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Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

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Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#131

Post by dwood_dev »

jojomodding wrote: post #109
baby_souffle wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The house I live in was built with ethernet, but of the fourteen outlets the builders saw fit to include, not one is located where we can make use of it. I had a similar situation a few years back. It was a rental so I didn't have access to the attic let alone permission to do my own drops. It'll depend a _lot_ on your exact setup, but we had reasonably good results with some ethernet-over-power adapters.

We have them at home as well and they really suck. They lose connection every 20ish minutes at best, and take about 5 to reconnect. Makes Zoom meetings impossible, among other things.

For PoE you want two networks for the best performance. One for each phase of your mains.

In general they do suck, but they can be pretty decent if you stick them all on one phase, even better if all on the same breaker.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#132

Post by chrneu »

lxgr wrote: post #66

> Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated. Is that actually a thing? Why would any ISP intentionally add unnecessary load to their network?

For what it's worth, I think most ISPs that do this will host their speed test in-network so their speeds are inflated. This benefits both the ISP and whoever is in charge of the speed test(like speedtest.net).

So they're not really increasing their network load a measurable amount since the data never actually leaves their internal network. My ISP's network admin explained this to me one day when I asked about it. He said they don't really notice any difference.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#135

Post by ericd »

dpark wrote: post #58
ericd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh flat Ethernet cables can easily be snaked all over with adhesive clips, and if you color match cable/clips/walls, it doesn’t look bad.

Cables routed on visible walls look absolutely terrible. I wish they didn’t, but they do. Yes, it’s better if your cable and clips and wall all match, but it still looks bad.

Why? Run them along baseboards in the corners, you'll never notice them (or at least we didn't at our last house, white on white).

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#136

Post by CoolGuySteve »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #3
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good. The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi…

> The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the mo…

It depends on your wiring but I've had pretty good success with AV2000 powerline ethernet. I get about 400Mbps and a reliable 2ms ping which is good enough for gaming and streaming from my media center.

The endpoint in my living room also has a wifi AP so signal is pretty good for laptops and whatnot.

In NYC every channel is congested, I can see like 25 access points at any time and half are poorly configured. Any wired medium is better than the air, I could probably propagate a signal through the drywall that's more reliable than wifi here.

So having something I can just plug into the wall is pretty nice compared to running cables even if it's a fraction of gigE standards.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#137

Post by chrneu »

somanyphotons wrote: post #84

Is there a good guide on what the right things to do are?

Hardwire everything you can over ethernet to get them off Wifi.

Use a dedicated 2.4ghz AP for all IoT devices. Firewall this network and only allow the traffic those devices need. This greatly reduces congestion.

Use 5ghz for phones/laptops and keep IoT off that network.

That's really about it. If you have special circumstances there are other solutions, but generally the solution to bad wifi is to not use the wifi, lol.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#138

Post by amluto »

I wish the Wi-Fi developers would put some serious effort into improving range and contention. Forgot 40 MHz vs 80 MHz — how about some 5 MHz channels? How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR? How about improving the stack to get better performance when a device has mediocre signal quality to multiple APs at the same time?

There are are these cool new features like MLO, but maybe devices could mostly use narrow channels and only use more RF bandwidth when they actually need it.

Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?

#139

Post by chrneu »

harrall wrote: post #133

I actually switched from 40 MHz to 80 Mhz when a friend complained about slow downloads on my Wi-Fi. So yeah, I do think speed is more important. Responsiveness doesn’t matter that often and when it does, plugging in Ethernet takes it out of the equation.

You can't use that speed if your device is dropping half the packets.
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