[Make-wifi-fast] Status of the industry on over buffering at the WiFi air interface

[David P. Reed]

A friend of mine (not a network expert, but a gadget freak), has been deploying wireless security cameras at his home and vacation home. He uses a single WiFi AP in each place, serving the security cameras etc.

What he observes is this:

Whenever anyone on a laptop in one of the homes uploads a modest sized file (over the same WiFi) the security systems all lose data.

Now I can't go to his home to diagnose this, but I've asked him to check out his cable bufferbloat using dslreports, and he gets no bufferbloat there. But it sure looks like *severe* lag under load is affecting the security camera feed to the cloud servers that the company that sells the security cameras provides.

So, is there a way to simply *diagnose* the WiFi air link for excess queueing in all the high rate WiFi devices? Something a non-net-head could do?

The situation around congestion control in the industry continues to royally suck, in my opinion. The vendors don't care, the ISPs don't care (they can sell a higher speed connection than is actually needed and super-fabulous MIMO gadgets that still don't quite solve the problem).

I'm an old guy, basically retired. I'm sad because the young folks remain clueless.

And it's been decades since bufferbloat was discuvered, and the basic issue of congestion signalling being needed. I'm sure 5G (whatever it really is) is not paying attention to this network level congestion issue...