17 ms·

Their secret for workplace Zen: Landlines and ethernet cords

115 points by imartin2k 5y ago

jccalhoun 5y ago
If cords are for old people, then I'm old. Everything in my house that has an ethernet jack on it is wired. I have two switches for everything and I live alone.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.ph/SFhwq https://archive.ph/SFhwq
10729287 5y ago
The picture of her netgear monstrosity plugged in is everything but zen to me.
uneekname 5y ago
An ethernet connection is a must for me. Unless I'm traveling somewhere and need to log in on someone else's network, it's a pain to deal with wifi's slow speeds and connection issues, even in 2022.
- TrainedMonkey 5y ago
  This is probably highly subjective, but I rarely have WiFi issues. I think primary driver there is investing in a stable home networking equipment.
  - nextos 5y ago
    Even with high end networking equipment (at work), I have found WiFi introduces a lot of latency which is noticeable when e.g. SSHing to other machines.
    - ericd 5y ago
      I’m in no ways an expert on this, so someone please correct me if it’s wrong, but one of the things that I learned that was surprising was that one client with marginal reception can really dominate the airtime with retries, effectively DOSing your wifi network. So good coverage is also pretty key.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        That may explain why some people have more trouble with wifi than others. I have a lot of wifi devices, but I also have four ubiquiti access points with good overlapping coverage. Using wifi instead of wired ethernet costs me about 1.5ms more latency.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Can you quantify "a lot of latency"? It should be...a few microseconds more latency? I have to guess the high end networking equipment was configured incorrectly or something. I ssh to machines on my network from wired and wireless devices and it is impossible to tell what kind of network you're on when doing so.
      - 10000truths 5y ago
        Latency highly depends on interference and attenuation. If you’re sitting right next to a 5 GHz AP that’s used exclusively by you, then your latency should be minimal. If you’re trying to connect to a router behind a couple of brick walls, or your roommate is using a leaky microwave, or you’re in a convention where everyone’s trying to connect to the same WiFi, then you’ll notice it in a video call, multiplayer shooter, slow-loading webpage, or anywhere else where double-digit-% dropped packets matter.
      - nextos 5y ago
        Latency is a few tens of ms (milliseconds) larger. It's not that much, but it matters to me. It's like keyboards, as measured by Dan Luu [1]. I can totally feel the difference between some listed on that web. Stacks are adding up a lot of latency, and I'm trying to remove as much as I can from my configuration. An extreme comparison is to run Emacs in text mode with Ethernet, a good wired connection and USB Magic Keyboard vs Emacs on a heavy desktop environment, WiFi and a laggy wireless keyboard. Night and day difference. On the second one, there's a lot of lag. [1] https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
  - dijonman2 5y ago
    Based on the anecdote Inread home wifi works great, other network APs do not.
  - coward123 5y ago
    I agree with you, but: -- It took a lot of years to get here. -- It took expensive equipment to get here. -- I'm lucky that my house doesn't have a lot of brick or steel or some other material that blocks signals -- I still believe that wired is more secure. -- When it's wired, I know it's either working or it's my ISPs fault. When it's wireless, I'm left doubting.
denimnerd42 5y ago
I don't like doing any kind of daily team voice conversation on the telephone network. my colleagues globally and those on cell phones sound like complete garbage. I'd much prefer something like mumble or discord for daily team calls but alas..
- vidanay 5y ago
  It's absolutely astounding how far phone call audio quality has fallen in the last 30 years. I'd kill to have routine narrow-band analog POTS phone calls again.
  - gkop 5y ago
    > in the last 30 years Isn’t the biggest contributor the discrete transition from circuit-switched copper to packet-switched data? You imply some sort of gradual erosion.. But anyhow yea, kids today will never know the special intimacy yielded by the low latency of a circuit-switched landline call.
    - vidanay 5y ago
      Yeah, for sure it was probably a five-year transition period, and crap since then.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > It's absolutely astounding how far phone call audio quality has fallen in the last 30 years. I'd kill to have routine narrow-band analog POTS phone calls again. What? The calls where the network saves bandwidth by dropping audible frequencies from each party's voice, so everyone sounds bizarre over the telephone? That's not the kind of thing I associate with "audio quality".
    - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
      The low latency is pretty nice, but ya the actual audio quality is nothing to brag about.
ryandrake 5y ago
Maybe I'm showing my old age, but I never thought of Wi-Fi networking or mobile voice as anything other than "toy" technologies, unsuitable for SeriousBusiness™. Wi-Fi is what you use very temporarily at a coffee shop or something when you simply have to log in to deal with an emergency while on the go. But, for serious daily driver usage, it's wired all the way. First thing I did when I moved into my home was crawl under the crawlspace and run two CAT 6 drops to each room. If I were to be hired by a company and went into their office the first day, and they said, "so the corporate Wi-Fi SSID is..." well, I'd kind of not take them really seriously as a business. I realize with today's much better Wi-Fi and cellular technologies, that this is an emotional response and there's no rational facts behind the way I feel. Just an artifact of growing up with "wired = reliable".
- carlio 5y ago
  I'm not sure "I refuse to adapt or change" is a desirable trait in a new employee anyway so probably the relationship would be mutually suspicious.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    To me "I refuse to adapt or change" is one of the most undesirable traits for an employer when some type of innovation needs to be accomplished then deployed.
- turtlebits 5y ago
  Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. IME, ever since 802.11ac (~2014), wifi has been fast enough to not need to be wired in.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Honestly this reads as painfully naive. Maybe you’ve never worked with radio communications before in which case I definitely give you the benefit of the doubt for not knowing this: But wifi (just like other radio tech like 4G) has limited capacity, and that capacity is shared across all radio systems- this sounds obvious but when you realise how few devices can be talking simultaneously you will understand what an absolute pain this is. Most of the huge gains in wifi technology (and 3g-4g) is not just making assumptions about what a signal is based on the leading and trailing edge of the wave of the transmission: mostly it’s about collision detection algorithms. Collision detection, by necessity, adds undeterminable latency to your connection, it’s literally how it works. So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time. Worse: that room full of people is not _just_ that room full of people. Wifi works in 3 dimensions, you’ll be competing with your upstairs and downstairs neighbours too.
legitster 5y ago
I bought a giant spool of Cat-6 cable and now I run around like Johnny Ethernet-seed upgrading my friends' internet. For most homes, you know exactly where your datahogs are going to be - computer desk, smart tv, consoles, etc. People are addicted to the convenience of running everything through the air, but an hour in a crawlspace and you've got something faster and more reliable.
- vageli 5y ago
  Forget the crawlspace. If there is no spouse involved you can just throw the cord out the window and connect it downstairs.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    I'm guessing you live in a very temperate region with no insects. LOL
    - tedunangst 5y ago
      You can usually sneak the thinner flat ethernet cables through the window seal without much gap.
      - hyperman1 5y ago
        Thanks for your answer. I was wondering what kind of insects were eating plastic cables. Doh!
      - traceroute66 5y ago
        > flat ethernet cables Ethernet cables are round and have twisted pairs inside for a reason. CAT6 etc. have a plastic spine running down the middle for a reason. Flat cables are NOT ethernet and they are not "CAT" anything. They don't comply to any standards whatsoever. Don't waste your money supporting an industry making products that should not exist.
        5y ago
egypturnash 5y ago
Then came the spam calls. At all hours. Dr. Ozimek knew, in his heart, that no one he wanted to talk to was ringing. And yet. “That’s how we were raised. You run to answer the phone,” he says. “It’s like if someone walks up to you and says hello and you were to just stare them in the face and not respond.” After a few months of nonstop ringing, he gave up and unplugged it. Dr. Ozimek has evidently completely forgotten the other part of a wired telephone: the answering machine. It's like voice mail except it's in a little box next to your phone that plays the message as it's being recorded, and automatically stops if you pick up the phone. Which did lead to messages like "Hello? Hello, Peggy? I know you're there. Pick up the phone. Pick up pick up pick up... Okay, I guess you're out. Um, I got your thing, call me when you get back and we'll talk about pickup times. Monday and Thursday evening next week are probably good for me."
mauvehaus 5y ago
For context, some parts of Lexington are pretty dense. I don't know if anywhere there as dense as the part of Jamaica Plain that I used to live in, but I had to pull CAT-6 because from my desk I could see a dozen and a half Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi was hopeless as a result.
- notacoward 5y ago
  I've lived in Lexington for 22 years (two houses) and practically nowhere in it is dense by any reasonable standard. Other than a mere handful of apartment developments it's practically all single-family zoned, with larger lot-size requirements than many other towns nearby. I just don't know how that can seem dense to someone who used to live in JP. What is true is that the 2.4GHz band can get a bit crowded, because every one of those standalone houses has multiple overpowered APs, plus other devices using (or interfering with) that band. On 5GHz, with more channels and less range, it's not so bad. With modern gear that can do MIMO and automatically select the least crowded channel, plus a wired backhaul between router/APs, those issues disappear entirely. It has been months since I or any other member of my family has noticed any issues at all with our wifi network, never any related to neighbors' activity, and we're in a completely typical part of town. You just have to use something other than the POS that Verizon/Comcast provides. (In case anyone's wondering: Netgear Orbi, one for every ~1000sf, all connections via Ethernet except for one that's G.hn powerline. Before that I had Synology MR2200s on a wireless backhaul, very occasional bad moments, and then one fried itself.)
- lostmsu 5y ago
  How's the Internet in Lexington? Is there a reliable 1Gbps+ provider?
TacticalCoder 5y ago
One aspect of Ethernet I do really like is that when a computer has, physically, no ability to do WiFi (as is the case on many desktop motherboards) you know through what exactly your device is connecting. If your device has wifi capabilities, you suddenly gained wonderful features: like for example your smart TV using your neighbour's Amazon echo (or whatever the latest evil scheme is these days) to report your viewing habits to advertizers. I've got WiFi for my "fun" computer: a Mac M1 laptop for the couch. For my serious computer (a high end Linux desktop machine with a gigantic screen) it's ethernet.
deleted 5y ago
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countvonbalzac 5y ago
[flagged]
motoboi 5y ago
UPDATE: It's fine to plug a cable if you want. I’m so tired of trying to convince friends to get a mesh Wi-Fi network. Guys, it’s 2022: get a Wi-Fi device per room (or one per two rooms) and be happy with your gigabit bulletproof Wi-Fi network. It’s expensive? Yeah. No pain no gain. Why? 2,4Ghz networks are from an era where Wi-Fi networks were rare and thus you had no interference. Today, you are surrounded by (literally) hundreds of networks and your tiny packages need to fight for airtime on those 11 channels. The only viable solution is 5Ghz Wi-Fi (not to be confounded with 5G mobile network). It comes with much more channels and it doesn’t traverse walls so well (it’s a good thing, because your neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal won’t interfere in yours). So you need at most a wall between you device and the wifi router. So, nowadays the solution is: several routers on the house, interconnected via a wireless link (not regular Wi-Fi) in a mesh network. You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  I really hope this is sarcasm. Are you really suggesting an AP in every room? An AP and a router are not the same thing, and neither will give you a very very low latency 1.5 GB wireless connection in my experience.
  - motoboi 5y ago
    yeah. one wifi router (or ap if you want) per room (or on per two rooms). In a mesh network. Interconnected via wireless (not regular wifi). this is the way. Or you can plug a cable in your notebook and be happy.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    What's wrong with one AP per room? That's exactly how it should be and indeed gives you bulletproof performance & reliability. Wi-Fi should be your home's "last mile" and everything before that should be wired. The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole, but in my case I'm regularly seeing ~500Mbps both ways and very consistent latency with no sudden spikes. Most wireless problems are due to there being a single AP that's barely within reach causing tons of retransmissions which makes any real-time application (such as calls) unusable. It doesn't help that Wi-Fi signal strength meters are completely useless (maybe they should measure actual packet loss instead of RSSI which is only part of the picture) so end-users are unable to tell what's actually going on. Having APs always within line of sight of the client device solves all these problems.
paxys 5y ago
Why do people associate ethernet cords with old outdated technology? I have found that newer houses are much more likely to be wired up with jacks in every room, and it is trivial to plug in your laptop through a dock or a cheap adapter. Most people I work with do exactly this. Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.
- ghaff 5y ago
  If you’re building a new house it’s close to free to run a bunch of Ethernet in the scheme of things so why not. But at some point you do draw a line. I probably wouldn’t run speaker wire everywhere these days. And I’m always grabbing a laptop and taking it to another room; I have a separate desktop. So I prefer to keep my laptops untethered as much as possible.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    Back in 99 my mom was building a new townhouse. I had them run cat-5 everywhere. I also had them run a 3" stack down the utility wall. The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots. We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived. I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
    - na85 5y ago
      >I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. Nah. Two houses ago I couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working. Turns out the builders had wired it up completely randomly, i.e. it didn't go orange-white, orange, green-white, brown... and each termination was different. I had to redo them all.
deleted 5y ago
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tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Wired Ethernet is not only more stable, it is so stable that it's way down on your list of things to debug, so when you have any kind of network issue, you don't have to start with checking whether the WiFi is connected.
gyulai 5y ago
> Landlines and Ethernet Cords [...] early 2000s technology 2000s? You'd expect better fact checking from the WSJ. I take it the author is young enough for all of this stuff to just blend into an amorphous chunk of history corresponding vaguely to "what my parents mean when they speak of the olden days".
- rewgs 5y ago
  I mean...yes, from 2000 to 20005 (the "early 2000s") I indeed had a landline and ethernet cords. Just because a technology preceded the time the author mentioned doesn't mean it didn't also exist in that time.
  - gyulai 5y ago
    But then the choice of early 2000s as a reference is just arbitrary. I mean: I have both ethernet and landline now, having never discontinued my use of them and not intending to do so in the foreseeable future. (The landline is VoIP-through-DSL, but I have a hardware VoIP phone connected to the DSL router, and the DSL itself runs on the infrastructure that was originally put into the ground and the house for use with landline phones, so in that sense both the infrastructure and the end user device could still be referred to as "landline"). The timeframe where Ethernet ascended to displace other modes of networking was mostly the 90s, though its history dates back to much earlier time periods. The only thing that's peculiar about the early 00s is that this marks the time period when PCs had already squarely displaced mainframes in business contexts and also found their way into private homes and WiFi hadn't yet broken into the mass market. (Wikipedia tells me the WiFi alliance was founded in late 1997, but I don't personally remember anyone using it until the early 00s). So, maybe in an "oral history" sense a reference to the early 00s seems justifiable as that may be what one's personal associations are. But, then again, that's the exact thing I'm poking fun at when I say "amorphous chunk of history" corresponding to the "olden days".
zekica 5y ago
The main issue that no mainstream user knows about is bufferbloat. If you use WiFi APs and devices that support AQM and airtime fairness, you'll never know that there is a user on your wifi with low signal as they wouldn't be able to use all the airtime.
m-i-l 5y ago
No mention of HomePlug/Powerline? Turns the power lines in your house into a wired LAN - plug one into your router and a mains wall socket and the other(s) into mains wall socket(s) in other room(s) to get you wired network connection(s) in that/those room(s). I've been happily using them for years, after struggling with WiFi in a large L-shaped loft-conversion that had a lot of lead cladding. Now everything that can be wired is wired, i.e. devices that are rarely moved, reserving WiFi for just the devices that need WiFi, i.e. devices that are often moved, e.g. mobile phones and the car outside. The other transformative thing for me was moving to fibre to the home. The fibre to the cabinet in the area suffered massive contention issues (didn't matter who your provider was because they all used the same cabinets). In the old days when the copper cabinets reached capacity they would stop taking new subscribers, but in recent years they've just been wiring more and more people in and hoping not too many people would use it at once. Which of course they did when the working from home and home schooling started 2 years ago, leading to everyone in the area having multiple sometimes multi-hour internet outages a day, which was a complete nightmare. The recently-installed fibre to the home removes the contention issues, so when combined with the HomePlug/Powerline wired connections where-ever possible, everything has been rock solid. Only mentioning the fibre to the home as an example of where new technology does actually make things significantly better rather than worse.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  I bought a set of powerline network adapters once, from a reputable manufacturer. While they work flawlessly, they have an extremely annoying side effect that made me pop them out an hour after I first installed them. I ran an ethernet cable instead (now I'm using them again in a different place). They turn the powerlines into radio antennae and all my semi-professional studio headphones tend to pick that signal up as really distracting digital clicking and humming noise.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  YMMV - I've never had any luck with Ethernet-over-power boxes, but it's very dependent on the quality and topology of house wiring. Fibre to the home, on the other hand ... super amazing. Rock solid 1Gb full duplex (and for busy torrents I actually hit 120Mb/s!) ... but it's all about the latency: I have (according to mtr) <85ms with StdDev<1 from home in .NL to OVH in .QC.CA.
Aeolun 5y ago
I want a way to plug my old landline phone to my PC, but basically every solution I’ve found does away with the bell because it’s hard to get them to ring.
gandalfian 5y ago
Start of lockdown I ordered my brother an eBay $5 7m ethernet cable so he could run it down the hall from his WiFi router to desktop pc. He is in an urban apartment block and can literally see 50+ WiFi networks.... Greatly improved things. I had thought of powerline adaptors but last time I gave him a pair to self install he said they were too slow and on visiting I found he had managed to connect them to a flat three floors down through two electricity meters? An Ethernet cable was easier for him to self install
dghughes 5y ago
The term "iPhone" to many people means a phone, any phone. The term Wifi seems to mean a network. I've asked people to try a network cable and they are baffled by my words. edit: at the very least if no cable connection is possible use 2.4GHz since it goes through walls better.

115 points by imartin2k 5y ago

If cords are for old people, then I'm old. Everything in my house that has an ethernet jack on it is wired. I have two switches for everything and I live alone.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.ph/SFhwq https://archive.ph/SFhwq

10729287 5y ago

The picture of her netgear monstrosity plugged in is everything but zen to me.

uneekname 5y ago

An ethernet connection is a must for me. Unless I'm traveling somewhere and need to log in on someone else's network, it's a pain to deal with wifi's slow speeds and connection issues, even in 2022.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago
This is probably highly subjective, but I rarely have WiFi issues. I think primary driver there is investing in a stable home networking equipment.
- nextos 5y ago
  Even with high end networking equipment (at work), I have found WiFi introduces a lot of latency which is noticeable when e.g. SSHing to other machines.
  - ericd 5y ago
    I’m in no ways an expert on this, so someone please correct me if it’s wrong, but one of the things that I learned that was surprising was that one client with marginal reception can really dominate the airtime with retries, effectively DOSing your wifi network. So good coverage is also pretty key.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      That may explain why some people have more trouble with wifi than others. I have a lot of wifi devices, but I also have four ubiquiti access points with good overlapping coverage. Using wifi instead of wired ethernet costs me about 1.5ms more latency.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Can you quantify "a lot of latency"? It should be...a few microseconds more latency? I have to guess the high end networking equipment was configured incorrectly or something. I ssh to machines on my network from wired and wireless devices and it is impossible to tell what kind of network you're on when doing so.
    - 10000truths 5y ago
      Latency highly depends on interference and attenuation. If you’re sitting right next to a 5 GHz AP that’s used exclusively by you, then your latency should be minimal. If you’re trying to connect to a router behind a couple of brick walls, or your roommate is using a leaky microwave, or you’re in a convention where everyone’s trying to connect to the same WiFi, then you’ll notice it in a video call, multiplayer shooter, slow-loading webpage, or anywhere else where double-digit-% dropped packets matter.
    - nextos 5y ago
      Latency is a few tens of ms (milliseconds) larger. It's not that much, but it matters to me. It's like keyboards, as measured by Dan Luu [1]. I can totally feel the difference between some listed on that web. Stacks are adding up a lot of latency, and I'm trying to remove as much as I can from my configuration. An extreme comparison is to run Emacs in text mode with Ethernet, a good wired connection and USB Magic Keyboard vs Emacs on a heavy desktop environment, WiFi and a laggy wireless keyboard. Night and day difference. On the second one, there's a lot of lag. [1] https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
- dijonman2 5y ago
  Based on the anecdote Inread home wifi works great, other network APs do not.
- coward123 5y ago
  I agree with you, but: -- It took a lot of years to get here. -- It took expensive equipment to get here. -- I'm lucky that my house doesn't have a lot of brick or steel or some other material that blocks signals -- I still believe that wired is more secure. -- When it's wired, I know it's either working or it's my ISPs fault. When it's wireless, I'm left doubting.

denimnerd42 5y ago

I don't like doing any kind of daily team voice conversation on the telephone network. my colleagues globally and those on cell phones sound like complete garbage. I'd much prefer something like mumble or discord for daily team calls but alas..

vidanay 5y ago
It's absolutely astounding how far phone call audio quality has fallen in the last 30 years. I'd kill to have routine narrow-band analog POTS phone calls again.
- gkop 5y ago
  > in the last 30 years Isn’t the biggest contributor the discrete transition from circuit-switched copper to packet-switched data? You imply some sort of gradual erosion.. But anyhow yea, kids today will never know the special intimacy yielded by the low latency of a circuit-switched landline call.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    Yeah, for sure it was probably a five-year transition period, and crap since then.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > It's absolutely astounding how far phone call audio quality has fallen in the last 30 years. I'd kill to have routine narrow-band analog POTS phone calls again. What? The calls where the network saves bandwidth by dropping audible frequencies from each party's voice, so everyone sounds bizarre over the telephone? That's not the kind of thing I associate with "audio quality".
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    The low latency is pretty nice, but ya the actual audio quality is nothing to brag about.

ryandrake 5y ago

Maybe I'm showing my old age, but I never thought of Wi-Fi networking or mobile voice as anything other than "toy" technologies, unsuitable for SeriousBusiness™. Wi-Fi is what you use very temporarily at a coffee shop or something when you simply have to log in to deal with an emergency while on the go. But, for serious daily driver usage, it's wired all the way. First thing I did when I moved into my home was crawl under the crawlspace and run two CAT 6 drops to each room. If I were to be hired by a company and went into their office the first day, and they said, "so the corporate Wi-Fi SSID is..." well, I'd kind of not take them really seriously as a business. I realize with today's much better Wi-Fi and cellular technologies, that this is an emotional response and there's no rational facts behind the way I feel. Just an artifact of growing up with "wired = reliable".

carlio 5y ago
I'm not sure "I refuse to adapt or change" is a desirable trait in a new employee anyway so probably the relationship would be mutually suspicious.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  To me "I refuse to adapt or change" is one of the most undesirable traits for an employer when some type of innovation needs to be accomplished then deployed.
turtlebits 5y ago
Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. IME, ever since 802.11ac (~2014), wifi has been fast enough to not need to be wired in.
- dijit 5y ago
  Honestly this reads as painfully naive. Maybe you’ve never worked with radio communications before in which case I definitely give you the benefit of the doubt for not knowing this: But wifi (just like other radio tech like 4G) has limited capacity, and that capacity is shared across all radio systems- this sounds obvious but when you realise how few devices can be talking simultaneously you will understand what an absolute pain this is. Most of the huge gains in wifi technology (and 3g-4g) is not just making assumptions about what a signal is based on the leading and trailing edge of the wave of the transmission: mostly it’s about collision detection algorithms. Collision detection, by necessity, adds undeterminable latency to your connection, it’s literally how it works. So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time. Worse: that room full of people is not _just_ that room full of people. Wifi works in 3 dimensions, you’ll be competing with your upstairs and downstairs neighbours too.

legitster 5y ago

I bought a giant spool of Cat-6 cable and now I run around like Johnny Ethernet-seed upgrading my friends' internet. For most homes, you know exactly where your datahogs are going to be - computer desk, smart tv, consoles, etc. People are addicted to the convenience of running everything through the air, but an hour in a crawlspace and you've got something faster and more reliable.

vageli 5y ago
Forget the crawlspace. If there is no spouse involved you can just throw the cord out the window and connect it downstairs.
- vidanay 5y ago
  I'm guessing you live in a very temperate region with no insects. LOL
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    You can usually sneak the thinner flat ethernet cables through the window seal without much gap.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      Thanks for your answer. I was wondering what kind of insects were eating plastic cables. Doh!
    - traceroute66 5y ago
      > flat ethernet cables Ethernet cables are round and have twisted pairs inside for a reason. CAT6 etc. have a plastic spine running down the middle for a reason. Flat cables are NOT ethernet and they are not "CAT" anything. They don't comply to any standards whatsoever. Don't waste your money supporting an industry making products that should not exist.
      - 5y ago

egypturnash 5y ago

Then came the spam calls. At all hours. Dr. Ozimek knew, in his heart, that no one he wanted to talk to was ringing. And yet. “That’s how we were raised. You run to answer the phone,” he says. “It’s like if someone walks up to you and says hello and you were to just stare them in the face and not respond.” After a few months of nonstop ringing, he gave up and unplugged it. Dr. Ozimek has evidently completely forgotten the other part of a wired telephone: the answering machine. It's like voice mail except it's in a little box next to your phone that plays the message as it's being recorded, and automatically stops if you pick up the phone. Which did lead to messages like "Hello? Hello, Peggy? I know you're there. Pick up the phone. Pick up pick up pick up... Okay, I guess you're out. Um, I got your thing, call me when you get back and we'll talk about pickup times. Monday and Thursday evening next week are probably good for me."

mauvehaus 5y ago

For context, some parts of Lexington are pretty dense. I don't know if anywhere there as dense as the part of Jamaica Plain that I used to live in, but I had to pull CAT-6 because from my desk I could see a dozen and a half Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi was hopeless as a result.

notacoward 5y ago
I've lived in Lexington for 22 years (two houses) and practically nowhere in it is dense by any reasonable standard. Other than a mere handful of apartment developments it's practically all single-family zoned, with larger lot-size requirements than many other towns nearby. I just don't know how that can seem dense to someone who used to live in JP. What is true is that the 2.4GHz band can get a bit crowded, because every one of those standalone houses has multiple overpowered APs, plus other devices using (or interfering with) that band. On 5GHz, with more channels and less range, it's not so bad. With modern gear that can do MIMO and automatically select the least crowded channel, plus a wired backhaul between router/APs, those issues disappear entirely. It has been months since I or any other member of my family has noticed any issues at all with our wifi network, never any related to neighbors' activity, and we're in a completely typical part of town. You just have to use something other than the POS that Verizon/Comcast provides. (In case anyone's wondering: Netgear Orbi, one for every ~1000sf, all connections via Ethernet except for one that's G.hn powerline. Before that I had Synology MR2200s on a wireless backhaul, very occasional bad moments, and then one fried itself.)
lostmsu 5y ago
How's the Internet in Lexington? Is there a reliable 1Gbps+ provider?

TacticalCoder 5y ago

One aspect of Ethernet I do really like is that when a computer has, physically, no ability to do WiFi (as is the case on many desktop motherboards) you know through what exactly your device is connecting. If your device has wifi capabilities, you suddenly gained wonderful features: like for example your smart TV using your neighbour's Amazon echo (or whatever the latest evil scheme is these days) to report your viewing habits to advertizers. I've got WiFi for my "fun" computer: a Mac M1 laptop for the couch. For my serious computer (a high end Linux desktop machine with a gigantic screen) it's ethernet.

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countvonbalzac 5y ago

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motoboi 5y ago

UPDATE: It's fine to plug a cable if you want. I’m so tired of trying to convince friends to get a mesh Wi-Fi network. Guys, it’s 2022: get a Wi-Fi device per room (or one per two rooms) and be happy with your gigabit bulletproof Wi-Fi network. It’s expensive? Yeah. No pain no gain. Why? 2,4Ghz networks are from an era where Wi-Fi networks were rare and thus you had no interference. Today, you are surrounded by (literally) hundreds of networks and your tiny packages need to fight for airtime on those 11 channels. The only viable solution is 5Ghz Wi-Fi (not to be confounded with 5G mobile network). It comes with much more channels and it doesn’t traverse walls so well (it’s a good thing, because your neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal won’t interfere in yours). So you need at most a wall between you device and the wifi router. So, nowadays the solution is: several routers on the house, interconnected via a wireless link (not regular Wi-Fi) in a mesh network. You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.

candiddevmike 5y ago
I really hope this is sarcasm. Are you really suggesting an AP in every room? An AP and a router are not the same thing, and neither will give you a very very low latency 1.5 GB wireless connection in my experience.
- motoboi 5y ago
  yeah. one wifi router (or ap if you want) per room (or on per two rooms). In a mesh network. Interconnected via wireless (not regular wifi). this is the way. Or you can plug a cable in your notebook and be happy.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  What's wrong with one AP per room? That's exactly how it should be and indeed gives you bulletproof performance & reliability. Wi-Fi should be your home's "last mile" and everything before that should be wired. The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole, but in my case I'm regularly seeing ~500Mbps both ways and very consistent latency with no sudden spikes. Most wireless problems are due to there being a single AP that's barely within reach causing tons of retransmissions which makes any real-time application (such as calls) unusable. It doesn't help that Wi-Fi signal strength meters are completely useless (maybe they should measure actual packet loss instead of RSSI which is only part of the picture) so end-users are unable to tell what's actually going on. Having APs always within line of sight of the client device solves all these problems.

paxys 5y ago

Why do people associate ethernet cords with old outdated technology? I have found that newer houses are much more likely to be wired up with jacks in every room, and it is trivial to plug in your laptop through a dock or a cheap adapter. Most people I work with do exactly this. Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.

ghaff 5y ago
If you’re building a new house it’s close to free to run a bunch of Ethernet in the scheme of things so why not. But at some point you do draw a line. I probably wouldn’t run speaker wire everywhere these days. And I’m always grabbing a laptop and taking it to another room; I have a separate desktop. So I prefer to keep my laptops untethered as much as possible.
- grogenaut 5y ago
  Back in 99 my mom was building a new townhouse. I had them run cat-5 everywhere. I also had them run a 3" stack down the utility wall. The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots. We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived. I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
  - na85 5y ago
    >I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. Nah. Two houses ago I couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working. Turns out the builders had wired it up completely randomly, i.e. it didn't go orange-white, orange, green-white, brown... and each termination was different. I had to redo them all.

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tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Wired Ethernet is not only more stable, it is so stable that it's way down on your list of things to debug, so when you have any kind of network issue, you don't have to start with checking whether the WiFi is connected.

gyulai 5y ago

> Landlines and Ethernet Cords [...] early 2000s technology 2000s? You'd expect better fact checking from the WSJ. I take it the author is young enough for all of this stuff to just blend into an amorphous chunk of history corresponding vaguely to "what my parents mean when they speak of the olden days".

rewgs 5y ago
I mean...yes, from 2000 to 20005 (the "early 2000s") I indeed had a landline and ethernet cords. Just because a technology preceded the time the author mentioned doesn't mean it didn't also exist in that time.
- gyulai 5y ago
  But then the choice of early 2000s as a reference is just arbitrary. I mean: I have both ethernet and landline now, having never discontinued my use of them and not intending to do so in the foreseeable future. (The landline is VoIP-through-DSL, but I have a hardware VoIP phone connected to the DSL router, and the DSL itself runs on the infrastructure that was originally put into the ground and the house for use with landline phones, so in that sense both the infrastructure and the end user device could still be referred to as "landline"). The timeframe where Ethernet ascended to displace other modes of networking was mostly the 90s, though its history dates back to much earlier time periods. The only thing that's peculiar about the early 00s is that this marks the time period when PCs had already squarely displaced mainframes in business contexts and also found their way into private homes and WiFi hadn't yet broken into the mass market. (Wikipedia tells me the WiFi alliance was founded in late 1997, but I don't personally remember anyone using it until the early 00s). So, maybe in an "oral history" sense a reference to the early 00s seems justifiable as that may be what one's personal associations are. But, then again, that's the exact thing I'm poking fun at when I say "amorphous chunk of history" corresponding to the "olden days".

zekica 5y ago

The main issue that no mainstream user knows about is bufferbloat. If you use WiFi APs and devices that support AQM and airtime fairness, you'll never know that there is a user on your wifi with low signal as they wouldn't be able to use all the airtime.

m-i-l 5y ago

No mention of HomePlug/Powerline? Turns the power lines in your house into a wired LAN - plug one into your router and a mains wall socket and the other(s) into mains wall socket(s) in other room(s) to get you wired network connection(s) in that/those room(s). I've been happily using them for years, after struggling with WiFi in a large L-shaped loft-conversion that had a lot of lead cladding. Now everything that can be wired is wired, i.e. devices that are rarely moved, reserving WiFi for just the devices that need WiFi, i.e. devices that are often moved, e.g. mobile phones and the car outside. The other transformative thing for me was moving to fibre to the home. The fibre to the cabinet in the area suffered massive contention issues (didn't matter who your provider was because they all used the same cabinets). In the old days when the copper cabinets reached capacity they would stop taking new subscribers, but in recent years they've just been wiring more and more people in and hoping not too many people would use it at once. Which of course they did when the working from home and home schooling started 2 years ago, leading to everyone in the area having multiple sometimes multi-hour internet outages a day, which was a complete nightmare. The recently-installed fibre to the home removes the contention issues, so when combined with the HomePlug/Powerline wired connections where-ever possible, everything has been rock solid. Only mentioning the fibre to the home as an example of where new technology does actually make things significantly better rather than worse.

gmueckl 5y ago
I bought a set of powerline network adapters once, from a reputable manufacturer. While they work flawlessly, they have an extremely annoying side effect that made me pop them out an hour after I first installed them. I ran an ethernet cable instead (now I'm using them again in a different place). They turn the powerlines into radio antennae and all my semi-professional studio headphones tend to pick that signal up as really distracting digital clicking and humming noise.
thanatos519 5y ago
YMMV - I've never had any luck with Ethernet-over-power boxes, but it's very dependent on the quality and topology of house wiring. Fibre to the home, on the other hand ... super amazing. Rock solid 1Gb full duplex (and for busy torrents I actually hit 120Mb/s!) ... but it's all about the latency: I have (according to mtr) <85ms with StdDev<1 from home in .NL to OVH in .QC.CA.

Aeolun 5y ago

I want a way to plug my old landline phone to my PC, but basically every solution I’ve found does away with the bell because it’s hard to get them to ring.

gandalfian 5y ago

Start of lockdown I ordered my brother an eBay $5 7m ethernet cable so he could run it down the hall from his WiFi router to desktop pc. He is in an urban apartment block and can literally see 50+ WiFi networks.... Greatly improved things. I had thought of powerline adaptors but last time I gave him a pair to self install he said they were too slow and on visiting I found he had managed to connect them to a flat three floors down through two electricity meters? An Ethernet cable was easier for him to self install

dghughes 5y ago

The term "iPhone" to many people means a phone, any phone. The term Wifi seems to mean a network. I've asked people to try a network cable and they are baffled by my words. edit: at the very least if no cable connection is possible use 2.4GHz since it goes through walls better.