What is your experience using wireless internet (WIFI) for JackTrip? Please share! Let us know your location and ISP, and quality of the sound, latency, and connection stability.
Personally, I only trust a wired ethernet connection, have had extreme difficulty using wireless internet (WIFI).
In sessions with others using WIFI, their audio can sound wildly different from the original and often undesirable. The connection is usually pretty strong and fast, but with the latency fluctuations (jitter) inherent in WIFI, a strong fast connection is moot, as there can still be dropouts and unintended changes in the timbre and tempo.
One day, perhaps WIFI will be better for JackTrip and be as good as ethernet. But not today!
My feeling is that wired is best, but wifi is typically good enough for some use cases such as meetings, music lessons, podcasts, etc.
IMHO the biggest issue with wifi is that it varies SO much. It depends on things like:
the access point you are using
the interface you have in your computer
how far away you are from the access point
how many other people are using it
how many other wireless signals are nearby (interference)
I use it often myself, because I’m a networking specialist and have been able to invest into a state-of-the-art wireless network at my home. But very few people are able to do that today.
And even when you can, it’s still not as good as ethernet:
You will have higher latency, at least 5ms (WIFI 6) but can often be much higher
You will have high jitter and dropouts (static, glitches, etc), sometimes for multiple seconds at a time
Loss concealment in JackTrip does wonders for the latter, but this has to be enabled on both ends to realize the full benefits. Currently we’re only enabling it on studios because the client side support is flaky; however, I believe this will be solved in 1.9.0 (coming soon).
The only way to get the best latency is plugging in. This isn’t going to change any time soon; however, wifi will get better over time. The latest standards (6e, 7 and beyond) are making huge strides, so in 5-10+ years, as people upgrade their computers and wifi access points to new ones that adopt them, both latency and jitter will continue to improve. Eventually I believe the gap will be so narrow that it will not make a big difference for most people.
I was wondering the same too if we could use WIFI. My current WIFI speed is over 250Mbps for upload/download so its not so much the speed but the glitches/dropouts with WIFI vs hardwire I guess?
Speed and latency are different metrics, and it’s common to have a lot of speed with poor and inconsistent latency. Speed is “how much” and latency is “how fast.” Music collaboration requires very little bandwidth (about 1.5 Mbps) but “how fast” is paramount.
Some good news: the hardware certification process for the latest WIFI standard v7 began this month. This promises to offer much lower and more consistent latency versus previous WIFI standards.
A few vendors have already launched WIFI 7 access points. Within a few months we can expect to see more client hardware appear in the latest laptops and external USB devices. I’m looking forward to testing and reporting back on this as soon as I can.
Of course, even if it is all it’s hyped up to be, it will take a while for people to adopt it. It requires all new hardware: replacing all your access points (router?), and replacing your computer (or using an external adapter). And best case scenario is that it just gets closer to Ethernet, which will continue (at least for decades) to be the most stable and lowest latency option available.
Awesome thanks Mike. Is there a way we can test the quality of our WIFI and what Jacktrip recommends as min standards? I found this site that tests WIFI quality Internet Quality Test. I didnt see a huge difference when I ran this test for my wifi and ethernet. The jitter/latency is 0-3 ms for both type of connections at the time I tested but I notice it varies the exact moment I test.
It’s hard to do these inside of a web browser because browsers don’t support UDP (yet; WASM promises to change that soon). Most tests, including the one you linked to, only seem to test latency for a second or two and report that back. That’s isn’t anywhere near good enough.
I usually just use the “ping” command line tool. Just open a terminal window and type “ping ROUTER” where ROUTER is the IP address of your router. Typically it’s 192.168.1.1 but not always. So for example “ping 192.168.1.1”
A consistent 0-3ms on WIFI would be pretty amazing. Perhaps you are one of a lucky few?
It is wonderful to have the ability to produce internet speed and quality testing data and I appreciate the time and interest regarding these measurements. Also good to have the inside scoop on potential improvements in WIFI access points, WASM and support for UDP. We’re lucky to have you, Mike.
We know that there are a lot of other variables involved when we are playing in a JackTrip session and it would be interesting to hear some examples of concurrent sessions based on the metrics mentioned above, and also provide important context for users.