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niobetoday at 12:39 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

rayinertoday at 2:05 AM

> 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.

You’re overlooking the spatial dimension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_multiplexing