[Rpm] Re: [Bloat] Re: [Cake] "Fi-Wi is a new forwarding plane for wireless" - Bob McMahon

[Frantisek Borsik <frantisek.borsik@gmail.com>]

Saw this one from Bob on LinkedIn - maybe there is someone interested
lurking here...:

"Umber is looking for a Bay Area cable tech (contract, part-time to start)
as we prepare to ship our UAX-8 concentrator.

Each install uses a hybrid cable: dual fiber for data plus copper that
powers the remote radio head. The job is to cut to length from a 1000 ft
spool, terminate with a pigtail, and verify optical power and low-voltage
delivery before units go out.

The Meta Level Up training is free. Umber will provide the splicing and
power-testing equipment. First units and our power distribution system
should be ready by late summer."

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-bob-mcmahon-b1a42a1_levelup-fiber-technician-pathway-meta-data-activity-7463251969630097408-AcWJ?

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik


*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/


https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 12:45 AM <bob.mcmahon@umbernetworks.com> wrote:

> > the reason home wifi is so bad is because there is no coordination
> > between the wifi in the diffeent houses/apartments. you don't need to
> > tie all those devices into a single network to solve that, and unless
> > you do solve the coordination problem, there is no way for you to make
> > the rf environment better.
> >
> > coordination may only be an 80% solution compared to this, but 80% is a
> > lot.
> >
>
> David,
>
> Even granting the 80% claim, which I don't think holds across 134M
> occupied homes in the US once you measure broadly enough, the loss
> functions shift dramatically with density, workload, and metric.
> Throughput, tail latency, and jitter under load do not degrade for the
> same reasons, and they do not reduce to a single number.
>
> Even inside a single home with one AP and no neighbors, Wi-Fi exhibits
> pathologies unrelated to cross-network coordination: hidden queues,
> retry storms, aggregation bursts, EDCA backoff variance, roaming
> decisions made with stale information, and firmware behavior the
> operator cannot observe or control.
>
> ECN marking, L4S, pacing, and AQMs all assume the layer below them
> provides observable and reasonably bounded service time. Conventional
> APs do not provide that. Coordinating neighbors does not fix it.
>
> The deeper problem is architectural. Conventional Wi-Fi scatters the
> observations. No AP sees enough state to make globally correct decisions
> across space, time, and frequency, so every AP treats overlap as loss
> and reacts using local, partial information. Neighbor coordination
> cannot recover information that was never collected, nor can it impose
> deterministic service intervals on autonomous 802.11 MAC state machines
> running in opaque vendor firmware.
>
> Fi-Wi inverts that architecture. The 802.11 MAC moves to the
> concentrator, where the observations are co-located and scheduling
> decisions are made in software the operator or building owner controls.
> The radios handle PHY/RF execution. One RRH or twenty, the architectural
> property is the same: airtime scheduling, transport feedback, and
> observability exist in one place.
>
> I put together a small animation showing how contention probability
> rises rapidly even with relatively small contention windows and moderate
> active station counts. It helps visualize why systems often become
> MAC-limited before PHY-limited:
>
> https://www.umbernetworks.com/csma-preview.html
>
> The "single network" is ultimately a human management abstraction. RF,
> like rats, does not respect property boundaries. The medium is shared
> whether or not the management plane pretends otherwise. Coordination
> between autonomous networks tries to paper over a partition we invented,
> and the ceiling is set by the partition. Fi-Wi doesn't eliminate the
> partition globally. It dissolves it within a coverage area, by replacing
> autonomous APs with radio arrays serving one MAC. Inside the domain,
> there is no partition to paper over. Engineering that matches physics is
> the goal.
>
> Bob
>