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0 pointsTeMPOraL3y ago0 comments

> If you're a typical consumer and use default settings, you end up with a mostly working setup that's glitchy but not quite broken enough for anyone to notice because Netflix still works.

But Skype/Teams/Zoom gets visibly glitchy, which may be annoying during remote schooling or work. In the past two years, a sizeable fraction of "typical consumers" started to use real-time applications a lot.

Not to mention, while Netflix "still works", TikTok may not. Or YouTube, if you happen to switch between videos at the moment. Or Facebook or Twitter or anything that relies on the "infinite scroll" dark pattern.

Point being, regular, non-tech users definitely notice. We may think that they don't, but that's because they don't know how to frame what's going on, and have been conditioned to accept that digital technologies are just shitty and glitchy. They think it's their fault, or the problem with "their Internet", or that their computer "has viruses" - and won't tell you until you're close enough with them they feel they can vent to you, or hope you can fix it for them.

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sgtnoodle3y ago

Oh for sure, it's one of the main reasons why people believe wifi sucks.

One of my favorite visualizations is Steam Remote Play's debug graph that shows the latency stack up. Playing a game over wifi on a smart phone, it can make subtle stutters significantly easier to track down. In one case, I was able to attribute a periodic latency spike to the Bluetooth radio.

I've been trying to go pretty deep understanding 802.11 the last couple years, between trying to make my home wifi setup work flawlessly, and using it extensively at work for real-time communication between embedded systems.

At home, I have converged on WRT1x00ac devices (with useless DFS). Three as APs, one as the main router, and a couple more to play around with. They can be had for $30 on ebay, have dual core ARM CPUs, and run OpenWRT well. The only reason they work well for me, though, is because I am an embedded engineer and stubborn. Recently I had to desolder failed TVS diodes from a couple of them...