This is surprising to me. I'd have guessed it decreases quadratically (i.e. due to the inverse square law), not exponentially.
The paragraph below seems to contain an explanation, but I don't really understand it (namely because I don't know what that percentage "Coverage" column actually means, or what we mean with "the total distance at each QAM step").
But you're technically correct!
But also the sentence uses "signal strength", not "throughput", so that would suggest quadratically. But I guess "signal strength" could be meant colloquially and mean more than just the raw signal power received by the antenna, here.
It's all very fuzzy to me, as it stands.
Finding it increasingly difficult to avoid bottlenecks though. Even with wifi 7 I still get 1.3 on my mac and 0.5 on iphone. More than enough realistically, but upstream internet is 1.7 so tiny bit unfortunately
Think I'm just going to wire the place with 10 gig fiber
>The speed advantages that Access Points have over mesh systems will become much more obvious with Wi-Fi 7.
From what I've read mesh devices generally can detect when they've got wired backhaul so they can stay in mesh mode for the clean handovers while not relying on it for actually moving data
And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not near radar, which intentionally causes you to get kicked off those channels and lose connection entirely.) And even then you might have to mess about a lot with positioning, because of reflections and generally multipath propagation.
I'd say it's not worth the headache. I would love to lay down Ethernet cable, even if it was just cabling only suitable for 1 Gbps (for which there's no good reason to, might as well do 10 Gbps).
But yeah, any mesh system worth its salt figures out the topology and absolutely favors wired links over WiFi for the back haul. Anything else wouldn't make any sense at all, there is basically no situation where you'd prefer an RF channel over a wire, unless the wire is maybe made of wet string.
If one considers that the higher speeds in 802.11ac and 802.11be require 256QAM modulation or better, this is completely expected (assuming 5 GHz band of course, which doesn't go through material very well at all). If you've sen a live eyeball chart of a 256QAM or 1024QAM constellation on test equipment for clear-air microwave link purposes, and seen how quickly it can degrade or get fuzzy if there's anything in the way of the link, it becomes more readily apparent. MCS levels 8 and onwards here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_7
"Clean" eyeball example of 256QAM: https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-is-256-qam-modul...
examples of "fuzzy qam" in 16QAM, same principle applies to denser QAM
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-eye-diagram-Symb...
only 1 transmitter at a time per channel - across all WLANs, yours and your neighbours, with no deterministic way to avoid collisions.
It's a shared medium and it's not even half duplex, unlike the dedicated full duplex you would typically get with an ethernet cable to a switch port.
The fact that Wi-Fi achieves what it does with this limitation, and how it co-ordinates the dance of multiple unknown clients using the same medium - and in the presence of other RF technologies to boot - is indeed an incredible technology story, but this achilles heel is the single most defining thing about Wi-Fi performance.