Avery’s laws of Wi-Fi reliability
This is a good insight, especially the diagram at the top. But the quesion for me is, why is a router broken say 10% of the time?<p>I think the problem is that WiFi is totally undebuggable. When it doesn&#x27;t work, you don&#x27;t see at which stage it doesn&#x27;t work.<p>- Do the frames in the air get corrupted or dropped? What portion of frames makes it through?<p>- I see the SSID, so it can transmit <i>something</i>. Why can&#x27;t I connect and get at least a slow connection?<p>- What is it doing now, sending, waiting for a response, did it negotiate encryption yet?<p>- Is the low-level connection OK, and we have a problem with DHCP? This you can detect, but the OS obscures it from you.<p>- There is no easy way to see signal strength. You get a more or less meaningful number reported from the card, but these nice diagrams showing signal strength over frequency? Mostly fake, this is just the reported signal strength of each channel, smoothed out to look like a continuous scan. If we had a continuous scan, we could see individual sources of interference better.<p>- Why does the connection suddenly drop out or get slow? Is the problem on my side of the router, or on the internet side? Are buffers full&#x2F;empty? Is some object standing in the way, or is is a weather phenomenon? You can ping your router or modem, and some routers have nice tools to let you see graphs of upstream and downstream. But there is no coherent debugging solution.