 is like very heavily rumored, basically confirmed to do seven. - Yeah,
19:16SPEAKERI would assume. - The, it sounds like the, the, the M4 based MacBook pro is a maybe
19:22SPEAKERin terms of the rumor mill. There are, there are quite a few Android phones that have Wi-Fi seven
19:26SPEAKERnow for what it's worth. Like the flagship ones. - The Android phones just refreshed like a month
19:31SPEAKERago. - Right, right. It's like bleeding edge new devices. It's like the, all the flagship
19:36SPEAKERAndroid phones that are coming out now do seven, but like I looked through a handful of co-pilot
19:40SPEAKERplus Snapdragon laptops, Windows laptops, and they all have Wi-Fi seven. You can say a hundred percent
19:46SPEAKERof them do, but certainly all the ones I checked did. All the new AMD motherboards for Zen five,
19:50SPEAKERthe X870E, X870 boards. Actually, I don't know, have they announced a B870 or 850?
19:57SPEAKER- I don't think they've announced the new boards yet. - I guess it would be a B850. There are,
20:00SPEAKERthere are X870E boards announced from all the vendors, but they, they all, they all do seven
20:05SPEAKERas well. The point is pretty much all the devices coming out now and going forward, it looks like
20:09SPEAKERare going to be seven. - So I was going to say the thing, the place we're at with Wi-Fi seven
20:13SPEAKERright now is that if you are using a desktop PC and I'm going to, I'm going to skip ahead here,
20:19SPEAKERactually. So one last thing on backwards compatibility. If you connect a Wi-Fi seven
20:25SPEAKERdevice to a Wi-Fi six or five router, it's just going to work in five or six mode as well. So
20:30SPEAKERit falls back to the least common denominator, least common denominator, both ways.
20:35SPEAKERThe place we're at right now is that like everything's expensive, flagships, your phone,
20:41SPEAKERrealistically, your phone is probably not going to ever need the kind of performance you get from
20:45SPEAKERseven. - Unless, unless it's like some edge case, like the time you recorded, was it a talent show
20:51SPEAKERat school or something along those lines where you have like a ton of high quality footage to dump
20:55SPEAKERoff? Like that's a pretty niche case. - It's yeah, it's, it's pretty limited and probably you're
21:00SPEAKERbetter off with it. Like at this point we have USB-C devices and it's a little bit easier to get
21:04SPEAKERthe, get the data off the phones. The, the, if you have a desktop PC that uses wireless, you can't
21:10SPEAKERget a wire to like, I think about it. Cause you can get, you can get dedicated USB-C, I mean,
21:16SPEAKERsorry, internal cards, internal NVM, what are they called? M2 style cards for PCI express, Wi-Fi seven.
21:27SPEAKERNow you can get USB devices. It'll give you better. That'll give you the benefits of the new
21:31SPEAKERspec, but you do have to upgrade your access point or your router. Your phone, like I said,
21:36SPEAKERprobably doesn't need that kind of high performance. Your laptop might. I think the place
21:41SPEAKERthat the we'll talk about the benefits here in a minute, but the real benefit is going to be more
21:45SPEAKERbandwidth across a lot of devices. So if you're in a corporate environment and your fleet of laptops
21:50SPEAKERhas, has Wi-Fi seven, it might make sense, especially if you're doing like video editing
21:54SPEAKERand stuff like that. It means that you can transfer large files really easily across the land
21:59SPEAKERat high speed. Yeah. I noted we, we are, we are referencing a really good article from Don Knows
22:05SPEAKERTech. We'll link in the show notes. That's like super detailed about the entire spec and where
22:10SPEAKERaccess points are out and stuff. He mentions in here that he, he strongly disagrees with this
22:15SPEAKERclaim, but a bunch of the manufacturers of Wi-Fi seven stuff are literally referring to it as like
22:20SPEAKERan ethernet replacement as a better than hard line kind of thing. Again, again, he's like, no, come
22:26SPEAKERon. That's ridiculous. But the point is it is getting fast enough now where they are at least
22:31SPEAKERable to make claims like that, even if they're kind of silly.
22:34SPEAKERWell, there's, there's big improvements to throughput. There's also big improvements to
22:38SPEAKERlatency. It has the IEEE 802.11q extensions for low latency, real time traffic, which
22:45SPEAKERmakes sense for things like zoom calls and games.
22:48SPEAKERYeah. Latency latency to me has always been kind of the actual Achilles heel of Wi-Fi like
22:52SPEAKERthroughput has been pretty good since like N right. Which is what is that? Wi-Fi four now.
22:57SPEAKERN was four. I think five is AC.
23:00SPEAKERYeah. That's right. That's right. Like since N I think, which was like top topped out at
23:04SPEAKERlike 300 megabits, like that's pretty good for most Wi-Fi applications, but it was always,
23:08SPEAKERit was always latency. That was the real killer to the point that, you know,
23:11SPEAKERthere's this divide in, for example, like fighting games online that show your connection, you know,
23:16SPEAKERit shows if you're using wired or wireless and like people would like look down on the
23:19SPEAKERwireless people because they knew that their ping was going to be worse.
23:21SPEAKERNo HPBs bro.
23:24SPEAKERYeah. So, okay. So like, should anybody run out and buy Wi-Fi seven right now? Probably not.
23:29SPEAKERYeah.
23:30SPEAKERI mean, maybe if you're, like I said, maybe if you're on a wired ethernet, a wireless ethernet
23:34SPEAKERconnection and you need, you play games, stuff like that, it might be worth doing at home.
23:40SPEAKERThe big benefit here, so like Wi-Fi 6E operates in 2.4 or 5 gigahertz and 6 gigahertz bands.
23:46SPEAKERThe 6 gigahertz band is only fully available in a couple of countries, the United States, Canada,
23:51SPEAKERBrazil, a handful of others. Parts of it are available in others. The spectrum that is less
23:57SPEAKERavailable from a legal standpoint in a lot of the world.
24:00SPEAKERSure. Did I understand correctly that 6 gigahertz only came about with 6E,
24:04SPEAKERthe regular Wi-Fi 6 did not support 6 gigahertz?
24:07SPEAKERYeah, 6 gigahertz is new with 6E. Regular Wi-Fi 6 does not support 6E. 6E does not
24:12SPEAKERsupport 6 gigahertz.
24:14SPEAKERIt seems like a pretty big thing to roll into a half step, a quasi update to the standard.
24:20SPEAKERI think that the availability of the spectrum in markets is why they flipped it on.
24:25SPEAKERSure.
24:25SPEAKERThe, as always, the lower the frequency that you're in, the better the penetration in the
24:32SPEAKERrange will be. The higher the frequency, the better the throughput, but the worse the range.
24:37SPEAKER6 gives you a close access, not quite line of sight, but close access to the access point
24:44SPEAKERat really, really high throughputs.
24:45SPEAKERRight. Probably ideally this is in the same room or maybe one wall away.
24:50SPEAKERYeah, not inside the refrigerator.
24:54SPEAKERThe number you're going to hear talking about throughput on boxes is 46 gigabits per second,
24:58SPEAKERprobably, which sounds really, really high.
25:01SPEAKERIt sure does.
25:02SPEAKERBut as is usually the case when this, in this case, that is the ultimate theoretical
25:06SPEAKERmaximum of all the bands at the same time on the same access point to one client.
25:11SPEAKERAnd it's not, it's not, it's a bullshit number.
25:14SPEAKEROh, wait, actually, hang on. Let me, let me unpack the statement that you just made.
25:18SPEAKERCause my understanding was that was them rolling up what every client at one time could expect
25:22SPEAKERto see in aggregate. Are you saying that one client could see that if, is it even possible
25:27SPEAKERfor one client to connect all the bands at the same time?
25:28SPEAKERNot really, no.
25:29SPEAKERYeah. Like, okay.
25:31SPEAKERLike it seemed like the, it seems like the kind of thing that if you really rigged up
25:34SPEAKERa specific test to do, like, to do like the equivalent of like wifi overclocking,
25:38SPEAKERyes, you could probably get there.
25:41SPEAKERPut a Peltier unit on your access point.
25:43SPEAKERYeah. But, but the reality is that you're going to see between 1.45 gigabits per
25:48SPEAKERsecond and 2.9 gigabits per second per stream.
25:50SPEAKERYeah. I mean, that's still pretty good. That's still exceeding. I get the sense
25:54SPEAKERthat gigabit connections are really starting to proliferate finally out there, just looking at
25:59SPEAKERdiscords and forums and stuff. It seems like more and more people have gigabit
26:03SPEAKERWAN internet connection, but so, so you're at least exceeding that.
26:06SPEAKERThe pressure from fiber and Comcast is finally doing relatively reasonably priced gigabit now.
26:14SPEAKERThe 1.4 gigabits to 2.9 gigabits per stream with a maximum of eight streams on devices
26:21SPEAKERthat are shipping now and a theoretical maximum of 16 in the future. And that means that the
26:27SPEAKERmaximum speed on the AP is around 23 gigabits per second. So, so yeah, like you're going
26:32SPEAKERto get better performance than your gigabit internet will provide. The latency is still
26:37SPEAKERa question. There's not been a ton of latency testing from the reviews that I've seen of the
26:40SPEAKERearly hardware or the hardware that's out now. It's not even that early anymore. But you think
26:46SPEAKERabout it, I think about the Whiskey Media office where we were sitting in a basement and we had a
26:52SPEAKERbunch of laptops on wifi. And anytime somebody did some edit on a laptop, it shut down the whole
26:59SPEAKERwifi for the office. And this, we would have roughly equivalent to the wired ethernet speeds
27:07SPEAKERwith multiple people connecting at the same time, which is, which is really good. Like at this point,
27:11SPEAKERthe uplink between the access point and the, and the router becomes the gate, not the wifi,
27:18SPEAKERwhich is nice. Which is what you want. Now I'm sitting here trying to think how many people were
27:22SPEAKERin that basement. And if, if one wifi seven access point could have served for that whole company,
27:26SPEAKERmaybe not quite, but probably pretty close. Well, I think we would have put one on the,
27:30SPEAKERone on the studio end and one on the people end and probably been fine. Yeah. So 400 bucks worth
27:35SPEAKERof hardware and wifi would have been good down there for what? Two dozen people or something.
27:39SPEAKERYeah. It was like 25 people. Yeah. That's, that's pretty good. Like that's,
27:42SPEAKERthe wifi seems like it's getting pretty good. It's been a good decade for wifi. So, so and again,
27:50SPEAKERreminder shared bandwidth across the whole node for that 23 gigabits numbers. That means everybody
27:54SPEAKERconnecting to the node is sharing that 23 gigabits and, and, and which is, which is fine, right?
28:01SPEAKERYeah. How did they do this? They're putting more data into each wavelength, into each bit of the
28:09SPEAKERbit of spectrum than they did before by using it's called 4096 QAM Q A M 12 bits per symbol per OFDM
28:20SPEAKERsubcarrier. And then they also increased the channels to make them two times as wide as the
28:25SPEAKER660 max. So the 60 channels were 160 megahertz wide maximum. They would range between 20 megahertz,
28:33SPEAKERwhich is like the old school 802.11 B original spec with, for a channel. And then they double
28:41SPEAKERmultiple times until they get to a 320, 160 rather than. I think my, my wifi five access
28:48SPEAKERpoint tops out at 80 megahertz, for example, that seems right. This is, this is a banana
28:52SPEAKERbanana question, but I've had this thought as I was reading through these notes as well.
28:57SPEAKERI also was going to come in here and say, Hey, they, they, they widened the channel with,
29:01SPEAKERdid they actually narrow the channel with because 320 megahertz is a narrower, isn't that, isn't
29:06SPEAKERthat a narrower wavelength because it is oscillating more frequently. No, no. Cause it's,
29:10SPEAKERit's the slice of spectrum. So it's centered on a, on a frequency and it's 300, it's 160 megahertz
29:17SPEAKERon either side of whatever this frequency that you select is for your channel. Okay. I'm sure,
29:21SPEAKERI'm sure some radio engineer is yelling right now. I apologize for my, so if you think about
29:27SPEAKERthe entire spectrum of the 2.4 gigahertz band as a series of like 20 channels, right. Each channel
29:33SPEAKERis 20 megahertz wide. What they're doing is saying, instead of taking one 20 hertz megahertz
29:38SPEAKERchannel with we're taking 16 megahertz with, right. That makes sense because you can't like,
29:44SPEAKERyou've only got so much spectrum to work with, right? So you can't, you can't just arbitrarily
29:49SPEAKERchange the frequency that, that much. So the good news is that just like the six and 60 devices,
29:55SPEAKERthe seven stuff is better at sharing with people around you. So if you're in a high congestion area,
30:00SPEAKERif you live in an apartment in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or someplace where
30:03SPEAKERthere's a lot where you can, where you turn on your phone and you see 35 different access points,
30:08SPEAKERyou might actually see a measurable benefit going from a five to a six or a seven at this point on
30:13SPEAKERthe, on the wifi stuff, just because they're, they're much, much better at dealing with
30:16SPEAKERcongestion now than they were before. That's huge for me that we'll, maybe we'll get to this later.
30:20SPEAKERI've been waffling on whether it's time for new access point. And that is, that is probably the
30:23SPEAKERbiggest problem in this apartment is that depending on, depending on how many, how many
30:28SPEAKERaccess points or how many SSIDs my site survey will show, we can pretty much always max it out.
30:33SPEAKERIf it's a hundred, I want to say, I want to say a previous router I had would show 200, the top 200
30:39SPEAKERthat it found and it found 200 networks. I mean, it's, it's absurd the congestion in a dense urban
30:45SPEAKERarea. So the, and you're not even in like a super dense area. You're in a, you're in a medium dense,
30:50SPEAKERhigh medium density, I would say. Like this is, this is like kind of quieter outlying suburban,
30:56SPEAKERnot suburban it's in the city, but this is more residential. Like it's like three story
31:00SPEAKERapartments, not, not 20 story apartments, three to four story buildings around here. Not, not like,
31:05SPEAKERlike true urban, you know, high rise type stuff. So, so the, the other thing you get access to is
31:11SPEAKERyou get that six gigahertz band in the US at least. So you can tap into an area, a part of
31:16SPEAKERspectrum that nobody else is using for all intents and purposes, which is, which is good. You you do
31:24SPEAKERneed as always, if you want to take advantage of the big giant speeds, you got to have the upstream
31:32SPEAKERor you got to have something internal on your LAN that you're, that can deliver faster than gigabit,
31:37SPEAKERright? Like if you don't have multi gigabit from your router to your switches, to your access point,
31:44SPEAKERyou're going to be capped out by the, by the speed of your gigabit ethernet uplink between the access
31:49SPEAKERpoint and the internet. Right. Unless you have, unless you have some, again, some niche use case
31:53SPEAKERwhere just internally on your land, you need to move big files or a lot of data around over wifi.
31:58SPEAKERBut if that's you, you already know what you need. Don't, don't put servers on wifi. Okay. Yes. Might
32:04SPEAKERseem like you're going to, you're looking at this and you're like, man, I'd have to replicate all my
32:07SPEAKERswitches or I could just get a wifi card for my server. Don't put the server on wifi.
32:11SPEAKERNope. But you know, like, I mean, that's me occasionally. Like sometimes I'll,
32:14SPEAKERsometimes it'll be like five or six and I'm like, you know, I've still got to finish dealing with
32:18SPEAKERthis video podcast. I don't feel like sitting at this desk anymore. I'm going to go sit on the
32:21SPEAKERcouch. That's fine. And then I'm, you know, then there's a 10 gigabit or 10, sorry, like 10 gigabyte
32:26SPEAKERfile has happened last week. Like there's suddenly there's a 10 gigabyte file on my NAS. I need to
32:31SPEAKERpull onto the laptop to finish doing whatever to it before I upload it to YouTube. You know,
32:35SPEAKERso there are, there are cases where even if your internet is not this fast internally,
32:39SPEAKERyou might still benefit. But again, but again, again, you know, you know, if you need that
32:43SPEAKERalready. Yeah. So the other, there's another, a couple other new features that are kind of
32:47SPEAKERinteresting in wifi, wifi seven. They have this thing called multi-link operation,
32:52SPEAKERwhich is an SSID level setting. It lets you bind. It's an optional feature. It lets clients
32:59SPEAKERaggregate multiple radio bands into a single connection. So your laptop, for example,
33:05SPEAKERcan connect to your S S your, your wifi access point on wifi six and six C and prior standards,
33:13SPEAKERyou connect to either the five gigahertz band or the 2.4 gigahertz band or the six gigahertz band,
33:18SPEAKERnot all of them at the same time, this lets you connect multi multiple bands to get
33:23SPEAKERessentially multiple pipes that you can pass data through. It doesn't let you bond those
33:30SPEAKERconnections. So you can't, you don't take your 20 gigabit. I'm making up theoretical numbers.
33:38SPEAKERYou don't take your three gigabit, six gigahertz band and your 2.4 gigabit, five gigahertz band
33:43SPEAKERand make a six gigahertz connection. You get a five gig, a four gigahertz connection,
33:51SPEAKERgigabits connection and a two gigabits. There's too many numbers. This is very tongue twisting.
33:56SPEAKERYeah. The point is they don't add up to make one bigger connection. They make two separate,
34:00SPEAKERsmaller connections. So if you have, so for example, if you're sending and receiving a
34:04SPEAKERfile at the same time, you'll go at the max for one channel on one of those transfers and the
34:09SPEAKERmax for the other channel at the other transfer. Got it. Per connection, I guess like if an
34:14SPEAKERapplication is making a connection that will go over one of those and then the next subsequent
34:18SPEAKERconnection might use the other one. The really nice thing is it means if you saturate one of
34:22SPEAKERyour, if you say saturate your five gigahertz band, you're not going to choke out the rest of
34:28SPEAKERyour wifi and make it so that you can't connect to the internet at all. Right. I'm assuming the
34:33SPEAKERmore of this you do, obviously the less capacity you have for other clients to connect. Yeah. Each
34:38SPEAKERone counts as a, as one of the nodes, one of the streams you can do on the device. So it requires
34:45SPEAKERWA WPA three or WPA two slash three, which is the new kind of hybrid standard. I've never heard of
34:52SPEAKERtwo slash three and that's interesting. Two slash three means it's just, it's just, you can like a
34:57SPEAKERfallback thing. Yeah. Yeah. So you, you, everything has to be encrypted. It's an SSID level setting.
35:06SPEAKERSo that means if you, if you have Brad five and Brad 2.4 as your, as your 2.4 and five
35:17SPEAKERmegahertz spectrums SSIDs, you can't do that anymore. You have to set them up
35:24SPEAKERand have them together. And there's a whole other configuration process for it. Interesting.
35:29SPEAKERI did see in the dongle tech article, he said, I believe he said this was based on hands-on testing
35:34SPEAKERthat every wifi seven access point he's used, the six gigahertz band requires WPA three.
35:40SPEAKERI believe that that is the case. Yes. I don't know if that's part of the spec or if that's
35:43SPEAKERjust what manufacturers are doing, but that really certainly narrows the list of clients that you
35:47SPEAKERcould use with the six gigahertz connection. Less than you'd think. Well, I guess, I guess
35:52SPEAKERactually anything that has support for that probably also supports WPA three at this point.
35:56SPEAKERYeah. Cause WPA was three was ratified in 2018. It was mandated in 2020. So anything
36:01SPEAKERthat's 60 is going to have WPA three. So in order to use the six gigahertz, you have to have 60,
36:07SPEAKERwhich means you have to have WPA three. The, the, the, the improvement in WPA three is basically,
36:12SPEAKERthis is just a more secure version of WPA two, better encryption. Didn't WPA two get compromised
36:17SPEAKERat some point. Yeah. But it's one of those weird ones that you have to have some real specific
36:21SPEAKERstuff to be a problem. It's not, it's not like a drive by hack. It's like somebody has to really
36:26SPEAKERdo some work. It's not like the web vulnerability where you might as well not be using
36:31SPEAKERyeah, no encryption. It's it's one of those ones that's fine for now,
36:35SPEAKERbut we need to move off of WPA two in the longer term. Yes. So yeah. You also have to do the
36:42SPEAKERmulti-bit multi-link stuff. You have to have OS support, which means windows 11, 24 H two.
36:47SPEAKEROh, interesting. And you probably want to set it up as a virtual radio for compatibility reasons,
36:53SPEAKERbecause it will limit you. Let's see devices that are not encrypted or do not support WPA three or
36:59SPEAKERthe two slash three won't be able to connect to that SSID. So that means your N and AC and all
37:05SPEAKERthat devices will be out of luck. Right. That makes sense. I might as well answer the question
37:09SPEAKERI wrote in the notes here, although we discussed it beforehand and I know the answer. I asked if
37:13SPEAKERthis multi-link operation has anything to do with MIMO multi, which is what multi-in multi-out?
37:18SPEAKERMultiple ins, multiple outs is what I always remember. I think that's not, there's a technical,
37:22SPEAKERthe the answer is no. MIMO is inside Spectrums. So MIMO, the idea on MIMO is that
37:29SPEAKERthe radios take advantage of like radio reflective surfaces inside the environment to make multiple
37:35SPEAKERvirtual paths through the, through the network to get multiple, multiple signals and channels sent
37:41SPEAKERstream sent inside each inside each wifi channel. So that's the MIMO is inside a channel. This is
37:50SPEAKERbinding multiple Spectrums together. Yeah. Yeah. I did think it was worth pointing that out because
37:54SPEAKERyou still see that on specs. Like I was, I did a little looking around at wifi seven access points,
37:59SPEAKERand you still see them referred to as the way that's denoted. And you've probably seen this.
38:02SPEAKERIf you look at wifi specs is like two by two, three by three, four by four is how it's
38:07SPEAKERdelineated. So that's how many radios are inside. Yeah. So the short version there is big. And I
38:12SPEAKERwondered about this because there are some like four by four wifi seven access points out there,
38:16SPEAKERbut they're very expensive. And I was like, am I, am I blowing it by only getting one that does two
38:20SPEAKERby two, but it sounds like basically every client on the market for wifi seven only does two by two
38:25SPEAKERat this point, because they just, because the inherent bandwidth is so much higher,
38:29SPEAKERthey don't need it anymore. Like they don't need to double and triple up on that stuff anymore.
38:33SPEAKERYeah. The, the benefit of having bit more radios is that you can have more clients
38:37SPEAKERconnected at the same time. Right. And there's less time slicing. Right. So the upshot is if you,
38:43SPEAKERif you see two by two on your wifi seven hardware that you're looking at, that should be just fine.
38:46SPEAKERIt's not like it was in the past where you might've wanted higher. Well, and the other thing is as
38:51SPEAKERtime goes on, usually they launch with the min spec stuff. So you'll see two by twos in the early
38:57SPEAKERdays. And as time goes on, we'll see more radios and, and, you know, it'll more stream capability,
39:04SPEAKERall that stuff will come in over time. Okay. So when to upgrade? Probably not yet. Like I said,
39:12SPEAKERthere's some specialized cases. If you're running a desktop PC, you're playing games on wifi,
39:16SPEAKERstuff like that. Maybe think about it. But like, if you're playing games on a console,
39:20SPEAKERon a PlayStation or Xbox, they're not wifi seven. So you're not going to see the benefits of the,
39:24SPEAKERof the eight or two 11 Q latency stuff, the time sensitive networking integration.
39:31SPEAKERSo, you know, you'll have to put either some sort of wifi seven end point and then plug those in
39:36SPEAKERvia ethernet or yeah, probably, probably PC gamers, people who do PC stuff and are sensitive to
39:44SPEAKERlatency. Yeah. But I mean, you know, the standing advice always is for games run a hard line if you
39:51SPEAKERcan get wires, always better do what you need to do to get an ethernet cable to that console
39:57SPEAKERor that PC. If you absolutely. And I will be interested. We are, you know, we're basically
40:02SPEAKERtwo new consoles are imminent. That's true. If rumors are to be believed, the PS five pro is
40:08SPEAKERrumored to be announced like within the next week or two, and then the switch to may get unveiled
40:13SPEAKERthis year or early. Now you'll add latest. It'll be early next year when the switch to is unveiled.
40:17SPEAKERSo I will be very curious to see what what wifi standard those both support, particularly the
40:22SPEAKERswitch, although Nintendo is so conservative about adopting new standards. I would be like,
40:27SPEAKERI would kind of be shocked if it even does 60. I, I it wouldn't surprise me if it does 60. So it
40:32SPEAKERdoes. So it does WPA three. Sure. Yeah. Well, you say that, but actually when I mentioned web
40:38SPEAKERearlier being horribly insecure, like that was the classic example. I forget. Was it the original?
40:44SPEAKERRight. It was weapon only, which was, and granted not moving a lot of sensitive data on your,
40:49SPEAKERon your DS, to be fair, but it meant you had to have your access point open, but yes,
40:54SPEAKERyou have to have weapon enabled, which is not great. So Nintendo kind of behind the times on
40:58SPEAKERstuff. So let's see, this is the time to talk about upgrading routers versus adding an access
41:04SPEAKERpoint with the new spec. If you, if you have a big, expensive consumer router, like gigabit routers
41:10SPEAKERhave gotten kind of expensive in the last few years or three, four or $500 in some cases,
41:15SPEAKERif you need to upgrade wifi, if you say you're in a heavily congested environment, you want to,
41:20SPEAKERyou want to move to wifi seven, it's going to be much cheaper to just buy an access point,
41:25SPEAKERdisable the wifi on your router and plug that access point into one of the ethernet ports on
41:30SPEAKERthe back of your, on the back of your existing router. Yeah. I don't want to blow our own horn
41:34SPEAKERor anything, but I actually feel like we have like backed into some, having given some very
41:38SPEAKERgood advice over the last couple of years, but not for the reasons I originally intended. Like we've,
41:42SPEAKERwe've been kind of trumpeting the, Hey, separate your router and your wifi thing for a while.
41:48SPEAKERYeah. There's real benefits to it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like partially that was just
41:51SPEAKERcause it's cool and it's fun to demonstrate different stuff and gives you more flexibility.
41:55SPEAKERBut like, here we are now, like you said, routers kind of just do their thing, you know,
41:59SPEAKERlike unless you get a much faster internet connection where you need a new router,
42:03SPEAKERif you have a good router that's working and doing what it's supposed to do, you can kind of just let
42:06SPEAKERit go. And like you said, now that it's getting so expensive to replace a router, that's a really
42:12SPEAKERbad reason. Just, just upgrading your wifi is a really bad reason to replace the entire router
42:17SPEAKERsetup. Yeah. When, when, like you said, just an access point is significantly cheaper now.
42:23SPEAKERWell, the other benefit I like, I started doing standalone access points because my
42:26SPEAKERrouters in the garage on the far, far side of my house from where the humans are and having
42:31SPEAKERthe access point in the center of the house with humans actually, you know, they like want to
42:36SPEAKERconnect to the network turned out to be really convenient compared to having it in the opposite
42:40SPEAKERedge of the yard. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, we've, we've talked about power over ethernet
42:44SPEAKERbefore, but if you've got, if you've got that set up, you can just run the ethernet cable to
42:48SPEAKERthe access point. You don't need to provide power to it, which is great if you put it on the ceiling
42:52SPEAKERor in some other out of the way place without an outlet. And you can get, like, I was looking
42:57SPEAKERaround at this, PoE injectors have become quite cheap and presumably reliable. Yeah. So if you
43:03SPEAKERdon't have a switch that does power ethernet, you can, you can plug one of these into the wall and
43:07SPEAKERthen put the ethernet cable in one end and out the other. That's exactly what it is. It's a tiny
43:11SPEAKERlittle box that just does that. So you can just put that right next to your router and run just
43:15SPEAKERthe ethernet cable to to your access point, even if you don't have a, like a fancy PoE switch already.
43:20SPEAKERYeah. It's it's it's an interesting, it's an interesting place to be. And the benefit is that
43:28SPEAKERinstead of spending three or $400 and having to reset up a whole new router, you just disable the
43:32SPEAKERwifi and you plug in this 180, $200 box basically to your network. Ideally, I'm going to say a lot
43:39SPEAKERof the wifi seven access points out there are still three, $400. You're starting to see cheaper
43:45SPEAKERones, like the Ubiquiti and Xizel, is that how we're saying it? Xizel is how you say that. Yeah.
43:50SPEAKERBut I've always said Xizel anyway. Like, like you're starting to see some from some manufacturers
43:54SPEAKERlike that that are under $200 now. Yeah. So we don't actually review that stuff, but the,
43:59SPEAKERthe kind of general, like, if you are interested in access points and want to know where to start,
44:05SPEAKERTP-Link makes the Omada series and Genius does stuff, Aruba Instant On.
44:09SPEAKERYeah. Like I literally just wrote down every one I can think of here.
44:12SPEAKEREero is mesh. No, they do access points now.
44:16SPEAKERSo it's like Eero, Netgears, Xizel, Asus is doing access points.
44:21SPEAKERI don't like Eero because they're Amazon. Yeah, that's fine. That's fair. I fully understand
44:26SPEAKERthat. But yeah, like when I, when I got my Ubiquiti access point in 2018, like that was
44:30SPEAKERthe kind of only one I knew of that was cheap enough in the consumer prosumer space to get at
44:36SPEAKERhome, but also looked like the cool things we had at work, you know, the Cisco, the white Cisco boxes
44:40SPEAKERon the, on the ceiling at work, you know, I was like, Oh man, I'm, I'm fancy in enterprise now,
44:44SPEAKERbut like, there's just been this explosion in access points since then, like this is what,
44:49SPEAKERseven or eight companies here that are all putting out similar dedicated wifi nodes now.
44:54SPEAKERWell, people's demands for home wifi have gotten, you know, 15 years ago, if the far bathroom in
45:02SPEAKERyour house didn't have wifi, nobody complained. And now if you're sitting in the tub and you don't
45:06SPEAKERhave wifi, people get upset. So it's like the expectations are higher and the market has filled
45:12SPEAKERthat demand as society has become less and less able to put their phones down. I don't know what
45:17SPEAKERyou're talking about, man. I'd love to hear from people on the discord. Hopefully we'll see some
45:23SPEAKERdiscussion of this in this week's episode thread about what people like in access points these days.
45:29SPEAKERWe have a lot of people who work professionally in IT spaces doing this kind of work. And I'd
45:34SPEAKERbe curious to hear what they like. Yeah. I know, I know the Aruba instant on stuff is pretty popular
45:38SPEAKERon the discord and the Aruba I think is big in the enterprise space. And I think that might,
45:42SPEAKERthat's their, that's their maybe more consumer facing line. Like you said, a lot of people
45:46SPEAKERlike the TP Link Amada stuff, like Ubiquiti still does its thing. Although I'm personally,
45:51SPEAKERwe'll get into this in a minute. I'm kind of looking to move away from Ubiquiti stuff,
45:55SPEAKERbut but I'm, I'm curious what people like there. And one thing I want to ask about real quick,
46:00SPEAKERI was looking at a, at a Zizel access point, it's 180 bucks, 557. Something about it that
46:06SPEAKERI really liked is that the management interface for it, the web UI just runs on the access point,
46:10SPEAKERno external controller software required. Like they do have an optional cloud management
46:15SPEAKERinterface, but that's completely optional. You can just plug it into your, your, your network
46:20SPEAKERand navigate to the IP of the thing and just administrate it in a webpage and be done.
46:24SPEAKERYeah. That's one of the differences between the consumer stuff and the pro hardware, right? Is
46:28SPEAKERthat typically for the pro hardware, you have to have a management console running someplace else.
46:32SPEAKERAnd it can be just on your windows PC, but right. But it's, it's another piece of software you have
46:38SPEAKERto run someplace else. It's kind of a pain, but that's also been the case for like the,
46:41SPEAKERthe TP Link Amada, like I believe the Aruba stuff, like a lot of these, a lot of these still have
46:45SPEAKERthat requirement. I would just for simplicity sake, I would really love to see more stuff
46:49SPEAKERgoing that direction of just like, Hey, you can do the basic SSID administration on the device and
46:54SPEAKERjust be done with it and not have to think about getting a cloud key or running a thing on a
46:58SPEAKERraspberry PI or a computer. I'm I'm generally so I run the big hardware here. I run the management
47:05SPEAKERconsole in a Docker image on a, on my NAS. I generally, I, that is having the, the software
47:13SPEAKERrun locally would be nice. I I'm generally skeptical of cloud configuration for this kind
47:19SPEAKERof stuff. Cause then if your network's down, if, if the, if the company goes out of business,
47:22SPEAKERwhatever you have a brick piece of hardware probably, which feels bad.
47:26SPEAKERYes. I also just, just for philosophical reasons, I want nothing to do with external hooks into my
47:31SPEAKERnetworking equipment from outside my house that are not controlled by me.
47:34SPEAKEROh, it's probably fine. What's the worst that could happen?
47:36SPEAKERWhat could go wrong? authentication credentials have never gotten breached and
47:42SPEAKERsprayed all over the internet before.
47:44SPEAKERSo the one thing I will say is the ubiquity stuff, if you run it locally,
47:47SPEAKERthere's no requirement for cloud connection or anything like that.
47:51SPEAKERI think that's still the case for most everybody. I'm pretty sure.
47:54SPEAKERBut Eero, I think you have to be connected. You have to have an internet connection.
47:58SPEAKERCause that was always kind of their thing is like, just connect to the internet. We'll do it for you.
48:01SPEAKERSure. I think, I think it's worth talking about how this stuff interacts with older devices more.
48:09SPEAKERRight. Cause like buying a wifi seven access point, isn't going to make your old six and
48:14SPEAKER60 and five devices any faster or better or more reliable or have better range or any of that stuff
48:19SPEAKERoutside of the inherent radio environment changes that happen when you change access points.
48:24SPEAKERLike you're in fact, there may be a detriment cause older devices,
48:31SPEAKERbecause there's wifi encryption requirements for these new seven access points, you may not have
48:38SPEAKERthe ability to connect older devices at all. Like wifi five, eight or 11 AC and some four devices
48:44SPEAKERwon't be able to connect. Sorry. Some five devices and all four devices won't be able to connect at
48:49SPEAKERall. Which again, four is in for people who remember those standards five, five is AC,
48:54SPEAKERbut it's I think it's like newer AC devices should be fine on seven, right?
48:58SPEAKERNewer AC devices or AC devices have been updated. Should be like AC, AC should be hardware able to,
49:04SPEAKERto connect whether it has the most recent version of the spec that's required is up in the air to
49:10SPEAKERgive context. The last eight or two 11 and iPhone was the iPhone five. So we're talking pretty old
49:16SPEAKERhardware at this point. Yeah. But you know, the upshot is though, if you're using older devices,
49:21SPEAKERnot even that old, but just AC range, you know, from maybe six, five, six years ago,
49:28SPEAKERyou probably don't want to run out and get us a wifi seven router or access point immediately.
49:33SPEAKERI feel like AC stuff was the, was the first of the like N was the first one that was pretty good.
49:39SPEAKERAnd AC was when it became, Oh, this is fine. This is everybody can use this. This is reliable. It's
49:45SPEAKERgood. They're not going to problems kind of don't think about it anymore, which was what I have. I
49:49SPEAKERstill have AC, although we'll talk about my access point in a minute. Yeah, let's, I think actually,
49:54SPEAKERI think that's a good place. So if you have questions about this stuff we have,
49:57SPEAKERwe'll do questions in a couple of weeks, send them to techbot at content.town.
50:01SPEAKERWe'll take the best ones and, and and, and answer them at the end of the month. But it's, it's,
50:07SPEAKERthis seems like a pretty good upgrade. Like I think my general feeling on wifi upgrades is that
50:13SPEAKERyou, you, you know, go two, three generations until stuff stops working or until you have a
50:21SPEAKERspecific need. Right. Cause like, mainly because I don't want to have to reconfigure everything.
50:26SPEAKERLike it's a pain in the butt to set up network gear. And I like, like, it's just,
50:31SPEAKERit's there on the wall and does its thing. And I don't have to think about it. And that feels
50:33SPEAKERreally nice. So can I ask you, and this is just asking what you do, because I feel like this,
50:38SPEAKERI feel like the conventional wisdom on this changes every six months. This is like the, is
50:43SPEAKERour art for our artificial sweeteners bad for you or not? Do you do all of your bands under one SSID
50:50SPEAKERor do you do a separate SSID for each band? And also that question now I think probably is going
50:55SPEAKERto change again with seven because of the changes there. That's a good question. I actually, I, I
51:00SPEAKERhonestly don't remember. Okay. I still am on separate SSIDs. I've got one for 2.4 gigahertz
51:05SPEAKERand one for five, but I feel like last time this came up on the discord, people were starting to
51:10SPEAKERwe're of the mind that a single SSID for everything is better or maybe that might've been because like
51:14SPEAKERboth wifi access points slash routers and also clients are just getting better at auto, auto
51:20SPEAKERnegotiating that stuff. And you don't need to manually separate it and separate it out like
51:24SPEAKERthat anymore. I think that's the case. I think that's the case. I'm looking at my, I'm looking
51:33SPEAKERfor my login for my ubiquity. I'm just going to do it on the phone. What do I do?
51:40SPEAKEROh, I don't even remember how to set this up, Brad.
51:44SPEAKERWe can move on. What's maybe we can address that on the Q and A.
51:47SPEAKERAh, yeah. So I keep, I, I keep everything on one, on one SSID now. I used to do one that was just
51:54SPEAKERthe default and then one that was a 5,000 for the five gigahertz band. And I changed,
52:00SPEAKERdon't remember why other than I think it's, I think it was, if I remember right, I was having
52:07SPEAKERphones drop when they couldn't, when they were on the, the iPhone used to have specific problems
52:12SPEAKERswitching between different access points. It would, it would stick on the access point. You
52:16SPEAKERset it to, and then it wouldn't drop down to the 2.4 gigahertz one when it got out of range of the
52:20SPEAKERfive gigahertz one. And as a result, I just set everything to be the same SSID because for
52:26SPEAKERusability. And I've, I've had the inverse happen where it would either, either because I manually
52:31SPEAKERsigned it or because it dropped down and didn't, and did not go back up. Like it, it sat on the
52:35SPEAKER2.4 for a long time when the five was perfectly available, but it never moved back over. So maybe,
52:40SPEAKERmaybe it is time to go back to, to single SSID. I think it tended to stick on whichever one you
52:45SPEAKERmanually set it to last, like that it took that as an express preference. Yes. So, yeah, I, I my
52:52SPEAKERgeneral feeling on network stuff is I think a little different than yours. I generally try to
52:56SPEAKERset it up and then never think about it again. Yeah. Well, I mean, I haven't touched my stuff
53:00SPEAKERin like two or three years at this point. It's, it's just the one thing I will say is having
53:05SPEAKERthe management console, like the, the prosumer tools is really, really nice when you have like
53:12SPEAKERa device that drops a lot. Cause it lets you see exactly what time the device dropped and
53:17SPEAKERyou can, you can do some science to figure out what what's actually causing the problem.
53:21SPEAKERFor example, I have a light that's a wifi connected like studio light that just,
53:27SPEAKERit just doesn't stay connected. And what I called the vendor and was like, Hey, your,
53:31SPEAKERyour wifi is dropping on this. You're like, well, how do you know that your wifi is dropping?
53:33SPEAKERIt's like, here's a log. They were like, we'll send you a new one. Thank you. Try about that.
53:38SPEAKERYeah. I think I saw, I saw somewhere wifi seven supports more SSIDs at one time.
53:44SPEAKERI mean, I think it's just, I don't know if that's a part of the spec or just by virtue of having
53:48SPEAKERmore streams and bandwidth and stuff like that. Maybe that's what it is. I think, I think if and
53:54SPEAKERwhen, and actually I'll, I'll get into this now as we wrap up here, like if and when I buy a new
53:58SPEAKERaccess point, I think I'm finally going to make the move and put all the internet of shit stuff
54:03SPEAKERon its own wifi network. Wow. That's a bold move. Well, so it's, I haven't done that because I
54:11SPEAKERguess I could do that, but I don't want to have, I want the phone to be able to control that stuff.
54:16SPEAKERWell, it should, it should still be possible, right? I don't know. Set up, set up some routing
54:21SPEAKERrules between the VLANs. Maybe that is, I mean, this, what we're describing here is exactly why
54:27SPEAKERI've never done this. It seems like kind of a headache to, if you're not, if you're on a network
54:30SPEAKERprofessional to learn and understand how to do all this stuff. Yeah. It's, it's the kind of thing
54:35SPEAKERthat like, well, I mean, so here's the problem. I'm going to run an IP addresses if I get too
54:39SPEAKERmany more light bulbs. Wow. That's a lot of light bulbs. Well, no, it's, I have three people and
54:44SPEAKEReverybody has multiple devices and like the, the, everything is connected to the internet.
54:49SPEAKERIt turns out now. Yeah. But in a, you know, what is it? An eight bit, eight bit subnet mask. So
54:54SPEAKERthat's like what, 255 addresses, but I block off the first like 40 or 50 for statics. Just,
55:00SPEAKERyou know, just in case. Yeah, sure. I don't really use those very much, but I I've been doing it for
55:05SPEAKERlong enough now that I can't remember what I have set up as static IP addresses in that, in that
55:08SPEAKERlow range. So yeah, at some point I'm going to have to declare network bankruptcy and just start
55:14SPEAKERover. I think, but that's a grim day. We'll just slap a bigger subnet mask on there. I could. Yeah.
55:22SPEAKERGo to IPV six. Nope, Nope. Not, not inside the land. No, thank you. That's madness. I would,
55:28SPEAKERI think there might be one or two people on the discord who do full IPV six on their entire land,
55:32SPEAKERwhich every time I try to mess up the pie hole. So I stopped. I could believe that. All right.
55:38SPEAKERReal quick. I'll just talk about, I did talk about this on the discord. I posted a video of it
55:42SPEAKERbecause it was freaking me out. My haunted access point, which is a ubiquity AC access point. It's
55:47SPEAKERa UP. Let's see. It's a UAP AC LR. People care about the model number. Anyway, it's been on the
55:54SPEAKERceiling for the last couple of years. We heard this very strange noise the other day. That's
55:59SPEAKERweird. Long story short, we were like creeping up and down the hall going, where is that noise coming
56:03SPEAKERfrom? And we thought it was like maybe the pipes, like some, some, just something knocking somebody
56:08SPEAKERrunning water upstairs or something turned out to be the access point. So like, what was the
56:13SPEAKERnoise? It was, it was both, it was both a rhythmic, like ticking kind of sound and also like a
56:17SPEAKERscratchy electronic sound and behind it. And I posted a video on the discord saying like, Hey,
56:23SPEAKERany ideas like access points, aren't supposed to make noise. I don't think there's nothing moving
56:26SPEAKERin there. And there's no fan or anything, right? No, definitely not. Absolutely not. The thing is
56:32SPEAKERthough, so like that morning I had gotten up and all of my airplane devices on my network had
56:36SPEAKERvanished. Like, you know, you go to your iPhone and like go to AirPlay. How many AirPlay devices
56:41SPEAKERdo you have? I've got a Sonos speaker and my receiver on my AV receiver has AirPlay support and
56:48SPEAKERthe Roku in the living room. So all of those will show up as AirPlay devices. If you go into,
56:53SPEAKERyou know, just go into the iPhone settings and tell it to AirPlay to something. None of those
56:57SPEAKERwere showing up anymore. And I was like, what, this has worked for years. What is happening later
57:01SPEAKERin the day after we discovered the noise coming from the access point, like all of the network,
57:05SPEAKERall the wifi throughput just started going to shit. Like things were just getting very slow.
57:09SPEAKERWeird.
57:10SPEAKERAnd so that's when I started researching wifi seven access points that afternoon.
57:14SPEAKERAre you doing PoE?
57:15SPEAKERYes, it is PoE. And I did wonder if it was the injector, but I only have one injector and one
57:19SPEAKERaccess point. So I couldn't AB test anything. Anyway, all of that is to say, I was like, well,
57:24SPEAKERI guess I'm buying a new access point and went to bed, got up the next morning,
57:27SPEAKERthe noise had stopped and everything was working fine again. So anybody listening has any thoughts
57:33SPEAKERon that? I'd love to hear what might be going on, but it's been fine since that was like five days
57:38SPEAKERago. So the first thing I wonder is I wonder if it's because the injector suddenly started
57:44SPEAKERgiving more or less power. Yeah. Yeah. I did wonder if it was something on the injector end.
57:50SPEAKERYeah. That's weird.
57:53SPEAKERThe access point, the injector came with it. They're both about six years old. So it's not
57:56SPEAKERlike they're brand new or anything, but it did. It has put me in the spot though of like
58:01SPEAKER60 is quite mature. Seven is still seven's fine. I mean, it's fine, but it's like, in terms of,
58:07SPEAKERlike we said, in terms of affordability and like, you know, the full feature set being supported,
58:11SPEAKERlike the devices are still pretty new. So like, I don't think I'm gonna have to buy anything now
58:15SPEAKERif this thing continues not freaking out, but, but it did leave me wondering, like, should I just get
58:20SPEAKERa, like a, a nice fully featured, relatively inexpensive 60 access point, or try to buy into
58:25SPEAKERseven, which is still like very much somewhat bleeding edge, you know? So I think I would
58:31SPEAKERconsider since it's like, since the spec is ratified and you're shipping final hardware now,
58:36SPEAKERlike I would consider this, like, I wouldn't buy old hardware at this point because it lasts a long,
58:42SPEAKERlong time. Yes. Like I just said, this access point is six years old. Like I probably am not
58:48SPEAKERgoing to want to have 60, six years from now. So you're not wrong, but, but it does seem like
58:53SPEAKERthe stuff will rapidly get cheaper and better. I think on the standalone AP on the, on the routers,
59:00SPEAKERit'll definitely get cheaper and better on the standalone APs. I feel like we're, we're into the,
59:05SPEAKERlike the okay part of the curve. It's still going to be more expensive than it will be in a year,
59:08SPEAKERbut it's not, it's not going to get a lot cheaper. I don't think.
59:12SPEAKERYeah. It does seem like we're, we're moving into a good place though. Like the, the, the summary in
59:16SPEAKERthe Stongnose tech article sounds really positive. Wi-Fi seven is the fastest adopted standard among
59:21SPEAKERall Wi-Fi revisions. The new standard combines the fragmentations in Wi-Fi six and six E to be the
59:28SPEAKERfirst that supports all three bands and forms a uniform wireless approach, et cetera, et cetera.
59:33SPEAKERLike, it sounds like, it sounds like things have been a bit all over the place in the Wi-Fi world.
59:36SPEAKERAnd this is like, this is the one. I think, I think DONG also makes money on affiliate
59:41SPEAKERsales. It's probably a little more enthusiastic about selling AP seven, eight routers and access
59:45SPEAKERpoints than, than a lot of people are. That's, that's fair. But, but, you know, like we said,
59:49SPEAKERlike six, six gear hurts only came about halfway through the Wi-Fi six generation, for example.
59:53SPEAKERThat's true. Like having something that it seems like it's just kind of like
59:56SPEAKERbringing everything together seems, seems positive.
59:59SPEAKERThat six gigahertz really, really tied the spectrum together, man. Yeah. I think, I think,
1:00:04SPEAKERso I guess that's kind of places I need to leave it off. You should get a Wi-Fi seven access point.
1:00:09SPEAKERJust, you know, you should be able to plug the old one, pull the plug on the old one,
1:00:11SPEAKERput a new one in, drop the same profile over on and call it a day, move on. Or you could ditch
1:00:18SPEAKERthe ubiquity and get something else. There's a lot of, a lot more choices in the market now.
1:00:23SPEAKERPlease post your Wi-Fi questions either in the question seeking answers channel in the discord
1:00:26SPEAKERor send them to tech pod at content.town. And we've reached the part of the show where I
1:00:31SPEAKERremind everyone that this is a listener supported podcast and that we wouldn't be here without you,
1:00:36SPEAKERthe listeners. We would not. So thank you. Thank you listeners for supporting us. Thank you. If you
1:00:42SPEAKERwant to find out how you can support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod. We, we have
1:00:49SPEAKERa couple of thousand really highly engaged people in the discord. It's a wonderful,
1:00:56SPEAKERwonderful place to hang out and talk tech and other stuff. I've been kind of been,
1:01:02SPEAKERI've been taking the temperature cause we're, we got an iPhone event I think next week.
1:01:06SPEAKERAnd the Apple, the Apple thread people, people are talking, people are thinking, so it's,
1:01:13SPEAKERit's phone season. Yeah. They just do phones at that event, right?
1:01:17SPEAKERIt'll be just phones probably. Watches are also usually late.
1:01:23SPEAKERThey'll just watch this next month. Probably watches are a separate event, right?
1:01:26SPEAKERYeah. Usually cause yeah, it's funny. My watch is now reaching the the, Hey man,
1:01:32SPEAKERyou got maybe one more year of updates. I put the betas on my phone and watch the other day.
1:01:36SPEAKEROh, living on the edge. Which watch do you have?
1:01:39SPEAKERSeven. Seven. Okay.
1:01:41SPEAKERI think you have an eight, right? I have an eight. So mine, mine is two years old now. So like I'm,
1:01:45SPEAKERI'm still in the, like it's working fine, but I, but if they, if they announced like dramatic
1:01:49SPEAKERchanges to the wash, I might think about like, I'm still on the, I'm still on the tail end.
1:01:53SPEAKERIf there's enough trade in value on it, that it would kind of be worth it.
1:01:56SPEAKERYeah. See, I'm looking at, should I just put a new battery in this and call it a day?
1:01:59SPEAKERWait, can you do that on a watch? If you have Apple care, you take it into them and they'll
1:02:03SPEAKERput a new one in. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So anyway, you can support the show. We,
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