Follow up on WiFi Class - 🛰️

The concepts we covered reviewed.

Thank you again for attending the Intro to WiFi Fundamentals class! 🚀

It was awesome to see the energy and curiosity you all brought to the session.

As a follow-up, I wanted to walk you through a real-world WiFi analysis to reinforce some key concepts we explored.

During the class, we talked about:

1. WiFi Versioning and Branding:
   We covered how the WiFi Alliance is trying to simplify branding (WiFi 4, 5, 6, 6E) so that even non-technical users (the "muggles" 😉) can better understand capabilities at a glance.
   Of course, for those of us digging deeper, it's essential to understand the underlying technical protocols behind those numbers.

2. MIMO:
   We discussed how end-user devices and Wireless Access Points (WAPs) use multiple antennas to increase speed and reliability.
   In this example, the iPhone operates with a 2x2 MIMO configuration.

3. TX Retries (Transmission Retries):
   Remember: the more retries, the worse the communication quality. It's like saying, "Can you repeat that? I didn’t catch it."
   In this case, the TX Retry Rate was about 16%—not terrible, but something worth monitoring to optimize performance.

4. Signal Strength:
   We explored how signal strength is measured.
   Here, the connection is sitting around -62 dBm, which falls into the "Good" range for WiFi.

5. Visualizing the Data:
   In the graph below:

   • Green dotted line = TX Retries over time.

   • Solid blue line = Signal strength over time.

6. Analytical Observation:
   Notice the timeframe:

   • The connection starts around 11:30 PM and continues steadily into the early morning.

     • My inference? Someone may have played music or ambient sounds to help them sleep.
       (More data would be needed to confirm that — but this is how network behavior can tell a story!)

   • Also, if you look at the description below, which provides a chronological log, it shows it on 5GHz until 3:16 AM, when it switched to 2.4 GHz.

     • My analysis would be that the WAP and iPhone both thought switching to the 2.4 GHz spectrum would improve performance. You can infer that based on the improvement in signal strength. Remember what we discussed about the different frequencies and ranges.

7. RF Bands, Spectrum, Channelization, and Bonding:
   This snapshot also shows the channel width (80 MHz), the frequency band (5 GHz on Channel 153), and how the endpoint and WAP communicate using those slices of the RF spectrum—exactly the kind of clues we discussed in class!

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Want to Dive Deeper?
If you'd like me to set up a follow-up live WiFi troubleshooting lab session to cover deeper topics, feel free to reply in the comments and let me know.

I’d also love it if you would repost this to increase the reach and get the word out.

I'd love to keep building on what we started together. 🚀