1
More broadly, why isn't wireless communication stupid fast? Why does Wifi 6 only support gigabit speeds? Given clear line of sight between laptop and receiver, why would there ever be dropped packets or unreliability? If my phone can do gigabit, why can't my laptop which is much bigger do ten gigabit wireless transfer?
This is obviously an incredibly difficult problem, I'm not saying "psh I don't understand what's hard so it must be easy". I want to know what I'm missing: what are the key constraints?
Some guesses:
- Is it purely because bandwidth is limited because of regulatory reasons and you can only pump X GB/s in the 2.4GHz & 5GHz bands and X is kinda small? Edit: so why not just claim significantly more bandwidth, "the people's" wireless transfer speed seems really important?
- Is it because of something like "power consumption scales with speed" so there's a tradeoff?
- Or is it because there's no market for/nobody wants to pay for wireless monitors and laptops that can broadcast out the 20GB/s that's necessary for 4k 60Hz 10-bit 4:4:4. But maybe we could totally do it if people were willing to pay for a laptop/phone that cost $100 more?
- Is it because of backwards compatibility hell and an ineffective bureaucracy managing the Wifi standard?
- Is it because of huge proliferation of devices in the band that behave poorly/uncooperatively which cause traffic (in the same sense there can be traffic on a highway, you lose through put for no good reason).
I'm hoping my guesses have revealed multiple fundamental misunderstandings. Please disabuse me of them.