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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?

#151

Post by jeffbee »

chrneu wrote: post #130
jeffbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethernet pretty much sucks and has not improved substantially in consumer devices since the previous century. It also has pretty severe idle power consumption consequences for PCs, unless you are an expert who goes around fixing that.

Ethernet will usually hit hardware limits of your HDD or SSD before it actually maxes out. 1gb ethernet is better than wifi in 99% of cases because wifi in the real world is pretty bad, even with modern standards. Why else do they have to continually revamp the standards to get around congestion and roaming issues? Cuz wifi is garbage in the real world. Ethernet = Very little jitter, latency, or packet loss. Wifi = T…

This is the most ridiculous lie in the thread. An ethernet link that can barely keep up with a $150 SSD costs $1250 per switch port, and needs a $1200 NIC and can go only 3m over copper before you need a $1000+ optic assembly. There is nobody with an ethernet setup in their home that outruns consumer-grade SSDs. "Ethernet is limited by SSDs" is a Charlie's Hoes level of wrong.

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

#152

Post by PaulKeeble »

A households bandwidth use is quite a bit different to a business. While a household may have a lot of devices most of them are doing very little at any given time, but the primary device in use requires the best speed possible. In a business however there are a lot of primary devices and not a lot of idle little devices and as such fairness and reliability dominate the needs as does getting the frequencies maxed out for coverage and total bandwidth available.

Wifi 8 will probably be another standard homes can skip. Like wifi 6 it is going to bring little that they need to utilise their fibre home connnections well across their home.

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

#153

Post by kazinator »

> Because consumers have been conditioned to understand only raw speed as a metric of Wi-Fi quality and not more important indicators of internet experience such as responsiveness and reliability.

Whie the two are not the same, they are not exactly separable.

You will not get good Internet speed out of a flaky network, because the interrupted flow of acknowledgements, and the need to retransmit lost segments, will not only itself impact the performance directly, but also trigger congestion-reducing algorithms.

Most users are not aware whether they are getting good speed most of the time, if they are only browsing the web, because of the latencies of the load times of complex pages. Individual video streams are not enough to stress the system either. You have to be running downloads (e.g. torrents) to have a better sense of that.

The flakiness of web page loads and insufficient load caused by streams can conceal both: some good amount of unreliability and poor throughput.

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

#154

Post by tzs »

MrZander wrote: post #40
725686 wrote: post #36

"The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices"... wtf?

That seems very high to me. A family of four each has 5 devices connected at the same time?

I'm single and have 11 devices on 2.4 GHz:

  Wireless temperature monitor
  Sync module for some Blink cameras
  2 smart plugs
  Roomba
  5 smart lights
  RPi 3
3 of the smart lights I currently don't need and and so aren't actually connected. That leaves 8 connected 2.4 GHz devices.

On 5 GHz I've got 16 devices:

  Amazon Fire Stick
  iPad
  Printer
  Echo Show
  Apple Watch
  Surface Pro 4
  iMac
  Nintendo Switch
  EV charger
  Mac Studio
  A smart plug
  Google Home Mini
  Echo Dot
  RPi 4
  Kindle
  iPhone
The iMac and the Surface Pro 4 are almost never turned on, and the printer is also most of the time. That leaves 13 regularly connected 5 GHz devices.

That's a total of 21 devices usually connected on my WiFi, right what the article says is average. :-)

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

#155

Post by BenjiWiebe »

dwood_dev wrote: post #131
jojomodding wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Powerline Ethernet != PoE (power over Ethernet)

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

dwood_dev wrote: post #131
jojomodding wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by dpark »

kiwijamo wrote: post #108
dpark wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practical terms, WiFi 5 is slower than 1gb Ethernet. It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet ports on TVs though.

No video streams out there uses over 100mbits so makes sense.

I’ve read that 8k streams can exceed 100mbps. I have not dig very far into that though since I don’t have an 8k tv or any 8k sources.

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

#159

Post by mikepurvis »

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.

I used those during covid to get a reliable connection for video calls and it was a huge step up over wifi. The bandwidth was like 1/10th of actual gige, so I got a wire pulled to my office when I went to fibre but there’s no question in my mind that decent powerline adaptors are the winner for connection stability.

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

#160

Post by drnick1 »

chrneu wrote: post #123
ipython wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. So true! Other tips I’ve found useful: Separate 2.4ghz network for only IoT devices. They tend to have terrible WiFi chipsets and use older WiFi standards. Slower speed = more airtime used for the same amount of data. This way the “slow” IoT devices don’t interfere with your faster devices which… Faster devices such as laptops and phones belong on 5ghz only netw…

Absolutely. Your IoT devices should be on their own 2.4ghz network running on a specific channel to isolate them. You should also firewall these devices pretty heavily on their own router. The only devices on wifi should be cell phones and laptops if they can't be plugged in. Everything else, including TVs, should be ethernet. When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything w…

My advice would be NOT to connect any kind of TV to the Internet. They have microphones and sometimes cameras, and are a huge privacy risk.
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