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Running wires would be profoundly impractical. The home has stairs, and the whole layout is profoundly non-conducive to running wires. It'd be a massively long

by wegs 6y ago

Running wires would be profoundly impractical. The home has stairs, and the whole layout is profoundly non-conducive to running wires. It'd be a massively long wire, running along floors, walls, and ceilings. Even if I decided to do that, I'm not the sole deciding party. Everyone at home needs to be happy, and I don't think anyone else would agree to that. I could do powerline or something, but I really think wifi is the way to go here. The wifi is robust when it goes to make desktop in my bedroom, which has a PCI wireless card with a proper antenna. Where it fails are things like laptops. That's why I'm pretty sure a good mesh network would get us there. 100mbit was with Netgear+Intel equipment, and swapping several cables. I even bought a fancy new cable on Amazon, just in case that was an issue. The equipment isn't 2020, but it's definitely not bargain-basement either.

pwg 6y ago
The problem with wifi, in a crowded environment, is the lost packets from the crowding. Which you allude to here: > As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks Every single wifi network other than your own is a source of interference for yours, and interference impacts latency first, then when the interference gets bad enough, throughput is impacted. You can paper over the issues with stronger signals, for a time, until the density of the surrounding networks grows (or others begin strengthening their signals because your stronger signals are now causing them excessive interference). But you can never escape the interference without moving somewhere very rural where you are the only wifi close enough to detect. You can escape some of the wireless interference by switching to 5G wireless (much shorter range, so fewer other 5G wireless networks will be in range to cause interference and a much larger number of channels, so fewer collisions), but then you have to be operating within that shorter range of your own AP, which could again mean running some ethernet to bring the transmitters closer to where you need them to be to operate reliably.

by wegs 6y ago

pwg 6y ago

The problem with wifi, in a crowded environment, is the lost packets from the crowding. Which you allude to here: > As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks Every single wifi network other than your own is a source of interference for yours, and interference impacts latency first, then when the interference gets bad enough, throughput is impacted. You can paper over the issues with stronger signals, for a time, until the density of the surrounding networks grows (or others begin strengthening their signals because your stronger signals are now causing them excessive interference). But you can never escape the interference without moving somewhere very rural where you are the only wifi close enough to detect. You can escape some of the wireless interference by switching to 5G wireless (much shorter range, so fewer other 5G wireless networks will be in range to cause interference and a much larger number of channels, so fewer collisions), but then you have to be operating within that shorter range of your own AP, which could again mean running some ethernet to bring the transmitters closer to where you need them to be to operate reliably.