Moving into a house for the first time since before college this year, I only just learned about Wi-Fi channel width this week. Apparently the mesh routers I ended up picking several months ago had a default width of 160 MHz, but only go as low as 80 MHz, so that's what I ended up switching to. Anecdotally it has seemed to be somewhat more reliable, but maybe in the long run finding something that can go even lower might be worth it because we do still notice some stutter occasionally that would be nice to reduce even if the theoretical max throughout was a bit lower.
Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
211–220 of 327 posts
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethernet cables can be as long as 100meters, long enough to snake around most any apartment. Add on a few rugs to cover over where they'd be tripping hazards and you're all set.
I got good results from running cables around the entire perimeter of a room to avoid crossing doorways. Doesn't work so well on bathrooms though.
Oh, bathrooms are [sometimes] easy.
In an apartment I once had, I ran some cat5-ish cable through the back wall of one closet and into another.
In between those closets was a bathroom, with a bathtub.
I fished the cable through the void of the bathtub's internals.
Spanning a space like this is not too hard to do with a tape measure, some cheap fiberglass rods, a metal coat hanger, and an apt helper.
Or these days, a person can replace the helper by plugging a $20 endoscope camera into their pocket supercomputer. They usually come with a hook that can be attached, or different hooks can be fashioned and taped on. It takes patience, but it can go pretty quickly. In my experience, most of the time is spent just trying to wrap one's brain around working in 3 dimensions while seeing through a 2-dimensional endoscope camera that doesn't know which way is up, which is a bit of a mindfuck at first.
Anyway, just use the camera to grab the rod or the ball of string pushed in with the rod or whatever. Worst-case: If a single tiny thread can make it from A to B, then that thread can pull in a somewhat-larger string, and that string can finally pull in a cable.
(Situations vary, but I never heard a word about these little holes in the closets that I left behind when I moved out, just as I also didn't hear anything about any of the other little holes I'd left from things like hanging up artwork or office garb.)
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
DECT phones run on the 1.9 GHz spectrum which doesn't get absorbed by water like 2.4 GHz, and will penetrate through many other materials far better than higher frequencies. Most people place wifi repeaters incorrectly, or invest in crappy repeater / mesh devices that do not multiple radios. A Wifi repeater or mesh device with a single radio by definition cuts your throughput in half for every hop. I run an ISP. Cust…
Eh, multiple APs and roaming being awful isn't just a matter of shitty placement and bad wireless backhaul, it's also client side software. I have two APs on opposite ends of my house and my phone tries to hang on to whatever AP its connected to far longer than it should when moving around the house. My APs are placed correctly, and support 802.11r, yet my phone and most other devices don't try to roam until far, far…
Have you tried turning down the tx power on your APs? It will help your devices decide to roam, and it may not actually reduce your effective range, because often times effective range is limited by tx power on the client more than the AP.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#214I 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…
I agree, but as a quite heavy user household, switching to Unifi 10y ago has fixed our issues, and they haven’t returned. With most devices on WiFi, on 3 APs.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rental or do you own? If you own, you should replace and/or move them. Might sound scary if you've never done this before but it is much easier than you'd think. If you want to make your future life easier I suggest running a PVC pipe (at minimum in the drop down portion). Replacing or adding new cabling will be much easier if you do this so it's totally worth the few extra bucks and few extra minutes of work. They'l…
There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.
I live in a brick house where only half of the walls are hollow. Bringing Ethernet wires to a few critical areas and putting small surface-mount RJ-45 sockets was not that hard.
Of course, some thin raceways can be seen somewhere along the baseboard. It does not look terrible, and is barely noticeable.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
you have five access points and 60 devices? How many square feet are you trying to cover?
He said SF with neighbors so I'm assuming condo/apartment. Probably less than 2000sq feet would be my guess. 5 aps for 60 devices is hilarious. I have over 120 devices running off 2 APs without issue. lol
You have 120 wifi-connected devices at home?? What kind of devices? 100 smart light bulbs or something like that?
I'm just curious – I'm a relatively techy person and I have maybe 15 devices on my whole home network.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#217The thing about speed tests causing a bad experience because they hog airtime felt like a non sequitur (since performing them is rare and manual) until I saw this: > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the consumer internet experience as demonstrated But there’s no support for this claim presented frankly I am skeptical. What WiFi devices…
I think Roku devices might. There's a network speed indicator in the settings and I think it had values before I explicitly ran a test. My Rokus are all wired, because I'm civilized, and the test interval is very short, so that ends my investigation.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot has changed in the 25 years since gbit wired ethernet was rolled out. While wired ethernet stagnated due to greed. Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house. Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA. Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and ge…
> Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit. Depending on the age of the house, there's a chance that phone lines are 4-pair, and you can probably run 1G on 4-pair wire, it's probably at least cat3 if it's 4-pair and quality cat3 that's not a max length run in dense conduit is likely to do gigE just fine. If it's only two-pair, you can still run 100, but you'll wan…
Gigabit ethernet "requires" 4 pairs of no-less-than cat5. The 100mbps standard that won the race -- 100BASE-TX -- also "requires" no-less-than cat5, but only 2 pairs of it.
Either may "work" with cat3, but that's by no means a certainty. The twists are simply not very twisty with cat3 compared to any of its successors...and this does make a difference.
But at least: If gigabit is flaky over a given span of whatever wire, then the connection can be forced to be not-gigabit by eliminating the brown and blue pairs. Neither end will get stuck trying to make a 1000BASE-T connection with only the orange and green pairs being contiguous.
I think I even still have a couple of factory-made cat5-ish patch cords kicking around that feature only 2 pairs; the grey patch cord that came with the OG Xbox is one such contrivance. Putting one of these in at either end brings the link down to no more than 100BASE-TX without any additional work.
(Scare quotes intentional, but it may be worth trying if the wire is already there.
Disclaimers: I've made many thousands of terminations of cat3 -- it's nice and fast to work with using things like 66 blocks. I've also spent waaaaay too much time trying to troubleshoot Ethernet networks that had been made with in-situ wiring that wasn't quite cutting the mustard.)
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.
I live in a brick house where only half of the walls are hollow. Bringing Ethernet wires to a few critical areas and putting small surface-mount RJ-45 sockets was not that hard. Of course, some thin raceways can be seen somewhere along the baseboard. It does not look terrible, and is barely noticeable.
Fibre is good for getting to hard-to-reach places.
But the slope is slippery. If you’re doing fibre, you might as well do 10gbe.
Re: Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are times I do envy people living in stick houses with hollow walls.
Stick houses with hollow walls are cheaper to build (assuming cheap wood) and cheaper to work on. Probably cheaper to maintain too, but not as durable, so it might work out... Otoh, durable isn't great when housing trends have moved on.
> not as durable
Your clearly don’t live in an earthquake prone area.
I do. But given how cheapskate New Zealand is, I’m 100% sure that we would build in stone and brick if it was cheaper.