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Ignorant questions, if I may: 1. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or l

Ignorant questions, if I may: 1. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? 2. Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all blasting full strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi performance actually near as good as wired performance?

centimeter 6y ago
Variance and latency is much higher with wifi than with wired. Sensitivity to interference is also a problem. Dropped packet count is usually much higher with wifi, which can wreak havoc on many applications.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ProfessorLayton 6y ago
Perhaps things have changed since I last upgraded my home network, but iirc, advertised wifi speeds are half duplex, while wired speeds are full duplex — i.e. wifi speeds are for the combined upload/download while wired can go full speed in both directions.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  It's even worse, because wireless is basically a hub. Or phrased differently: there is only one wire available for all devices on a wireless network, and your (as well as others on same frequencies) devices have to figure out which packet is for which device by themselves.
ConceitedCode 6y ago
1. Taking a shot in the dark - Maybe check your ethernet cables? Not all ethernet cables are the same. If it's a cheap / old ethernet cable then it might not be rated for the same kinds of speed as your wifi. There is a chart on this page labeled "Ethernet Cable Performance Summary" with some stats for different ethernet cables. https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/connectivity/ethernet-ieee-802-3/cables-types-pinout-cat-5-5e-6.php https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/connectivity/ethe... 2. Yes, although in my experience this is very minor. On my network - good wifi has a 3ms latency and good ethernet has a .3ms latency. While that is a 10x improvement, in the scheme of things I don't notice 3ms of latency. I live in a high rise condo with lots of interference in a major city and can't say it's caused me any issues.
jayd16 6y ago
Mostly just no one is bothering to make the consumer products, not that the tech isn't there. Most consumer products are the ubiquitous 1gbps Ethernet ports with 10gbps on certain prosumer/gamer chipsets. Those 10gbps boards are meant to be the upsell so they're expensive for a lot of reasons. At a consumer level what does that buy you? The average internet connection is far far less bandwidth than that. Most consumers don't have a need to stream large amounts of data. You can just use sneaker-net for bulk transfer with a thumb drive.
lostlogin 6y ago
> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? While you can get impressive figures, a 1gbps wired connection is just so much better than the equivalent speed wifi connection. It’s double or triple the speed in my experience.
- wojciii 6y ago
  Also the wired connection doesn't degrade or die when I turn the microwave on to heat a meal. I really like the Ethernet in my house that I'm soon going to upgrade to 10 GE.
staticman2 6y ago
I have limited to zero success gamestreaming on wifi vs ethernet with the particular setup at my house in a townhome. I have not tested it on my Wifi 6 phone but I'd be tentatively skeptical that you'd want to use ethernet for this use case.
ptmcc 6y ago
My home is wired with Cat5E and a gigabit switch, and my wired connection delivers consistent, uninterrupted, near-zero-latency 1gbps connectivity 24/7. I have two different nice wifi APs running all the latest standards and even on new devices supporting the latest and greatest the best I ever see over wifi is about 300-350mbps, plus a couple additional milliseconds of latency. Plus the random little transient wifi hiccups that just happen from time to time. I can see about a dozen other wifi networks in range of my house, so some radio noise out there but nothing crazy. And now that I also have symmetric gigabit fiber, only my wired connections can come anywhere close to saturating my WAN bandwidth. If you have the option/ability, wired is going to crush wireless every time. Wifi is great for casual use and I'm glad it has gotten as good as it has, but for real work/gaming/whatever there's no contest.
- yftsui 6y ago
  I have a similar all Unifi setup, I could get 350Mbps stable connection for any devices as I used 3 Unifi APs. Recently played with the new Eero Wi-Fi 6 AP, I could get 500Mbps as it seems to be duplex two channels. That's probably the best you could get, compared with a cheap gigabit switch can give you 970Mbps easily.
- KiranRao0 6y ago
  I remember doing an experiment with my roommates with Engenius APs (I can consistently get ~480mbps). For everything but direct large downloads, everyone thought that using a 100mbps wired connection felt faster/snappier than the 480mpbs wireless
- spearo77 6y ago
  Another couple for your list– Moving a device from Wifi to wired marginally helps all your other wifi devices. Overall it can improve performance enough to not need another access point. Even better is PoE which can let you put an AP in places that would otherwise require an electrician to install mains power outlets. Remote power-cycle is good too, even if you already have mains power for the AP.
xvector 6y ago
> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? In the review it looks like he’s using a PCIe card for WiFi. If you used a 10Gbe card on a 10Gbe network, I imagine you’d do even better.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Isn’t that how all wifi is connected?
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    Lots of wifi is via USB.
Bayart 6y ago
1. At this point I don't think 10Gbps NICs are worth that much on the second hand market. Most of the cost will be in the wiring. In WiFi most of the cost would be in the router and APs. 2. Wired is far more reliable than wireless in urban settings. You just don't have to deal with overlapping channels, physical barriers, dropped packets, concurrency between devices etc. You might get away with free real estate on 5Ghz+ nowadays but that's going to change as the ISP-provided equipment rotates. I get a lot of wireless myself because I live in the middle of nowhere, without a single other Wifi AP in detectable range and the inner walls of my house are pretty thin. In that context, with a well configured router, I get extremely stable wireless connections with low latency (<1ms router<->NIC). But in a city apartment I'd rather have the old 10m Ethernet cable cutting across the living-room.
- cogman10 6y ago
  The biggest problem I run into with 10Gbps ethernet is finding a consumer grade switch that supports it. You are pretty much limited to commercial offerings.
  - Bayart 6y ago
    Mikrotik makes "reasonably" priced switches if you want brand new networking equipment for the home (with warranties, support etc.). But yeah it's not stuff you'd find on your ISP-provided whitelabel 15€ all-in-one box. It's just one of these things. People who know they need 10Gpbs LAN are already completely outside of the scope of regular consumer use.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Switch availability is a big part of it. For my purposes at home, I've got two adjacent computers wired directly together with 10g, then wired over 1g to a wifi access point and router.
- fomine3 6y ago
  I live in house with similar situation, but I still prefer wired over wireless. It's rock solid and pretty stable.
jimmar 6y ago
1. WiFi price/performance does not exceed wired connections. Real-world WiFi performance typically falls well below the advertised maximum. You're much more likely to get the advertised maximum with a wired connection. WiFi gets more attention because running cable is hard to do. Most people are content with weak signals at the corners of their homes. WiFi is the good enough solution for most people. 2. If you can use a wired connection, a wired connection will almost always be better. The 5ghz spectrum doesn't suffer from noisy neighbors as much as the 2.4ghz spectrum, but that's mostly because 5ghz is much more easily blocked by walls and its effective range is much shorter. When I started working from home because of COVID, I bit the bullet and ran ethernet cable in my 100 year old house. No regrets. I had been looking at WiFi mesh networks, but all of the performance reviews I saw on YouTube showed speeds much lower than the theoretical WiFi limits.
- vizzier 6y ago
  This comment is a great summary. For expanded information Ars technica did a great write up of the marketing spiel a few years back [1]. Remains an interesting read and few of the issues raised have been fixed, especially if using common 2.4/5ghz wifi. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-e...
  - the_pwner224 6y ago
    This is another in-depth writeup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564
- fvv 6y ago
  Mesh wifi is not bad of properly done.. results depend on house shape.. consider it cut in half of wifi theoretical bandwidth after each hop
  - rektide 6y ago
    5Ghz has enough spectrum that there's no need for loss. But whether anyone implements dual 4 x 4 wifi mesh? I dunno. Since smallnetbuilder.com went quiet I haven't had a good trusted place to keep up on wifi products.
cogman10 6y ago
> Is the Ethernet standard lagging In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards of today are basically the same thing that we've had since like 2000. There's no reason it can't use a lot of the same techniques that are used in wifi, other than it increases complexity. 1 Gbps is enough for anyone... right :D Surprisingly, you'll see a lot of the wifi standards have analogs in cable broadcasting. DOCSIS is very analogous to how WiFi handles data transmission. It is pulling a lot of the same tricks. > Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? Yeah, ethernet is still way more reliable than Wifi. You run into far fewer problems with interference or noise. Some of the higher frequency WiFi standards (60GHz) suffer less from noise (because they can't penetrate walls very well).
- zokier 6y ago
  > In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards of today are basically the same thing that we've had since like 2000. 10Gbe is readily and widely available these days, even in consumer space, and the top end is pushing 400Gbps ethernet. For reference, 10Gbe over baset was standardized in 2006, so I'd say we have come pretty far from the turn of millennium.
  - vel0city 6y ago
    10GbE in the consumer space is widely available? I can go down to Best Buy and buy an 8-port 10GbE switch? Do many consumer routers ship with 10GbE ports on them? I guess the latest Mac Pros ship with 10GbE ports on them. Definitely a normal consumer product. I guess its probably pretty low end, as the high end of the consumer space is pushing 400GbE according to you.
- moonbug 6y ago
  Blame intel. they could've landed 10gige in their consumer choosers any time in the last decade.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    You can find it's not possible to see 10GBASE-T Hub's massive heat spreader or fan.
Ekaros 6y ago
To add. Wifi is still shared medium, so as devices increase the share of bandwidth lowers. With proper ethernet switches this really shouldn't be case. As any pair of devices should be able to communicate with each other at full speed.
KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Commercial applications could use and afford the higher speed 10Gbit over 'fiber' and other expensive interconnects. While the consumer side really did not demand >1Gbit speeds until very recently but even now the demand is still very low. 10Gbit network adapters consumer a lot more power and are a lot more expensive than 1Gbit chipsets. Consumers's primary demands are things like better battery life, price, and smaller form factors so it makes sense to go with 1Gbit. Additionally, a lot of the most popular computers today don't even include a real Ethernet port; it's a folding mechanism which saves space but would make a 10Gbit spec Ethernet port (shielding, etc.) even more of a challenge. Modern chipsets are starting to include 2.5/5Gbit chipsets which benefit from higher speeds but are still much cheaper than 10Gbit. I think a lot of players in this space were expecting and waiting for 10Gbit to become much cheaper and efficient but that did not happen. Many Ultrabooks drop the Ethernet port altogether forcing the use of USB-C adapters. USB-C/thunderbolt has a theoretical bandwidth of 20/40Gbit/s which means you, in theory, could buy a 10Gbit ethernet to thunderbolt adapter. I'm sure there's a lot more on the technical side that has kept the price/energy of 10Gbit high but I don't know the details.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  > 10Gbit network adapters [...] are a lot more expensive than 1Gbit chipsets. You're not kidding! I'm working on updating a lot of my network to 10 GbE, and it's kind of insane how you can get by with super-cheap hardware, cabling, connectors, etc. for 1 Gbps and everything works fine... but when you go to 2.5 or 5 Gbps, prices increase a bit (and the need for better cables with more shielding arises). When you hit 10 Gbps, there's a lot more expense on every layer, especially the chips/cards that you connect to your computers. The difference is something like $5-10 for 1 Gbps devices, vs $150+ for 10 Gbps devices (in many cases... there are exceptions).
  - moonbug 6y ago
    grab connectx3s from eBay, they're 20-30 quid a pop.
    - 6y ago
colechristensen 6y ago
WiFi is very much worse than ethernet in dense apartment housing. With gigabit internet service, getting 90% is easy wired, getting 30% wireless is lucky. In a <1000 sq ft apartment my wireless performance depends on the room. Basically on the physical layer wireless is very busy with collisions and retransmitting. Better performance can come with some tuning, but ultimately it is quite limited. I plug in all the devices I can conveniently.
mrbonner 6y ago
I wired my PS4 to the CAT6 cable to the router and it has zero issue. Comparing to that, when it was connected to wifi just 10 feet away, I ran into all sort of issues with latency and drop packets when playing FPS games online.
nisa 6y ago
1. 10Gbe copper requires fast switching and more shielding - there was a discussion here a few days ago that it's still very expensive - there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon that is a compromise on price/complexity and speed. 2. As someone developing part-time with others on a community mesh network if you somehow can use a wire use the wire. no discussion. 802.11ax (wifi 6) does improve quite a lot, but in the end there a quite a few requirements to reach 1.3gbps. noise, distance, mimo-antennas, driver-issues, fresnel-zone should be free, enough free channels to blast 80mhz of wifi data through the air at 1024QAM - all devices must speak wifi 6 - then there is latency due to aggretation and due to the high bitrates the distance is usally very low. On the one hand you have reliable 110mbyte/s on wire vs. maybe sometimes a little bit more via wifi.
- moonbug 6y ago
  >there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon NBase-T is the magic, will train 2.5, 5 or 10g over cat5e, depending on the cabling
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  > 10Gbe copper requires fast switching and more shielding That depends greatly on your cable length. A 50ft run (about the distance commonly found from switch to device in an average home) will _easily_ operate trouble free and full speed over Cat5e. It’s only necessary to use Cat6/Cat6A/Cat7 when you are going over long cable lengths (most reputable sources say ~125ft is the max for reliable 10GbE over Cat5e, adding an additional ~50ft for Cat6, and up to ~330ft for 6a/7)
mlyle 6y ago
> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? "Per-port", 2.5gbps is cheaper than fast wireless. But one fast wireless interface on a router can work in a star configuration with many devices. You can get a 2.5gbase-T card for $30. You can get an 8 port 2.5gbase-T switch with 2 10gbit SFP+ uplinks for $450. This will run circles around any wireless network in practice. Decent 802.11ax adds more than $30 to your device in most cases. And a router with good 802.11ax is still a couple hundred bucks. It'd be even cheaper, but 1gbps is good enough for 'most everyone, so we have to deal with repurposing low-end business stuff instead of consumer gear.
wil421 6y ago
You can get 10 gigabit with Ethernet. 10gb switches and especially 10gb NICs from retired servers are getting cheaper. After you upgrade to a 10gb you might need to use something other than SATA drives to reach the full potential. At least for a NAS. I’d benefit from faster restores and transferring 4K video.
topspin 6y ago
> Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? Absolutely not. Wired gigabit ethernet is far better than wifi; on a small wired network the packet loss is negligible and contention is non-existent, so the network is smooth and fast. You get better than 80% of theoretical wire speed in file transfers. Remote desktops have minimum latency. Every couple months another wifi router zero-day pops up and some huge fraction of all such routers become vulnerable to remote attacks. It's nice not being involved in that mess. My fellow remote colleagues with wifi sound terrible on their contended networks; dropping packets and getting cut off calls. The people with wired connections like myself are always glitch free. Wifi is for toys and casual use. Ethernet is for work.
zelly 6y ago
Just pull fiber and you or the next owner won't have to worry about it in the next 50 years. You can buy pre-terminated or use quick connectors. Most don't realize that fiber is cheaper to produce than copper; the expense comes from the fancy SFP switches and routers. Wireless is horrible. In urban settings, the RF pollution will lead to all kinds of misery. If you are doing anything important with the connection, it must be wired. It's also bad security because I can drive by in a van and knock out your whole block's internet connections because so many people equate internet with WiFi.
- fvv 6y ago
  Yeah also fiber are smaller and can help sometimes.. and have no length issues like copper
josteink 6y ago
> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Only if you read the advertised speeds instead of measuring. Also wired networking has the benefit of not using a shared medium, so all wired clients get full capacity each, vs wireless where all clients share the bandwidth. Wired is so much better for almost any task I throw at it, by a magnitude at least, so the only units in my house left to wireless are phones, tablets and non-work laptops.
jcrawfordor 6y ago
Although slowly, 2.5gbps ethernet is starting to land. I have a few devices in my house now with 2.5gbps interfaces, my hangup has been that I currently have a commercial GbE switch that was moderately expensive and I'm not feeling the need to replace it with a 2.5gbps switch that will be quite expensive (and if I really wanted to I could get full speed on some ports with SFP). But not feeling the need, I think, kind of makes the point... WiFi has to continuously push to higher and higher speeds in large part because for various fundamental reasons WiFi is not able to deliver speed with consistency. Packet loss, jitter, contention, and periodic serious disruptions in connectivity are the norm for WiFi, and very high speeds offer more overhead to tolerate these problems. Unlike Ethernet, WiFi is also fundamentally half-duplex and contentious between multiple devices, so very high speeds and MIMO techniques (as well as beam steering and other more cutting-edge technology) are used to mitigate this. All of these enhancements are aimed towards allowing WiFi to consistently and reliably achieve 100mbps and more in practice - something which even the latest WiFi standards still struggle with in much of the "real world." By contrast, GbE can consistently deliver gigabit performance, full duplex, non-collision with only slight overhead, and a very high degree of consistency. Gigabit ethernet already allows saturation of most storage devices in consumer use, so from a practical perspective, there aren't many reasons anyone would want more--going to 2.5, 5, or 10GbE in a home network is not likely to allow you to actually do anything faster because at that volume of data you're probably reading from or writing to storage, and consumer storage devices cannot reach even gigabit speeds. Likewise there are few or no consumer devices capable of generating instantaneous/real-time data volumes over GbE, the ones that are are moving uncompressed video, e.g. HDMI at 10-20gbps, which is both beyond what "faster" ethernet specs currently readily available can do, and it's just something that few people seem to want - there aren't many situations where you're moving video over a distance longer than an HDMI cable and you aren't willing to compress it. I actually have an unusually demanding situation as I have a project that involves moving multiple high-rate IQ streams from large-bandwidth SDRs over the network. Even here, CPU and I/O issues on the sending devices are consistently a bigger problem for me than the actual network. There are SDRs with highly optimized network support that allow them to achieve real-time rates in the Gbps range, but they cost so much that owners of such devices aren't going to have a problem investing in commercial network equipment. It feels a bit lame to say that "GbE is fast enough," but for consumer cases I think this is largely true. The only thing I can see changing it is moving full-rate video around, but video streaming has already been captured for consumers by vendor-specific systems that use compression, and "works fine" within an ecosystem even over WiFi.
Nextgrid 6y ago
> WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired WiFi absolutely does not. This is a test in lab conditions, with a single, stationary device and no stats on packet loss. Unless you're happy to use your device in these conditions (but at this point why not use a wire?), this does not represent the real-world conditions in which you'd be using the device. If he tries again with people moving around and moving the devices around, with more people using the wireless network at the same time, he'd see much more different results especially when it comes to stability. Stability is the main problem with Wi-Fi. It's relatively easy to get a huge speed test, it's harder to maintain a stable latency and no packet loss. It doesn't help that operating systems aren't good at reporting this information to the user, so the Wi-Fi always appears to work (with decent speeds) until it totally craps out when you launch an interactive application (like calling or multiplayer gaming) where low latency is paramount and the error correction/retransmission algorithms can't do their thing fast enough).
x3iv130f 6y ago
Single all in one modem/router/access points are popular because they are incredibly easy go set up and that is about it. The only people who don't run Ethernet cable are those who are too lazy to bother. The second any sort of performance becomes important you will need to find dedicated devices with Ethernet running inbetween. My parent's house is 100% wireless however I had to run extended lengths of Cat 5e to set up multiple wireless access points. We have multiple 4k TVs on different sides of the house. There was no way we could keep decent speeds and wireless coverage without running cable. Even for my Android phone. I will occaisonally use a wired Ethernet connection to speed up downloads.
penglish1 6y ago
Q: 1a. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? A: WiFi does not exceed the price/performance of hard-wired Ethernet. They are different enough it is difficult to compare properly - for instance, for wired Ethernet, do you include the cost of the wire installation, termination, etc? I don't think it is reasonable to include - complex wiring gets more expensive - potentially by an order of magnitude! Fiber can be much more expensive than copper.. or cheaper. Fiber transcievers get very expensive for very long distances (miles) etc. So to do a simple comparison - 10GbE vs. Wifi. Let assume you are adding these to a computer which doesn't have them. The Wifi adapter is $26.90 A 2.5GbE adapter is $30 What about the network switch? (or wifi access point) Typically with wired ethernet, you do this as a "cost per port" - currently about $25/port on the low end (rated at 10Gbps, by the way, but able to step down to 2.5Gbps). This (top performing "high end") Wifi router runs $250. It may officially support 200+ clients but that just means it can theoretically talk to them at all. Good luck pushing actual data to/from them! In practice, to match up in cost/performance with a 10 port ethernet switch, it would need to drive the full 2.5Gbps for 10 clients simultaneously! I guarantee you it can't. And the price equation only gets better if you go full 10Gbps - which is probably the "sweet spot" right now for price/performance, buying in SOHO-sized quantities. Q1b: The ethernet standard is pretty excellent, and currently goes to 400Gbps, and if you have the cash to buy 400Gbps equipment - you can basically expect it to work to spec - if the switch fabric says it will support X Tbps concurrently - it will. Good luck with that on Wifi. There is a TON of demand - you just don't see it in your house. Or your neighbor's house. Or your friend's house. You should though! Ethernet is AWESOME - and back when we had wired landlines, people ran those wires all over their house. It isn't that hard, or that expensive, and you'll get MUCH better, more predictable performance from doing it, and moving as many devices as you can to wired ethernet. Even your WiFi access point benefits from an ethernet cable running to a location where it's signal works best, rather than some closet off in the corner of your house. Q2: Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all blasting full strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi performance actually near as good as wired performance? A: No, real life wifi is nowhere near as good as ethernet. Switch to ethernet as much as you can! Of course, it doesn't make much sense to run an ethernet cable to the tablet you read sitting on your couch. But every desk, printer(?), your WAP(s), etc.
jacquesm 6y ago
Latency and reliability on WiFi, even the best, pales in comparison to a simple UTP cable. Besides that, you're always just one step away from some security issue in the WiFi stack that might leave you wide open to abuse from nearby stations.
vel0city 6y ago
The rated speed of your access point is essentially shared with all clients in that channel. So if you've got 16 devices, they all share that few gigabits of potential airtime assuming they have all nearly perfect connections to the AP. My 16-port gigabit switch can handle 32Gbit of switching, significantly more throughput than the latest WiFi can even hope to achieve in ideal circumstances. Adding more capacity is buying another switch. Depending on the existing density and RF noise of the area, you might not be able to add much more density even with adding more APs. I think its more that we're seeing wireless get somewhat competitive with its wired counterparts in the home, not necessarily that its surpassing it. Its still not as reliable as wired. Unless you live in a anechoic chamber you're going to get dropped frames from time to time, requiring retransmits and increasing your jitter. If you're experiencing that on your wired networking, you either messed up your cable runs or you need to step outside of your microwave oven. That said, 10GbE+ outside of the datacenter has been a long time coming. Its there, but its not very widespread. Most devices tend to use a good bit of power and are rather expensive. On top of that, unless you're doing something datacenter-like (using a SAN or building HPC cluster) you usually don't experience much of a difference. In the few instances where you might want more throughput, you can often set up your devices in a LAGG to combine multiple gigabit ports to increase aggregate throughput.
rayiner 6y ago
> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? 10-gige is already cheap and 40-gige is coming down in price. There is just no need for it at home. I have my house wired with 10gige, and > gigabit fiber internet, and literally can’t notice when switching to wireless. 500 mbps should be enough for anyone.
rektide 6y ago
Markets don't innovate unless pushed into competition & ethernet has had so little pressure to innovate. I think there's a lot of parallels here to another article today, on webcams being ultra-uncompetitive. Discussion also talked about monitors in the same way. There's a very low expectations for these products & few people trying for better. There is 2.5Gbit and 5Gbit ethernet happening. These are both significantly easier to implement than 10Gbit, which everyone is withholding, reserving for "enterprise" ("who needs that much speed?") but the whole thing screams scam, when far far more complicated wifi chips are so cheap, when 40 & 100Gbit are not that expensive. 10Gbit is not easy but all these 5Gbit, 2.5Gbit options; it strikes me as more about tiering, about having a range of products to sell, rather than update to something modern. Everyone is upgrading at minimum possible speed while leaving pricier options free of competition. Meanwhile, intel just shipped two 40Gbps USB4 ports on their new cpu chip. Which can directly connect two computers with just a regular cable. Unlike ethernet this is very short range though, measured in meters. Although rumblings about optical keep showing up, which would throw everything into chaos. Wifi though, now, is multi-gigabit. It's making ethernet look bad.
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ksec 6y ago
>WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Those are best case performance. i.e Standing next to the Router. In most cases you wont be getting 1Gbps from WiFi. But having said that, WiFi is improving at the rate simply because there is a much larger market to drive its volume, and amortised R&D. WiFi is included in every laptop, tablet, Smartphones and many other applications. That is nearly 2 Billion devices a year. Compared to Ethernet, you are looking at Desktop PC, Servers and other much smaller niche like NAS. Not to mention faster WiFI ( aka WiFi 6 ) is an easier sell to consumers than faster Ethernet which is really only aiming at prosumers. First draft of WiFi 7 will arrive in a few months time. >is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice Always use wired if you have a choice.

centimeter 6y ago

Variance and latency is much higher with wifi than with wired. Sensitivity to interference is also a problem. Dropped packet count is usually much higher with wifi, which can wreak havoc on many applications.

deleted 6y ago
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ProfessorLayton 6y ago

Perhaps things have changed since I last upgraded my home network, but iirc, advertised wifi speeds are half duplex, while wired speeds are full duplex — i.e. wifi speeds are for the combined upload/download while wired can go full speed in both directions.

411111111111111 6y ago
It's even worse, because wireless is basically a hub. Or phrased differently: there is only one wire available for all devices on a wireless network, and your (as well as others on same frequencies) devices have to figure out which packet is for which device by themselves.

ConceitedCode 6y ago

1. Taking a shot in the dark - Maybe check your ethernet cables? Not all ethernet cables are the same. If it's a cheap / old ethernet cable then it might not be rated for the same kinds of speed as your wifi. There is a chart on this page labeled "Ethernet Cable Performance Summary" with some stats for different ethernet cables. https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/connectivity/ethernet-ieee-802-3/cables-types-pinout-cat-5-5e-6.php https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/connectivity/ethe... 2. Yes, although in my experience this is very minor. On my network - good wifi has a 3ms latency and good ethernet has a .3ms latency. While that is a 10x improvement, in the scheme of things I don't notice 3ms of latency. I live in a high rise condo with lots of interference in a major city and can't say it's caused me any issues.

jayd16 6y ago

Mostly just no one is bothering to make the consumer products, not that the tech isn't there. Most consumer products are the ubiquitous 1gbps Ethernet ports with 10gbps on certain prosumer/gamer chipsets. Those 10gbps boards are meant to be the upsell so they're expensive for a lot of reasons. At a consumer level what does that buy you? The average internet connection is far far less bandwidth than that. Most consumers don't have a need to stream large amounts of data. You can just use sneaker-net for bulk transfer with a thumb drive.

lostlogin 6y ago

> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? While you can get impressive figures, a 1gbps wired connection is just so much better than the equivalent speed wifi connection. It’s double or triple the speed in my experience.

wojciii 6y ago
Also the wired connection doesn't degrade or die when I turn the microwave on to heat a meal. I really like the Ethernet in my house that I'm soon going to upgrade to 10 GE.

staticman2 6y ago

I have limited to zero success gamestreaming on wifi vs ethernet with the particular setup at my house in a townhome. I have not tested it on my Wifi 6 phone but I'd be tentatively skeptical that you'd want to use ethernet for this use case.

ptmcc 6y ago

My home is wired with Cat5E and a gigabit switch, and my wired connection delivers consistent, uninterrupted, near-zero-latency 1gbps connectivity 24/7. I have two different nice wifi APs running all the latest standards and even on new devices supporting the latest and greatest the best I ever see over wifi is about 300-350mbps, plus a couple additional milliseconds of latency. Plus the random little transient wifi hiccups that just happen from time to time. I can see about a dozen other wifi networks in range of my house, so some radio noise out there but nothing crazy. And now that I also have symmetric gigabit fiber, only my wired connections can come anywhere close to saturating my WAN bandwidth. If you have the option/ability, wired is going to crush wireless every time. Wifi is great for casual use and I'm glad it has gotten as good as it has, but for real work/gaming/whatever there's no contest.

yftsui 6y ago
I have a similar all Unifi setup, I could get 350Mbps stable connection for any devices as I used 3 Unifi APs. Recently played with the new Eero Wi-Fi 6 AP, I could get 500Mbps as it seems to be duplex two channels. That's probably the best you could get, compared with a cheap gigabit switch can give you 970Mbps easily.
KiranRao0 6y ago
I remember doing an experiment with my roommates with Engenius APs (I can consistently get ~480mbps). For everything but direct large downloads, everyone thought that using a 100mbps wired connection felt faster/snappier than the 480mpbs wireless
spearo77 6y ago
Another couple for your list– Moving a device from Wifi to wired marginally helps all your other wifi devices. Overall it can improve performance enough to not need another access point. Even better is PoE which can let you put an AP in places that would otherwise require an electrician to install mains power outlets. Remote power-cycle is good too, even if you already have mains power for the AP.

xvector 6y ago

> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? In the review it looks like he’s using a PCIe card for WiFi. If you used a 10Gbe card on a 10Gbe network, I imagine you’d do even better.

ubercow13 6y ago
Isn’t that how all wifi is connected?
- dsr_ 6y ago
  Lots of wifi is via USB.

Bayart 6y ago

1. At this point I don't think 10Gbps NICs are worth that much on the second hand market. Most of the cost will be in the wiring. In WiFi most of the cost would be in the router and APs. 2. Wired is far more reliable than wireless in urban settings. You just don't have to deal with overlapping channels, physical barriers, dropped packets, concurrency between devices etc. You might get away with free real estate on 5Ghz+ nowadays but that's going to change as the ISP-provided equipment rotates. I get a lot of wireless myself because I live in the middle of nowhere, without a single other Wifi AP in detectable range and the inner walls of my house are pretty thin. In that context, with a well configured router, I get extremely stable wireless connections with low latency (<1ms router<->NIC). But in a city apartment I'd rather have the old 10m Ethernet cable cutting across the living-room.

cogman10 6y ago
The biggest problem I run into with 10Gbps ethernet is finding a consumer grade switch that supports it. You are pretty much limited to commercial offerings.
- Bayart 6y ago
  Mikrotik makes "reasonably" priced switches if you want brand new networking equipment for the home (with warranties, support etc.). But yeah it's not stuff you'd find on your ISP-provided whitelabel 15€ all-in-one box. It's just one of these things. People who know they need 10Gpbs LAN are already completely outside of the scope of regular consumer use.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Switch availability is a big part of it. For my purposes at home, I've got two adjacent computers wired directly together with 10g, then wired over 1g to a wifi access point and router.
fomine3 6y ago
I live in house with similar situation, but I still prefer wired over wireless. It's rock solid and pretty stable.

jimmar 6y ago

1. WiFi price/performance does not exceed wired connections. Real-world WiFi performance typically falls well below the advertised maximum. You're much more likely to get the advertised maximum with a wired connection. WiFi gets more attention because running cable is hard to do. Most people are content with weak signals at the corners of their homes. WiFi is the good enough solution for most people. 2. If you can use a wired connection, a wired connection will almost always be better. The 5ghz spectrum doesn't suffer from noisy neighbors as much as the 2.4ghz spectrum, but that's mostly because 5ghz is much more easily blocked by walls and its effective range is much shorter. When I started working from home because of COVID, I bit the bullet and ran ethernet cable in my 100 year old house. No regrets. I had been looking at WiFi mesh networks, but all of the performance reviews I saw on YouTube showed speeds much lower than the theoretical WiFi limits.

vizzier 6y ago
This comment is a great summary. For expanded information Ars technica did a great write up of the marketing spiel a few years back [1]. Remains an interesting read and few of the issues raised have been fixed, especially if using common 2.4/5ghz wifi. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-e...
- the_pwner224 6y ago
  This is another in-depth writeup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564
fvv 6y ago
Mesh wifi is not bad of properly done.. results depend on house shape.. consider it cut in half of wifi theoretical bandwidth after each hop
- rektide 6y ago
  5Ghz has enough spectrum that there's no need for loss. But whether anyone implements dual 4 x 4 wifi mesh? I dunno. Since smallnetbuilder.com went quiet I haven't had a good trusted place to keep up on wifi products.

cogman10 6y ago

> Is the Ethernet standard lagging In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards of today are basically the same thing that we've had since like 2000. There's no reason it can't use a lot of the same techniques that are used in wifi, other than it increases complexity. 1 Gbps is enough for anyone... right :D Surprisingly, you'll see a lot of the wifi standards have analogs in cable broadcasting. DOCSIS is very analogous to how WiFi handles data transmission. It is pulling a lot of the same tricks. > Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? Yeah, ethernet is still way more reliable than Wifi. You run into far fewer problems with interference or noise. Some of the higher frequency WiFi standards (60GHz) suffer less from noise (because they can't penetrate walls very well).

zokier 6y ago
> In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards of today are basically the same thing that we've had since like 2000. 10Gbe is readily and widely available these days, even in consumer space, and the top end is pushing 400Gbps ethernet. For reference, 10Gbe over baset was standardized in 2006, so I'd say we have come pretty far from the turn of millennium.
- vel0city 6y ago
  10GbE in the consumer space is widely available? I can go down to Best Buy and buy an 8-port 10GbE switch? Do many consumer routers ship with 10GbE ports on them? I guess the latest Mac Pros ship with 10GbE ports on them. Definitely a normal consumer product. I guess its probably pretty low end, as the high end of the consumer space is pushing 400GbE according to you.
moonbug 6y ago
Blame intel. they could've landed 10gige in their consumer choosers any time in the last decade.
- fomine3 6y ago
  You can find it's not possible to see 10GBASE-T Hub's massive heat spreader or fan.

Ekaros 6y ago

To add. Wifi is still shared medium, so as devices increase the share of bandwidth lowers. With proper ethernet switches this really shouldn't be case. As any pair of devices should be able to communicate with each other at full speed.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago

Commercial applications could use and afford the higher speed 10Gbit over 'fiber' and other expensive interconnects. While the consumer side really did not demand >1Gbit speeds until very recently but even now the demand is still very low. 10Gbit network adapters consumer a lot more power and are a lot more expensive than 1Gbit chipsets. Consumers's primary demands are things like better battery life, price, and smaller form factors so it makes sense to go with 1Gbit. Additionally, a lot of the most popular computers today don't even include a real Ethernet port; it's a folding mechanism which saves space but would make a 10Gbit spec Ethernet port (shielding, etc.) even more of a challenge. Modern chipsets are starting to include 2.5/5Gbit chipsets which benefit from higher speeds but are still much cheaper than 10Gbit. I think a lot of players in this space were expecting and waiting for 10Gbit to become much cheaper and efficient but that did not happen. Many Ultrabooks drop the Ethernet port altogether forcing the use of USB-C adapters. USB-C/thunderbolt has a theoretical bandwidth of 20/40Gbit/s which means you, in theory, could buy a 10Gbit ethernet to thunderbolt adapter. I'm sure there's a lot more on the technical side that has kept the price/energy of 10Gbit high but I don't know the details.

geerlingguy 6y ago
> 10Gbit network adapters [...] are a lot more expensive than 1Gbit chipsets. You're not kidding! I'm working on updating a lot of my network to 10 GbE, and it's kind of insane how you can get by with super-cheap hardware, cabling, connectors, etc. for 1 Gbps and everything works fine... but when you go to 2.5 or 5 Gbps, prices increase a bit (and the need for better cables with more shielding arises). When you hit 10 Gbps, there's a lot more expense on every layer, especially the chips/cards that you connect to your computers. The difference is something like $5-10 for 1 Gbps devices, vs $150+ for 10 Gbps devices (in many cases... there are exceptions).
- moonbug 6y ago
  grab connectx3s from eBay, they're 20-30 quid a pop.
  - 6y ago

colechristensen 6y ago

WiFi is very much worse than ethernet in dense apartment housing. With gigabit internet service, getting 90% is easy wired, getting 30% wireless is lucky. In a <1000 sq ft apartment my wireless performance depends on the room. Basically on the physical layer wireless is very busy with collisions and retransmitting. Better performance can come with some tuning, but ultimately it is quite limited. I plug in all the devices I can conveniently.

mrbonner 6y ago

I wired my PS4 to the CAT6 cable to the router and it has zero issue. Comparing to that, when it was connected to wifi just 10 feet away, I ran into all sort of issues with latency and drop packets when playing FPS games online.

nisa 6y ago

1. 10Gbe copper requires fast switching and more shielding - there was a discussion here a few days ago that it's still very expensive - there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon that is a compromise on price/complexity and speed. 2. As someone developing part-time with others on a community mesh network if you somehow can use a wire use the wire. no discussion. 802.11ax (wifi 6) does improve quite a lot, but in the end there a quite a few requirements to reach 1.3gbps. noise, distance, mimo-antennas, driver-issues, fresnel-zone should be free, enough free channels to blast 80mhz of wifi data through the air at 1024QAM - all devices must speak wifi 6 - then there is latency due to aggretation and due to the high bitrates the distance is usally very low. On the one hand you have reliable 110mbyte/s on wire vs. maybe sometimes a little bit more via wifi.

moonbug 6y ago
>there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon NBase-T is the magic, will train 2.5, 5 or 10g over cat5e, depending on the cabling
jsjohnst 6y ago
> 10Gbe copper requires fast switching and more shielding That depends greatly on your cable length. A 50ft run (about the distance commonly found from switch to device in an average home) will _easily_ operate trouble free and full speed over Cat5e. It’s only necessary to use Cat6/Cat6A/Cat7 when you are going over long cable lengths (most reputable sources say ~125ft is the max for reliable 10GbE over Cat5e, adding an additional ~50ft for Cat6, and up to ~330ft for 6a/7)

mlyle 6y ago

> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? "Per-port", 2.5gbps is cheaper than fast wireless. But one fast wireless interface on a router can work in a star configuration with many devices. You can get a 2.5gbase-T card for $30. You can get an 8 port 2.5gbase-T switch with 2 10gbit SFP+ uplinks for $450. This will run circles around any wireless network in practice. Decent 802.11ax adds more than $30 to your device in most cases. And a router with good 802.11ax is still a couple hundred bucks. It'd be even cheaper, but 1gbps is good enough for 'most everyone, so we have to deal with repurposing low-end business stuff instead of consumer gear.

wil421 6y ago

You can get 10 gigabit with Ethernet. 10gb switches and especially 10gb NICs from retired servers are getting cheaper. After you upgrade to a 10gb you might need to use something other than SATA drives to reach the full potential. At least for a NAS. I’d benefit from faster restores and transferring 4K video.

topspin 6y ago

> Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? Absolutely not. Wired gigabit ethernet is far better than wifi; on a small wired network the packet loss is negligible and contention is non-existent, so the network is smooth and fast. You get better than 80% of theoretical wire speed in file transfers. Remote desktops have minimum latency. Every couple months another wifi router zero-day pops up and some huge fraction of all such routers become vulnerable to remote attacks. It's nice not being involved in that mess. My fellow remote colleagues with wifi sound terrible on their contended networks; dropping packets and getting cut off calls. The people with wired connections like myself are always glitch free. Wifi is for toys and casual use. Ethernet is for work.

zelly 6y ago

Just pull fiber and you or the next owner won't have to worry about it in the next 50 years. You can buy pre-terminated or use quick connectors. Most don't realize that fiber is cheaper to produce than copper; the expense comes from the fancy SFP switches and routers. Wireless is horrible. In urban settings, the RF pollution will lead to all kinds of misery. If you are doing anything important with the connection, it must be wired. It's also bad security because I can drive by in a van and knock out your whole block's internet connections because so many people equate internet with WiFi.

fvv 6y ago
Yeah also fiber are smaller and can help sometimes.. and have no length issues like copper

josteink 6y ago

> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Only if you read the advertised speeds instead of measuring. Also wired networking has the benefit of not using a shared medium, so all wired clients get full capacity each, vs wireless where all clients share the bandwidth. Wired is so much better for almost any task I throw at it, by a magnitude at least, so the only units in my house left to wireless are phones, tablets and non-work laptops.

jcrawfordor 6y ago

Although slowly, 2.5gbps ethernet is starting to land. I have a few devices in my house now with 2.5gbps interfaces, my hangup has been that I currently have a commercial GbE switch that was moderately expensive and I'm not feeling the need to replace it with a 2.5gbps switch that will be quite expensive (and if I really wanted to I could get full speed on some ports with SFP). But not feeling the need, I think, kind of makes the point... WiFi has to continuously push to higher and higher speeds in large part because for various fundamental reasons WiFi is not able to deliver speed with consistency. Packet loss, jitter, contention, and periodic serious disruptions in connectivity are the norm for WiFi, and very high speeds offer more overhead to tolerate these problems. Unlike Ethernet, WiFi is also fundamentally half-duplex and contentious between multiple devices, so very high speeds and MIMO techniques (as well as beam steering and other more cutting-edge technology) are used to mitigate this. All of these enhancements are aimed towards allowing WiFi to consistently and reliably achieve 100mbps and more in practice - something which even the latest WiFi standards still struggle with in much of the "real world." By contrast, GbE can consistently deliver gigabit performance, full duplex, non-collision with only slight overhead, and a very high degree of consistency. Gigabit ethernet already allows saturation of most storage devices in consumer use, so from a practical perspective, there aren't many reasons anyone would want more--going to 2.5, 5, or 10GbE in a home network is not likely to allow you to actually do anything faster because at that volume of data you're probably reading from or writing to storage, and consumer storage devices cannot reach even gigabit speeds. Likewise there are few or no consumer devices capable of generating instantaneous/real-time data volumes over GbE, the ones that are are moving uncompressed video, e.g. HDMI at 10-20gbps, which is both beyond what "faster" ethernet specs currently readily available can do, and it's just something that few people seem to want - there aren't many situations where you're moving video over a distance longer than an HDMI cable and you aren't willing to compress it. I actually have an unusually demanding situation as I have a project that involves moving multiple high-rate IQ streams from large-bandwidth SDRs over the network. Even here, CPU and I/O issues on the sending devices are consistently a bigger problem for me than the actual network. There are SDRs with highly optimized network support that allow them to achieve real-time rates in the Gbps range, but they cost so much that owners of such devices aren't going to have a problem investing in commercial network equipment. It feels a bit lame to say that "GbE is fast enough," but for consumer cases I think this is largely true. The only thing I can see changing it is moving full-rate video around, but video streaming has already been captured for consumers by vendor-specific systems that use compression, and "works fine" within an ecosystem even over WiFi.

Nextgrid 6y ago

> WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired WiFi absolutely does not. This is a test in lab conditions, with a single, stationary device and no stats on packet loss. Unless you're happy to use your device in these conditions (but at this point why not use a wire?), this does not represent the real-world conditions in which you'd be using the device. If he tries again with people moving around and moving the devices around, with more people using the wireless network at the same time, he'd see much more different results especially when it comes to stability. Stability is the main problem with Wi-Fi. It's relatively easy to get a huge speed test, it's harder to maintain a stable latency and no packet loss. It doesn't help that operating systems aren't good at reporting this information to the user, so the Wi-Fi always appears to work (with decent speeds) until it totally craps out when you launch an interactive application (like calling or multiplayer gaming) where low latency is paramount and the error correction/retransmission algorithms can't do their thing fast enough).

x3iv130f 6y ago

Single all in one modem/router/access points are popular because they are incredibly easy go set up and that is about it. The only people who don't run Ethernet cable are those who are too lazy to bother. The second any sort of performance becomes important you will need to find dedicated devices with Ethernet running inbetween. My parent's house is 100% wireless however I had to run extended lengths of Cat 5e to set up multiple wireless access points. We have multiple 4k TVs on different sides of the house. There was no way we could keep decent speeds and wireless coverage without running cable. Even for my Android phone. I will occaisonally use a wired Ethernet connection to speed up downloads.

penglish1 6y ago

Q: 1a. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? A: WiFi does not exceed the price/performance of hard-wired Ethernet. They are different enough it is difficult to compare properly - for instance, for wired Ethernet, do you include the cost of the wire installation, termination, etc? I don't think it is reasonable to include - complex wiring gets more expensive - potentially by an order of magnitude! Fiber can be much more expensive than copper.. or cheaper. Fiber transcievers get very expensive for very long distances (miles) etc. So to do a simple comparison - 10GbE vs. Wifi. Let assume you are adding these to a computer which doesn't have them. The Wifi adapter is $26.90 A 2.5GbE adapter is $30 What about the network switch? (or wifi access point) Typically with wired ethernet, you do this as a "cost per port" - currently about $25/port on the low end (rated at 10Gbps, by the way, but able to step down to 2.5Gbps). This (top performing "high end") Wifi router runs $250. It may officially support 200+ clients but that just means it can theoretically talk to them at all. Good luck pushing actual data to/from them! In practice, to match up in cost/performance with a 10 port ethernet switch, it would need to drive the full 2.5Gbps for 10 clients simultaneously! I guarantee you it can't. And the price equation only gets better if you go full 10Gbps - which is probably the "sweet spot" right now for price/performance, buying in SOHO-sized quantities. Q1b: The ethernet standard is pretty excellent, and currently goes to 400Gbps, and if you have the cash to buy 400Gbps equipment - you can basically expect it to work to spec - if the switch fabric says it will support X Tbps concurrently - it will. Good luck with that on Wifi. There is a TON of demand - you just don't see it in your house. Or your neighbor's house. Or your friend's house. You should though! Ethernet is AWESOME - and back when we had wired landlines, people ran those wires all over their house. It isn't that hard, or that expensive, and you'll get MUCH better, more predictable performance from doing it, and moving as many devices as you can to wired ethernet. Even your WiFi access point benefits from an ethernet cable running to a location where it's signal works best, rather than some closet off in the corner of your house. Q2: Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all blasting full strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi performance actually near as good as wired performance? A: No, real life wifi is nowhere near as good as ethernet. Switch to ethernet as much as you can! Of course, it doesn't make much sense to run an ethernet cable to the tablet you read sitting on your couch. But every desk, printer(?), your WAP(s), etc.

jacquesm 6y ago

Latency and reliability on WiFi, even the best, pales in comparison to a simple UTP cable. Besides that, you're always just one step away from some security issue in the WiFi stack that might leave you wide open to abuse from nearby stations.

vel0city 6y ago

The rated speed of your access point is essentially shared with all clients in that channel. So if you've got 16 devices, they all share that few gigabits of potential airtime assuming they have all nearly perfect connections to the AP. My 16-port gigabit switch can handle 32Gbit of switching, significantly more throughput than the latest WiFi can even hope to achieve in ideal circumstances. Adding more capacity is buying another switch. Depending on the existing density and RF noise of the area, you might not be able to add much more density even with adding more APs. I think its more that we're seeing wireless get somewhat competitive with its wired counterparts in the home, not necessarily that its surpassing it. Its still not as reliable as wired. Unless you live in a anechoic chamber you're going to get dropped frames from time to time, requiring retransmits and increasing your jitter. If you're experiencing that on your wired networking, you either messed up your cable runs or you need to step outside of your microwave oven. That said, 10GbE+ outside of the datacenter has been a long time coming. Its there, but its not very widespread. Most devices tend to use a good bit of power and are rather expensive. On top of that, unless you're doing something datacenter-like (using a SAN or building HPC cluster) you usually don't experience much of a difference. In the few instances where you might want more throughput, you can often set up your devices in a LAGG to combine multiple gigabit ports to increase aggregate throughput.

rayiner 6y ago

> How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? 10-gige is already cheap and 40-gige is coming down in price. There is just no need for it at home. I have my house wired with 10gige, and > gigabit fiber internet, and literally can’t notice when switching to wireless. 500 mbps should be enough for anyone.

rektide 6y ago

Markets don't innovate unless pushed into competition & ethernet has had so little pressure to innovate. I think there's a lot of parallels here to another article today, on webcams being ultra-uncompetitive. Discussion also talked about monitors in the same way. There's a very low expectations for these products & few people trying for better. There is 2.5Gbit and 5Gbit ethernet happening. These are both significantly easier to implement than 10Gbit, which everyone is withholding, reserving for "enterprise" ("who needs that much speed?") but the whole thing screams scam, when far far more complicated wifi chips are so cheap, when 40 & 100Gbit are not that expensive. 10Gbit is not easy but all these 5Gbit, 2.5Gbit options; it strikes me as more about tiering, about having a range of products to sell, rather than update to something modern. Everyone is upgrading at minimum possible speed while leaving pricier options free of competition. Meanwhile, intel just shipped two 40Gbps USB4 ports on their new cpu chip. Which can directly connect two computers with just a regular cable. Unlike ethernet this is very short range though, measured in meters. Although rumblings about optical keep showing up, which would throw everything into chaos. Wifi though, now, is multi-gigabit. It's making ethernet look bad.

deleted 6y ago

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ksec 6y ago

>WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Those are best case performance. i.e Standing next to the Router. In most cases you wont be getting 1Gbps from WiFi. But having said that, WiFi is improving at the rate simply because there is a much larger market to drive its volume, and amortised R&D. WiFi is included in every laptop, tablet, Smartphones and many other applications. That is nearly 2 Billion devices a year. Compared to Ethernet, you are looking at Desktop PC, Servers and other much smaller niche like NAS. Not to mention faster WiFI ( aka WiFi 6 ) is an easier sell to consumers than faster Ethernet which is really only aiming at prosumers. First draft of WiFi 7 will arrive in a few months time. >is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice Always use wired if you have a choice.