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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?

#161
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

so does your phone :)

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

so does your phone :)

Yes, but unlike TVs, my phone runs free software (Graphene) and is free of the spyware "smart" TVs are known for.

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

#163

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…

For people who don't or can't have Ethernet wiring, I've had great success with Ethernet over coax. My ancient coax wiring gets 800mbps back to my router with a screenbeam MoCA 2.5

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

#165
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We downsized from a house built in 1914 with phone jacks everywhere to a house built in 2007 with coax and ethernet ports in every room, some rooms with two. At the 1914 house, I used ethernet-over-powerline adapters so I could have a second router running in access point mode. The alternative was punching holes in the outside walls since there was no way to feasibly run cabling inside lath-and-plaster walls. I don't…

> I don't know how 2025 houses are built but I would be surprised if they didn't have an ethernet jack in every room to a wiring closet of some sort. Not sure about coax. Speaking from a US standpoint, it still not common in new construction for ethernet to be deployed in a house. I'm not sure why. It seems like a no-brainer. Coax is still usually reserved to a couple jacks -- usually in the living room and master be…

Most people think they can just use WiFi, and most of them are probably right.

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

#166
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lose wifi signal consistently in my bedroom on my 80Mhz wide 5Ghz wifi. I just now reduced it to 20Mhz, and though there is a (slight) perceptible drop in latency, those 5 extra dB I gained from Signal/Noise have given me wifi in the bedroom again

Every doubling of the channel width costs roughly 3dB. Shannon's law strikes again!

Every doubling of the channel width doubles the Shannon limit*

* An a gaussian white noise environment, which WiFi usually isn't in.

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

#167
post #138

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 ma…

IEEE 802.11af old TV band

IEEE 802.11ah 900Ish

IEEE 802.11ax(WiFi6): traditional channels can be subdivided between 26 and 2x996 resource units according to need(effectively a 2MHz channel at the low end). This means multiple devices can be transmitted to within the same transmit opportunity.

> How about some modulations designed to work at low received power and/or low SNR?

802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps.

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

#168

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. The two devices in our house which use a wired connection are both plugged directly into the switch in our utility closet. (We do have one internet-connected device which permanently lives about an inch away from one of the ethernet sockets, but it is, ironically, a…

> 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.

Ethernet of powerline adapters a very YMMV situation. Occasionally, it works great for people, but more often than not, the performance is poor and/or unreliable, especially in countries with split-phase 120/240 volt power (where good performance relies on choosing outlets with hots on the same side of the center-tapped neutral. The people who most commonly share success stories with powerline Ethernet are residents of the UK, where houses only have 2 wires coming in from the pole and there's often a ring main system where an entire floor of a house will be on one circuit.

A better solution is repurposing unused 75Ω coaxial cable with MoCA 2.5 adapters, which will actually give you 1+ Gbps symmetrical. The latency is a very consistent 3-4ms, which is negligible. I use Screenbeam (formerly Actiontek) ECB6250 adapters, though they now make a new model, ECB7250, which is identical to the ECB6250 except with 2.5GBASE-T ports instead of 1000BASE-T.

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

#169
post #58
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.

What if you ran the cable on the top of the wall and covered it with crown molding?

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

#170

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…

And all iot devices on protocol such as zwave
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