Late to the party, also not an engineer...but if there's something I have learned during my time with RF elements:

--- 99% of the vendors out there (and most of the ISPs, I dare to say, as well) don't know/care/respect thing as "simple", as physics.

 

--- 2.4GHz was lost because of this, and 5GHz was saved like "5 minutes to midnight" for ISPs, by RF elements Horns (and UltraHorns, UltraDish, Asymmetrical Horns later on), basically, that have inspired ("Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness." Oscar Wilde) some other vendors of the antennas to bring their own version of Horns etc. 

--- sure, lot of improvements in order to fight noise, modulate, virtualise (like Tarana Wireless) were done on the AP (radio) side, but still - physics is physics and it was overlooked and neglected for such a LONG time.

--- ISPs were told by the vendors to basically BLAST through the noise and many more BS like this. So they did as they were told, they were blasting and blasting. Those that were getting smarter, switched to RF elements Horns, stopped blasting, started to being reasonable with topology ("if Your customers are 5 miles away from the AP, You will not blast like crazy for 10 miles, because You will pick up all the noise") and they even started to cooperate - frequency coordination, colocation - with other ISPs on the same towers etc (the same co-ordination needs to be done between the ISP behind the CPEs now - on the Wi-Fi routers of their customers.)

The similar development I was able to see when I got into Wi-Fi (while at TurrisTech - secure, powerful open source Wi-Fi routers). The same story, basically, for vendors as well as ISPs. No actual respect for the underlying physics, attempts to blast-over the noise, chasing clouds ("muah WiFi 6, 6E....oh no, here comes Wi-Fi 7 and this will change EVERYTHING ---> see, it was a lot of "fun" to see this happening with 5G, and the amount of over-promise and under-delivery BS was and even still is, staggering.)

The whole Wi-Fi industry is chasing (almost) empty numbers (bandwidth) instead of focusing on bufferbloat (latency, jitter...).

Thanks to Domos for putting together the Understanding Latency webinar series. I know that most of You are aware of latency as the most important metric we should focus on nowadays in order to improve the overall Internet experience, but still...

About 6 hours watch of watching. And rewatching:

Also, there is one more thing to add re Wi-Fi. If You can cable, You should always cable. Mesh as we know it, would be a way better Wi-Fi enhancement, if the mesh units would be wired as much as possible. We will reduce the noice, grow smart and save spectrum.

Thanks for the great discussion.

All the best,