9 ms·
1. WiFi price/performance does not exceed wired connections. Real-world WiFi performance typically falls well below the advertised maximum. You're much more lik
by 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 agoThis 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 agoThis is another in-depth writeup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564
- fvv 6y agoMesh 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 ago5Ghz 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.
- colordrops 6y agoJust started wiring up my house with a Ubiquiti Unifi 4x4 mesh and it's been performing as advertised.
- benlivengood 6y agoThe key to good mesh wifi is to have wired mesh routers (at least with google/nest wifi). That still means one or two cat6 runs but better than a switch and as many cat6 runs as you need in every room. Wired connections will also have stable latency.
- rand49an 6y agoThat's not a mesh, that's just multiple access points broadcasting the same SSID.
- tesin 6y agoWired or wireless backhaul doesn't alter mesh capabilities? Multiple access points is merely range extending and is a much poorer solution, with no proper handoff and usually at half speed.
- rnicholus 6y agoHandoff is handled by the client, not the AP. Mesh is useful when you can’t hardwire multiple APs. Otherwise, you’re much better off with wiring up multiple APs on the same SSID/auth with non-overlapping channels.
- elcomet 6y agoThat's where you're wrong, and this is the difference between wired meshes and multiple access points. Wired meshes will handle the handoff (and do it better than devices, with no downtime). Multiple APs will not.
- fomine3 6y agoI want wired mesh but never want wireless mesh to avoid inconsistent performance. Sadly there's very few wired mesh APs meanwhile many expensive wireless mesh APs available.
- 6y ago
- e12e 6y agoAlso remember that in most ways, wireless is more like a hub, than using a switch. Fundamentally all wireless peers share the bandwidth (they can share it differently, but they share) - with a typical ethernet switch (i haven't seen a hub in years, let alone coax...) - you get 1gbps duplex between any two peers simultaneously (these day probably without much problems at 1gbps, depending on hardware at higher speeds and multiple ports - but much closer than with wireless, anyway). I think the "leap" to 10gbps was a bit too far for consumer grade switches - and "too fast" - faster than your SSD - so it didn't make much sense. Hight cost, low real world benefit. In a lot of situations, you'll likely only use 10gbps in order for your NAS to talk to multiple clients, each around 1-2gbps duplex.
- formerly_proven 6y ago2.5 GbE is starting to become quite common on midrange motherboards, still uncommon in switches though.
- fomine3 6y ago2.5GbE adoption for consumer PC is in progress by Intel i225 controller but sadly the controller is buggy.
- formerly_proven 6y agoOverall most boards seem to sport the RTL8125 controller instead. Which doesn't exactly inspire all that much confidence either to be honest... https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbp4_1200&xf=17256_1&asuch=&bpmin=&bpmax=&v=e&dist=&mail=&fcols=4770&sort=p&bl1_id=30 https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbp4_1200&xf=17256_1&asuch=&bpmin=&... https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&xf=17256_1&asuch=&bpmin=&bpmax=&v=e&dist=&fcols=4770&sort=p&bl1_id=30 https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&xf=17256_1&asuch=&bpmin=&bpma...
- tw04 6y agoI think it was less "too fast" and more that 10gbase-t is crazy power hungry and significantly reduced run length. End result is basically 0 adoption in the enterprise so there was little to no trickle down to the consumer market. The power draw also made it extremely difficult to make a 10gbt dongle for laptops and extremely expensive to put on a desktop motherboard.
- strenholme 6y agoWell, I’m not going to rewire my house, but I put all of the servers, including the Raspberry Pi, in the same room as the router, so they can all be connected online with cables.
- walshemj 6y agoI am certainly glad about 18 months ago I totally renewed the home network to GB powerline and upgraded to Vodaphone business when demon was finally switched off. And 5G is good but you still need a wired DS and several AP's potentialy one per room.