What's the criteria?
Speed and reliability? Snakeboi.
Ability to move around unimpeded and/or taking a dump while being on Lemmy? $350 router with spikes.
And if prison rules, I'm going router with spikes...
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Unless your toilet room just so happens to have a RJ45 socket in the wall. I know one that has two of them.
Reliability 100% the snakeboi
But for speed, WiFi can actually out-perform those particular snakebois in many scenarios.
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In perfect conditions for Wi-Fi. I live in a high rise and the 2.4 Ghz band is hardly usable. My previous phone didn't have dual band Wi-Fi and it was much faster on 4G than WiFi.
Plus, modern routers and APs often rely on band aggregation and so even with devices that have dual band, crowded airwaves will have a negative effect on speed.
Wi-Fi is very fast when I'm in my cabin in the countryside. But when I get home with the same devices, it's barely usable.
You could argue that I need a better router with the newest protocol and gizmos but so far, even with new bands and protocols, Wi-Fi is still a competition of which router and devices will shout louder than their neighbors.
Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.
I would argue that the public needs to be better educated or at least saved from themselves with WiFi, however, nobody will be doing that. Having multiple lower-powered APs in a space can dramatically reduce how far outside of your premise the signal travels, and provide fast speeds indoors, however, it only takes one dummy to pick up a long-range AP, and put it in their apartment to ruin the wifi for everyone else around them.
Unless we start EM isolating apartments, or get everyone to start using modern lower-powered WiFi with multiple access points for coverage, things won't change. I largely consider it to be impossible to fix WiFi in large buildings; especially established apartment buildings. No company is going to spend on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz isolation insulation to be installed between units just for their renters to have better WiFi, and the general public as a whole.... well, it's basically a fool's errand to convince everyone to do anything without government regulation, and bluntly, the government, made of the same idiots that make up the general public, isn't any better and won't be forcing everyone to "do it correctly".... so we get this dystopian landscape of WiFi for any high-density area.
IMO, new builds don't really have an excuse not to, it's a trivial additional cost to install while things are being built, putting AP hookups in the ceilings, and WiFi blocking measures in the walls between units, but they still don't, because cost. They want to spend nothing and collect huge rent payments for basically squatting on a plot of land.
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Nope. While WiFi has fancy claims you're not going to get any more than around 1200mbps at 20 metres on the best day with the best gear.
While with cat6 you'll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem, and even 10gbps. Even cat5e will do those speeds at certain distances.
I have a 10 meter cat5 cable I use for one application that can't have any interruptions or lag.
Calling it cat5 cable makes any woman who hears me want to leave their man for me. Good to see another king our there using the proper terminology, stay tight player
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Physical limit for 2.4GHz is 1.11 gigabits per second or only 143 megabytes per second AT ALL. For 5GHz it's slightly more than twice as much, but still less than even shitty cat5e, that allows 2.5GBE at 100 meters or in certain conditions 5GBE.
While with cat6 you'll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem,
Cat6 is 5gbps no problem at 100 meters and 10gbps at 55 meters.
I have 0 faith that a router which doesn't have high speed ethernet will ever be able to deliver such fast WiFi. If they've cheaped out on the ethernet I doubt they've splurged on WiFi most devices can't use. And if you're talking about fast ethernet, then WiFi is chanceless.
"fast ethernet" is defined as 100mbps. I know what you meant, but there's an actual industry definition for "fast" ethernet....
Most of the marketing is showing a combined speed at 100% optimal conditions. Unless you live in a faraday cage and have 4x4 802.11 equipment on all of your 5Ghz devices, and 2x2 at least on all of your 2.4Ghz equipment, then do massive, consistent and continual one-way data transfers using UDP or something which doesn't have window sizes and can support one-way no-reply transfers like with multicast, all with a perfect signal and the highest wireless PHY rates, you're not going to even remotely see that much speed.
I handle a lot of internal support for a dev outfit.
"My shit's slow."
"That's because you're on wireless at your house. Not my problem, but I'll try to help. Can you hardwire it?"
"That would be IMPOSSIBLE!"
"Suffer."
I used to work on a tech support hotline for a ISP 10 years ago and that was the usual thing.
- My shit's slow
- Ok, I see you've got perfect parameters for your ADSL, I just logged into your router, trying out download... and upload... It works exactly as it should, so maybe your WiFi? Could you connect a wire?
- Plz come fix asap, TECHNICIAN VISIT WHEN??!!
If the WiFi sucked on router provided as part of the service then sure, I could send a technician, but usually the router only had one ethernet port.
Cables are fine until that stupid clip breaks off and every nudge unplugs the fucking cable ever so slightly that it doesn't work but you can't see it.
Get a crimp tool and a 50-pack of connectors. If one breaks, it takes all of 60 seconds to re-crimp the end and you’ll only lose about an inch of cable length.
I re-cabled my entire apartment when I first moved in. Best decision I ever made. I just used the existing Cat5 lines to pull my Cat6a instead. Apartment got a free upgrade to Cat6a (which they never even knew about, because I wasn’t going to lose a deposit over something stupid like “unapproved upgrades”) and I got my tasty gigabit.
I was trying to download Red Dead Redemption 2. It was like 120GB, and was going to take hours at 10Mbps on the existing Cat5. I quickly said “fuck that, I can run new lines in 45 minutes and have the download done in 20 minutes with gigabit.” Sure enough, about an hour later, I was playing my game.
Make sure to get pass-through RJ45 connectors.
It's 10x easier to trim the excess after crimping, rather than getting the lengths spot on before.
I remember running out of those at work, & intentionally crushing the cheap-ass crimp-tool in my hand, just so I could finish up the next day with pass-through connectors & my Klein tool, rather than spend the next two hours re-terminating connectors that I 'should have' gotten exactly right the first time.
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I had whatb I assumed was a fault modem/router from the isp and one of the ports ran at 100mbps while the other ran at 1000. I figured this out when it took forever to transfer a file that was just a few gb.
I have zero experience with networking hardware. How hard is it to recable an apartment for a newb like me? How does that even work, do I gotta pull wires out of the walls?
Adding new connectors means you only need about an inch extra on each side. Very low skill required if you have the (cheap) tools to do it. Actually putting new wires in place is a bit harder but still fairly easy. Attach some string to the old cable, pull it all the way through the walls. Attach the new cable to the string, then pull that through the walls. Then just add the connectors like the other scenario.
If the holes are sized for a single ethernet cable, you won't be able to pull through two. If your confident holes are all oversized, sure go for it. Otherwise you risk getting it stuck half way through a wall and pulling the two cables apart
Fair point. I'm an electrician by trade so i hate it people drill holes that small, but it does happen.
Replacing connectors is east, but won’t solve your problem if the issue is bad cables in the walls. Pulling new cables entirely depends on how well they were installed. A lazy install will actually be much easier to replace, because a lazy installer won’t bother stapling cables in place. They’ll just run the cables across the attic/crawl space and leave it where it lands.
If you’re lucky and got a lazy installer, then you can be equally lazy; The old cable in the wall is going to be your pull line for your new cable. Step 1 is figuring out which lines are which. This is easier with something like a cable sniffer, but there are a few ways to do it. But assuming you know which cables are which, the rest is fairly straightforward.
Use electrical tape to affix the old cable to the new one. Just make a bend on each cable, hook the resulting bends together, then wrap them tightly with electrical tape. The bends hooked together allow the cable to hold the strain, rather than the adhesive on the tape. And you want to use electrical tape because it stretches. Pulling it tight when you wrap ensures that the tape will compress the cables with every wrap. You also want to try to make the connection as “smooth” as possible, so it won’t snag on anything when you pull it.
Now that the old cable is attached to the new, just grab the other end of the old cable and start pulling. It’ll drag the new cable through the wall for you as you pull it out of the wall. Fair warning this is much easier if you have someone feeding the new cable in as you pull, to ensure it doesn’t snag on anything as it enters the wall. It also only reliably works on installs without a lot of bends and corners; Every corner you have to pull around is another potential corner to get snagged on. If you get snagged, sometimes pulling it backwards (tugging on the new cable entering the wall) can help you reset to try again. But sometimes there’s no replacement for good old fashioned legwork; If you get really stuck, or your tape comes undone, or your cable breaks from the strain, you may need to go crawling around your attic to fix it. This is a fast method, but it’s not 100% reliable.
No pulling wires from walls, just cutting the ends off and installing new connectors. Might not be enough in every case though.
Crimping took me like 5 attempts to get right when I learned it in school.
I have a collection of 3d prints on thingiverse that reattach that part. Highly recommend.
This is why Pro level is to terminate all of your permanent cabling with punch down jacks and patch panels, then use throw-away patch cables from jacks to devices.
It's not that expensive... you can buy a home punch down board for cheap, just need some space. You don't need an actual rack.
All of money and downtime I save from replacing broken RJ45 plugs more than covers the $10 tool and extra $2 that it costs for a keystone jack and wall mount box.
Easy fix with a tight layer of electrical tape to act as a wedge. You can also shove a toothpick in the top for extra staying power.
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Crimp tool: 2$
100 RJ45: 3$
Your problem will be solved for rest of you life and life of your children for 5 dollars.
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The sheer amount of engineering, FCC regulations, and wizardry that goes into making 802.11 fast is insane. It feels weird seeing so much data get shoved through radio waves which are still subject to only one transmission at a time which is why we have stuff like CSMA/CA and MIMO
Still no match for good ol ethernet though lol
802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we've become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.
After the usual "Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals" reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.
Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?
Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they're about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.
Even plain old wifi is fascinating in terms of signaling, they use ofdm, or orthogonal frequency division multiplexing to encode data. The whole concept is crazy.
To summarize, the waveform (sine wave) is measured by degrees from zero, where 90 is the peak, 180 is when it crosses the middle line again, 270 is the trough, and at 360 it returns to zero. What OFDM does is interrupt the normal sine wave and jump from 90 to 180 to encode bits.
What gets crazier is that this is divided into dozens of different positions that represent different bit encodings. Then they go more crazy and run... I think it's 10 by 2mhz wide carriers, all doing this same thing (for a 20mhz wide channel width) to encode more data into the bandwidth.
Then they get more crazy and implement AM on top of it, so you get high power OFDM and low power OFDM divisions that can do upwards of double the symbols on the same carrier.
The wizardry to make all this work is insane, and the fact that we've mastered it to the point where we can sell wifi cards for something like $20 USD just kind of blows my mind. This is crazy to me!
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Still no match for good ol ethernet though lol
For 99.9999% of the user base 6E would be indistinguishable from an ethernet cable, including gamers.
I tend to encounter a cable's greates enemy: Walls in a rented appartment you can't just drill through
I drilled holes in the ceiling of my rented house to run cable through the attic and down into separate rooms. Never heard anything. Don't need a big hole so it's easy to patch when they come through for nail holes and such which are expected.
Sometimes you can have great success using the wires that are already in your walls, provided it's in good nick and isn't isolated. Try a powerline adaptor.
Otherwise, do like i did and run a 50m cable halfway around the house.
I run a 20m from my landline Box to my Router. In the hallway I route it behind the furniture. On doors I router it along the frame with transparent Self-adhesive cable older I got of Amazon.
Protips for diy renters: you can buy conduit baseboards. They're baseboards that have a void behind them for cabling. If you're good with tools, you can remove the existing baseboards and put those on. When you leave, either replace the original baseboards or just pull the wires out and leave them there....
What I did was use cup hooks to put wire along the top of walls. A small step stool helped me get up to the ceiling line, put a nail partway in to get a "pilot" hole, then screwed in the cup hook... did one hook every 18-24 inches about 2 inches from the ceiling. With larger cup hooks, I easily fit 4 ethernet lines in. I also got some wall mount wire conduit to go down the wall to my router. For doors and such, vertical wall mounted conduit to the hinge, under the door at the hinge, then back up the wall on the other side to the ceiling to continue (or along baseboards to the device). I only had trouble with the vertical conduit (I only had one) when I left since it was attached with mounting tape.
My way was pretty clean, never had to look out for cables on the floor, I didn't really notice them at all, and all the important stuff was wired.
If you're just going between neighboring rooms (eg. Your router is in one bedroom and you want to get to the bedroom next to it), look for telephone/cable TV hookups. If there appears to be one on both sides of the wall in the same spot, open it up, there's a good chance the wiring box for those lines goes straight through the wall. If you want a more professional look to it, buy keystones and use a short bit of wire to link two together, and just put them on either side of the wall using Keystone faceplates... so you can just pass the cable through the wall....
There's also MoCA if you have coax in every room. Look it up, it's great.
There's a ton more I could say on this, I'm a big believer and advocate for ethernet over WiFi, because after spending a long time working on WiFi professionally, I've realized that all wifi sucks. My mantra is "wire when you can, wireless when you have to". If it's feasible to run a wire, do it. For mobile and non-stationary devices, wireless since those move around and it's impractical or impossible to put ethernet everywhere it could be.
True story:
*Grabs Cat2 cable out of lab storage and hooks everything up to it*
"Why is everything so slow?"
Image Transcription:
An image titled "who would win?"
On the left side is an image of an Asus RT-AC5300 Tri-Band Wireless Gigabit Router, a square, black router with a red line around the side near the upper edge, and 8 antennas coming up from the bottom. The text beneath the image reads "A $350 router with scary spikes"
On the right side is a blue Cat6 ethernet cable. The text beneath this image reads "A $3 snakey boi"
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes@lemmy.world!]
My favourite thing is to hear people talk about having 'great WiFi' as if that is an internet connection.
I used to work for spectrum. I'd say around 60% of people legit do not know the difference between wifi and Internet. No wifi means no Internet, to them. Makes some trouble shooting harder
I hate that people refer to ethernet, unironically as a "wifi cable".
It hurts my soul.
Them: "The WiFi is down."
Me: '... No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.'
Them: "I can't connect to Flipboard."
Me: 'Ohhh, the internet is down. It's probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.'
Them: "Yep, now the WiFi is back."
Most consumer devices these days, if they detect the internet is down over a wifi connection (e.g. by inability to reach 1.1.1.1), will automatically disconnect from that wifi network, or at least show the same UI as if it had.
Pedantic but correct. Only your connection to the internet is down.
Even when there are massive "internet outages" sometimes it's just DNS being bad. The internet works just fine, it's just not working in a way that you can make use of it.
I really don't understand why it's such a common confusion. None of these people struggle with the difference between their gas supply and their oven.
But when your electricity goes out, do you even consider whether it’s the power plant, substation, distribution station, or individual service drop that is the problem? Probably not. But I’m sure many power line technicians see the phrase “my power’s out” in the same way tech-savvy people see the phrase “my wifi’s out”.
How much of that is in your control to diagnose, let alone fix? If the neighbours are out too, that means it's already out of your hands.
When it comes to "the internet is down", much of the time it is something within your control, whether or not you know that. It's not a very good analogy imo.
When it comes to "the internet is down", much of the time it is something within your control
This really isn’t true anymore. Most people use all-in-one modem+router+AP. I’d guess that unless you’re one to tinker with your router, there’s a much better chance you’ve tripped a breaker or GFCI than there is that you’ve somehow broken your home wifi.
I consider those if only cause it may give me an idea of when power will come back on. Ill even drive around to see how much is out or if i can find repair crews.
I'm sure you driving around to find a random power truck and asking them to fix your power faster is much appreciated by the people fixing it..... I'm sure they don't make fun of you or threaten you in anyway after you drive off while they have to be out in the weather doing their job.
I said looking for repair crews said nothing about bugging them, that was your jump in logic. If I know powers down in my block then if I see a repair crew about a block away I can assume power will be on in about an hour or so. Plus I usually am grabbing food at the same time.
Soooo, ya do exactly what I said in last comment..... there is a number to call for power outages. They guys in the truck are on call to a problem, you are just annoying them.
A very large portion of people who use electricity everyday have never given a single thought to where their power comes from. They are the same folks who feel like they are superior plugging in their Tesla and knowing they are making a difference....... while the coal plant drops another traincar to charge it up.
The people who bitch the loudest are always the ones who have absolutely no clue how things actually work and that every single decision is give/take. And if you try to explain you are (insert ism/ist). Tards gonna tard. Way she goes, fuckin way she goes.
If all the food in my fridge is warm I don't immediately assume my electricity has been cut off rather than something is wrong with my fridge.
I think people care about different things, networking might not be something they're interested in so aren't interested in spending time learning about it. Where as when you are interested in it it's not so hard to read, watch videos about it and experiment with it. At least that's generally how I find these things work.
Obligatory warning AVOID CCA CABLES! They can be a hazard!
Go for copper. More on this issue:
https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/cca-vs-solid-copper#page_comments=1
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For PoE? Yeah. For data only? No. Short reply: if cable passes test for its category, it passes, otherwise it does not.
The difference in cost for 1000ft spools is <$50 CAD, and you get a product you know always works, is less brittle, can do PoE without becoming a fireball, can be used in commercial installation legally, and is actually in spec. I mean a lot of people who are actually running cables already have separate spools for solid and stranded, plenum and riser, maybe even shielded/burial... no need to add CCA to the mix with all of its downsides (and potentially make that mistake...)
I won't defend CCA wire but aluminium is an excellent conductor... by weight, not by volume. It's not that you can't make good aluminium wire it's that CCA wire are generally shoddy. Brittleness is an issue but with time copper work-hardens so you can't mess with it infinitely, either. It's especially useful for overhead lines as it's so light.
Somewhat not entirely unrelatedly: Steel bike frames are generally better than aluminium. They're it practical terms about as erm sturdy at equal weight, but steel bends quite a bit before it breaks so a good steel frame will be lighter than an aluminium frame and can get by without shock absorbers when the geometry is good, that's why you see curved forks (not if it's a downhill bike, of course, and "generally" means "if you're not looking for a carbon-fibre race bike", there's reasons to want stiffness in bikes just not for most people).
Next up: Oxygen-free copper and audiophiles. Practically no increase in performance (and definitely none compared to simply using a tiny bit more of regular copper), meanwhile, so cheap that when you're at a decent store (say, Thomann) and sort by price the cheapest stuff will have OFC.
I don't like to use aluminum for anything, mainly that it fatigues more easily and will thin/break of strained. My home insurance provider also hates aluminum, I couldn't get insurance if I have any aluminum wire for my electrical work. Anytime I see it, I just want to pull it out.
CCA feels like the worst of both worlds.
Copper is king for me.
There's a plethora of problems that can be listed for both aluminum and copper and CCA. Aluminum/CCA is cheaper, but the trade-offs are not worth the savings IMO.
just a heads up for anyone deciding to make their own cables, make sure you buy pass through rj45 ends or it becomes substantially more annoying to make a successful crimp. with pass through you can prep your cable and it doesn't matter how long you make the strands you're working with because you cut the excess off, with non-pass through you have to cut them to a specific size and if it's too long when they bottom out, your conductors will stick out making your crimp weaker inviting poor connection issues later in the cable's life.
thank you for tuning in for this controls tech tip
I like the ones that have a separate little sleeve with a pass though. You put the wires through it, clip them, then insert it as a unit into the connector.
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Crimper costs you about 2$, rj45 connectors cost 0.05$ and cable costs 0.1$/meter. Not that much.
You can hire low voltage writing contractors to do it, they usually charge per run (up to a certain length), and they only leave you with what you will use. They're a bit more costly, since you're paying for their time, but it will save you the hassle of buying tools, learning how to use them, buying cable, running the line, doing the crimping (usually several times as you will probably mess up at least a few), and everything.
Saves a bunch of headaches... just an option I'll throw out there.
Don't hire an electrician for the work, most don't understand the requirements of low voltage or ethernet, they're simply not trained for it. They can wire up your fridge or whatever perfectly great, but the rules that apply to high voltage are very different than what is needed for low voltage... specifically Ethernet.
Crimper costs you about 2$
Pffft flathead screwdriver.
...no seriously if you want to buy a crimper spend 10 bucks upwards or so, people have spent more on screwdrivers. A knipex one costs about 30 bucks, we're not talking fibre splicers here. Regarding outlets, those 10 buck LSA Plus things are perfectly fine. Finagling those things with a flathead is way harder if you want more than an electrical connection but actual signal quality.
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if you want to buy a crimper spend 10 bucks upwards or so, people have spent more on screwdrivers.
We live in different economies
380₽ right now, about 3.8$
It's not that you can't get crimpers that cheap here (cheapest I found on Amazon is 3.50 Euros, incl. 19% VAT) it's that they're almost guaranteed to be made from chinesium with the engineering and manufacturing precision to match. There's a difference between inexpensive and cheap.
Going to be tricky dropping cables from the attic of my three story house into my first-floor home office.
Up from the basement?
If it's an unfinished basement, easy. If it's finished, that feels bad man.
Pretty sure the biggest cost of crimping your own cables is finding a place to store the remaining spool.
Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP
Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP
Nah, the remaining spool will be useful for the rest of its/your lifetime, it always comes in handy as a generic 4-pair twisted pair signal cable for any non-ethernet purpose. I've used my old spool twice this year; first for an m-bus cable to my power meter and then for a limit switch for my garage door.
That's me lol. I'm still sitting on my spool of Cat6 I bought a few years ago. At pre-COVID prices it was approximately (CAD) $1 per termination, and $1 per 6 feet of cable.
Today at Infinite Cables and other Canadian stores I can buy premade lengths at almost those costs, shockingly. Prices really came down.
Well until you have to guide that snaky boy through the whole apartment and through door frames.
If you connect both ends of that snakey boi into the router then you’ll find out who wins real quick
If your TV vendor decides to only put 100Mb cards in their TV then unfortunately spikey boy wins and you lose unless you're willing to downrez your AV catalog.
Venn diagram of people who understand this specific technicality and people who don't want to deal with the shitty TV software is almost a circle though.
I'd rather get a Android box at the very least.., or just HTPC.
I'm in that Venn diagram but I'm married with kids and the UX of anything but the TV remote and Plex software is a bit much for me to convince the family to learn. And potentially relearn when I find the next great app like jellyfin 😅
I think there's another circle with at least significant overlap between those two of family techies who just can't convince the rest of the family to care.
My wife and kids found Jellyfin easier to use because it more closely resembles Netflix. Your mileage may vary but I get it, and it's why I even use a media server over just plugging in a laptop with Kodi.
Sometimes the best solution is whatever you can get the users to actually use.
I set up an hdmi-Ethernet converter and run Ethernet between my TV and main desktop. It solves problems.
That's one solution.... unless someone wants to use the computer while you're watching something, it's fine. For any shared access TV/computer set up, this falls apart quickly.
I want my SO to be able to watch something on the TV while I'm playing a game though (and vice versa). Personally all of my stuff is independent, we each have a gaming computer, and the TV ruins separately of all of it. We have a Samsung smart TV and it has a Chromecast attached, so we have options there.... but not everyone is set up like me.
Nobody's using this computer except me and nobody uses it for media except during group nights so it's no problem. Technically it has a PlayStation hooked up to it that could be used for DVDs/Blu-rays but that never happens.
They do that shit on purpose. Use a shield or an htpc. Only input your TV should be getting is HDMI.
From a signaling perspective, they're very very similar. Given that all TVs have HDMI, it may be the only option.
The only real benefit to HDMI over DVI is that it carries audio where DVI does not, which is why it's used on so many TVs. I know DP can do audio too; so I'm not even going to touch on that. DVI however, can do dual-link, which IMO, makes it a much better video format regardless of any patent nonsense.
What the hell are you watching that has a bitrate of >100Mb? Because unless you have a 16K television I suspect the answer is nothing.
I have a 4k blu-ray remux of Misery that has a 104 Mpbs bitrate. But there are only a couple of movies in my collection that break 100. Most of my remuxes are around 50 to 70.
Anyhoo it's all moot in terms of network speed since I just use a htpc to play all of them.
I have plenty with higher bitrate audio that can hit 80. And with the overhead of the rest of the connections, and possibly just some limits on the chipset for TCP overhead etc, it starts stuttering around that 80mbps limit.
80MBit/s audio? How?
For reference: 2x channels of 16-bit 48KHz raw uncompressed PCM audio (ie "perfect except maybe the noise floor under very very specific circumstances") is about 1.5MBit/s. Even if you go 96KHz 6 channels (5.1 setup) 24bit uncompressed PCM then it's only 14MBit + overheads.
The audio isn't 80Mbps, the entire file is. The audio is TrueHD7.1, though. I probably don't need it but I haven't bothered transcoding it yet because I'm not exactly out of space or bandwidth.
Discovered this on a laptop after running the cable. Wifi was getting 250mbps vs 10/100 speeds
My canon ink tank type printer from mid COVID era is the same, didn't realise it was only 10/100 on the wired port until I was looking at the switch one day and wondered why I had a yellow light instead of green, was about to run a new network cable until I checked the printer
I guess you have to have a very particular workload, and printer, to need a gigabit line...
Right?
Printers really don't need even 100mbps though. They're just not fast enough to spit out the prints your sending even at those speeds. So I get it.
I get it too, but it was a bit of a shock given that the selling points for everything is bigger better faster stronger, otherwise why would people upgrade. It's like finding something with a micro USB port on it instead of type c
Could be something wrong with a cable? A damaged cable can downgrade your connection from gigabit to 100mb
Or to 10mbps, half duplex. I've witnessed this. My former company was trying to sell a client a new server because it was too slow when I noticed it was only operating at 10/half, instead of the 1000/full that both it and the switch was capable of. Some testing later, and the problem was at the server side cable termination, a quick re-termination and they were up to gigabit. Grabbed a spare run to the switch and connected another cable after verifying it was good and the company went from 10M/half to a LAG of 2000/full in the matter of about an hour.
The speed complaints stopped.
Is that why my shit keeps buffering any time I try to stream a movie larger than 50-60 GB, despite the fact that I have a gigabit connection and a 2.5Gb router? TIL. BRB, running some speed tests on my TV...
I don't understand how it's acceptable for $2,000 TVs to have only 100 mbps ports, wouldn't it only cost a few cents per unit to upgrade?
My last several multicore multithreaded "smartphones" each sucked at multitasking; why should I hold myself to a higher standard than the entire telecom industry?
Latency is the name of the game if you're gaming. Copper will always give you the fastest ping times compared to the fastest wifi you can buy.
Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that's why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.
Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people's routers nearby.
No shit?
I mean copper runs at 2/3 the speed of light.
Wireless is pretty much the speed of light.
I thought they used dedicated fiber for their links.
Ehhh... not quite. There's evidence that copper runs closer to the speed of light (aka c), than fiber. Light through glass runs at around 2/3 c, making it the slowest option.
Wireless technically runs as fast as light, through atmosphere that's a tiny bit slower than c, but as close as we can get.
There's also a large argument among physisicts and electrician YouTubers about the speed of electricity through a wire, and I don't understand the conclusions, though they were articulated quite well by the YouTubers, it just didn't stick in my brain. The premise is how fast a lightbulb would illuminate if it had one light-second of pure copper (or superconducting) wire between the power source and the bulb, with little to no resistance. It's interesting but nuanced and complex.
Wifi, being EM waves (same as light) should run the fastest, copper ethernet close behind and fiber dragging it's heels at 2/3rds c. However, in practical applications, wifi has more to overcome since it's a shared medium. Copper and fiber have a dedicated medium, so they have no competition in signaling, wifi needs to contend with everything from other wifi networks spurious emissions from other frequencies, even background cosmic radiation, as well as itself (half duplex). Because of all of that, you generally end up with wifi in last because it has so many protections and checks that it delays itself to ensure that it's transmission will be recieved intact. The packets are generally larger and take longer to get started, so all the additional (mostly artificial) slowdowns make it slower. However, if you use highly directional antennas, a pair of them, on different but otherwise equivalent frequencies for send/receive, and cut out a lot of the other factors by designing the system well, then disable most of the protections because they're not needed by design, it will be faster, at least in terms of latency, than fiber or copper in almost every case.
Since designing a multi-access system that doesn't need wifi's protections is borderline impossible, this is limited to very controlled point to point systems where both ends are tightly constrained.
So the argument "wifi has a lower minimum latency" is correct, but irrelevant in 99.99% of use-cases. Copper is easier and cheaper than fiber and actually runs faster, than fiber, but it's only viable for extremely short runs, up to 100m in most cases, and fiber, while "slow" at 2/3rds c, is better for longer distance since there's less line-loss across the glass per foot.
This is a very deep topic and I'm no physicist, but I've been endlessly fascinated by this issue for a very long time. The information here is the result of my research over many years. I still consider fiber to be the gold standard of data communication, ethernet to be next-best and overall best for relatively short connections, and wireless to be dead last due to all the challenges it faces that are not easily overcome.
Not even 5 ms. I have a properly set up Wi-Fi at home and you'll feel no difference in gaming. Wi-Fi only adds like 1-2 ms latency at most.
Unless you have no choice - a good WiFi will not add noticeable latency.
Myself I am playing over 5ghz wifi. I would say I don't feel much difference, but prefer cable any time!
Is the notebook or desktop wifi NIC and antenna important or only the router? Because when I had a shitty laptop a few years back the latency sucked ass, both at home and at my university (where I hope they had good network components but idk)
With wifi, everything is important, even the number of people connected on your channel... not the number of wifi networks on the channel, the number of total nodes using the same channel. The ap hardware factors in, your wifi card (client) factors in, even drivers and other things can factor in. The band (2.4/5/6 GHz), the non-wifi traffic, spurious emissions from other harmonic frequencies, even electrical noise from gadgets and other devices nearby. You can even factor in distance to the ap and cosmic background noise.
On top of that, it's half duplex, so only one node can successfully transmit at a time. So it interferes with itself.
It's a complete mess of unknowns and unknowable things, unless you have a very good spectrum analyser to look into it.
IMO, this is what makes WiFi so terrible. There's simply too many factors that can be slowing you down, most of which you can't see and aren't obvious.
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WiFi 5 latency on a decent router (not the shit your ISP gives you for free) is only 0.6ms. Yes, that's less than 1ms.
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I just tested ping between my weak computers, one of which supports only 100mbit ethernet and are sequentially connected via cheap 2$ dumb switch and ISP-provided router and got 0.187ms average, while ping via same system, but using 802.11ac for one device got 8.16ms with standard deviation of 11.9, maximum of 67ms and minimum of 1.44ms.
Right. Like even in the shittiest scenario that's not a major difference. There's stuff like interference and the speeds are lower, sure, but 1 gigabit is plenty for non enterprise situations
Maybe....
your latency on your network might be 0.6ms, but for most practical use-cases, it will be orders of magnitude more. Partly due to the interference and half duplex nature of wifi, but also because of CSMA/CA (carrier sense multi access / collision avoidance) algorithm, which listens before transmitting to ensure the channel is clear, and waits when it's busy until it's clear before transmitting. The actual transit time for each frame is very short, but getting to the point where you can actually transmit is the main challenge for wifi.
Propegation time for a 1500 byte frame on gigabit Ethernet is approximately 12 µs, or 12 microseconds, aka 0.012 ms. So the argument is kind of squished here. Given that you have a dedicated channel to the switch (and not needing a carrier sense, collision avoidance of detection algorithm with ethernet) the frame can be immediately sent, so the total transit time from a computer connected by ethernet to a router or switch is orders of magnitude faster.
Your experience varies massively depending on your RF environment. In my suburban neighborhood, I’m getting a stable 3.4ms to my router. The same hardware when I was in a dense urban environment was around 11ms. I’ve never looked at retry counters, but if I had to guess, I’m getting close to zero right now, but was getting considerably higher in a dense area.
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WiFi 5 latency is only two times higher than cooper (0.3ms vs 0.6ms). WiFi 6 has the same or even lower latency. WiFi 7 is even better. If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice. Unless you have spare money for an industrial 100Gbps set up. Which you don't.
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Please speak standards, not marketing language. Replace WiFi and number with 802.11 and letters in the end.
If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice
One packet drop for TCP creates huge latency for application level protocol. And not many games use UDP for their transport.
not many games use UDP for their transport
Citation Needed
I have never heard of a latency-sensitive game that doesn’t use UDP for inner loop communication. Sure they use TCP for login and server browser, but the actual communication for gameplay almost always uses UDP.
Minecraft and Terraria use both TCP and UDP, presumably in the way I described (TCP for initial connection, asset download, etc. and UDP for world state sync). Factorio uses UDP exclusively, and implements reliable transport where needed in software.
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Oops, Factorio moved to UDP.
Can't find any UDP implementation or even UDP protocol description for Terraria, while there are implementations of Terraria protocol that use TCP and documentation for it. Basically no evidence of UDP and a lot of evidence of TCP for gameplay.
Minecraft uses only TCP. Sources: wiki.vg, myself, myself and friend of mine and myself again(no link for now, but two minecraft proxy server implementations)
Unless it’s changed in the past year which I doubt, Minecraft exclusively uses TCP for client/server communication. I’ve been modding the game for years and am pretty familiar with the protocol. I think it’s actually one of the few which don’t use UDP to some capacity.
The original PC Java client uses TCP; every other client, including the C++ PC version, uses UDP.
Depends on the challenge. Snakey boiy loses if the challenge is to move around the house and go into the backyard.
Nay, with long enough cable you'll get consistently good performance. With wifi it's a hit and miss due to interference and walls.
We ran snakey boys throughout the house using command hooks on the ceiling when my wife and I had to go WFH 3 years ago.
The temporary fix is still going strong. At this point, the place would look weird without hastily strung up CAT5 all over the place.
The joke is that you have to spend $350+ on a router if you want a lot of bandwidth to spare for all your devices -- and more importantly -- a strong, reliable connection (especially if you live in an area with a lot of competing WiFi traffic, like an apartment building). Or you could just buy a $3 ethernet cable and get the same thing.
Happened to me. The cheap $100 routers kept dropping the signal, so I blew $400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support. Problem solved. That said, if it weren't for the fact that smartphones exist (and the fact that I have a girlfriend with a laptop), I wouldn't bother with WiFi at all. I miss the 2000s, when all you needed was a 10Mbps switch, and WiFi was something you only got if you wanted to brag to your friends that you can browse the internet in your backyard..
$400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support
I think I need to bold this up. Custom firmware support, especially OpenWRYT, means that your router will live for years to come.
Thing is: You can get better hardware for $250. OpenWRT support for mikrotik devices is spotty, though, not many people care as the things already run Linux (with proprietary network stack and management interface looking, well, like an enterprise-grade router, not server). That is, the issue is not that they're locked down (they're not) but lack of interest in using custom firmware, these aren't dumbed-down html interface only types of machines but office endpoints from a company producing ISP-grade hardware.
Generally speaking having wifi is usually a good idea because smartphones and guests exist but connecting PCs via wifi is nuts. First of all, I'd have to buy a wifi card and sacrifice pcie lanes...
And lastly, a fun reminder: Once upon a time there was a German black hat, and he used wifi. The police already had evidence that he lived in a particular neighbourhood, but nothing specific enough to get a search warrant. So they went war-driving in the area, correlating spikes in (encrypted) wifi traffic with messages in a chat room where nefarious things were planned, until they figured out which house the traffic was coming from, then parked a bit nearby until they had statistical significance tighter than a fingerprint. They never had to get that search warrant once they presented the court with the data it issued an arrest warrant straight away and no degree of disk encryption could save the guy from a verdict.
What's the speed? Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you're easily saturating that line either way.
Do you have gigabit? Then Ethernet, but then again getting like 600mbps wirelessly is good enough.
Biggest thing is having GOOD coverage. My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere. People with a shitty ISP router shoved in the cupboard in their basement make no sense lol.
Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you're easily saturating that line either way.
Only if latency doesn't matter. WiFi has a lot more jitter, no matter if your WAN connection is 10 or 1000mbps.
Packet loss really, and the latency and jitter said loss can contribute to.
Radio waves go faster (speed of light) than through a medium (copper). Not that it matters at such a small scale, but it's helpful to have a good picture of the elements at work here. The further you are from the receiving point, the more obstacles (matter) that can obstruct it. But in ideal conditions WiFi is better than most people think. Replicating those ideal conditions though...
Radio waves go faster (speed of light) than through a medium (copper).
Except that copper ethernet is baseband, so it's not radio waves. WiFi is still faster than copper AFAIK (there was a huge debate about this between youtubers not that long ago), at least for signalling, but the difference is smaller than you think. light (which is EM, the same waves as radio/WiFi) through glass is about 2/3rds c (aka the speed of light), and it's actually a lot slower than ethernet or WiFi for propagation delay, however, WiFi must use CSMA/CA as well as other tricks to ensure it doesn't step on itself, and that it doesn't step on other sources of radio interference (Microwave ovens, wireless controllers (like xbox), bluetooth, zigbee, etc, on 2.4Ghz and stuff like RADAR on 5Ghz). It's half-duplex, so only one station can transmit at a time, hense CSMA/CA being required, where ethernet doesn't need any collision avoidance or detection except for rare cases of 10/100 half duplex, all gigabit is full duplex. Half duplex on wireline networks is basically eliminated at this point, so it's little more than a footnote.
Factoring all this in, getting the signal down the line, WiFi loses in almost every case, due to all the considerations it needs to take into account.
What crap are you doing that so intensive WiFi causes latency? It's essentially a negligible difference unless you are saturating the signal. We're taking less than 3ms for a reliable round trip.
There are lots of factors that can cause jitter on WiFi, and it's mostly outside of your control if you're living somewhere more densely populated. My apartment randomly gets a lot of noise, and as a result my WiFi starts to get unacceptable amounts of packet loss and jitter. It doesn't happen often enough to motivate the effort for me to go around signal analyzing, but still...
The the picture to me says, would you rather have a desktop and console plugged up via ethernet in here and 15 other devices connected through your house or 1 single device plugged in.
It really is just a dumb meme
15 wired devices, kthx. Once & done.
No more "why's it down now"; no deauth attacks; no weird outages when highway traffic spikes from nav\music-streaming users getting tower timeouts that cause their WiFi to aggressively cry out for every known SSID.
With wired connections, I set it up once & it keeps working. With WiFi, it's a constant shouting match version of the Telephone game, with openly malicious actors literally headquartered a few blocks away.
Wi-Fi has constant retransmissions. This adds perceptible latency because the checksum check, turnaround, and packet transmission add a lot of time compared to the speed of light through air across 3 meters.
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I did. Just pointing out uselessness of mentioning big downloads in context of latency. Just don't bring bad arguments.
downloading a few torrents while gaming, but it'll definitely have an impact. Especially if you're on WiFi.
Yes, but also setting up network priority(QoS), limiting torrent transfer speed and other stuff.
Something is wrong. None of this is perceptible to humans.
If you don't want to figure it out, cool. But it ain't the protocol causing your issues.
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I had 100mbps ethernet because incompetent ISP worker who crimped only two pairs out of four. And I had AFAIR 150mbps plan! Don't know what to wish for that idiot.
My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere
As an IT professional who has worked with a lot of wireless systems, I approve. This is the way.