alt Hacker NewsWell the newer WiFi standards on 6Ghz support a lot more channels. Not a perfect work around by any means but it does significantly reduce congestion.
Replies
Yes, that helps quiet a lot in practice because in most places there's limited "frequency-domain" capacity (i.e. free channels) but plenty of "time-domain" capacity, (i.e. free air-time). So even if you are sharing a channel with 4 other APs and their users, everybody may subjectively feel the network is fast. When chopping up the time domain into nanoseconds there's just a lot of idle time available, even if clients are pulling down files at 600Mbps.
But at a fundamental level, the channel space (~60 across all bands best case) is extremely limited but the potential growth in transmitters is unbounded. It's like a linear hack to an exponential problem. It seems to work at first, but under very high load conditions performance still degrades ever faster until it falls off a cliff. Then there's all sorts of complex dynamic behaviour like the hidden node problem to add to this, but it all boils down to needing air-time and SNR.
Yeah 6Ghz freq doesn't have DFS channels which remove a lot of usable channels for 5Ghz. Unfortunately it'll be a while until most devices support 6Ghz.