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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?

#221

Post by kbouck »

Denatonium wrote: post #168
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.

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…

That was my experience too. The experience with powerline ethernet adapters was unbearable on a daily basis.

We had an unused coax (which we disconnected from the outside world) and used MoCA adapters (actiontek) and it's been consistently great/stable. No issues ever... for years.

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

#222

Post by jandrewrogers »

toast0 wrote: post #194
silversmith wrote: post #193

Earlier 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.

Much more durable in an earthquake though, which is important in places like the US where half the country is a serious seismic hazard zone. In many locales only wood or steel framing is allowed because historically stone and concrete construction collapsed due to the strength of the earthquakes.

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

#223

Post by kindacuriouzzx »

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…

Does this advice still hold true for Internet that is provided through power sockets in the house?

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

#224

Post by hvb2 »

drnick1 wrote: post #203
whatevaa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't run Graphene so point stands.

Most people don't know that Big Tech is extracting data from them on a massive scale. It's up to us, the "tech people," to educate the people and show them alternatives like Graphene. As for the TV, my advice is not to connect it to the internet. If you need to stream something, hook up a laptop or dedicated device to the TV.

This is where regulation comes in. For the TV makers. Things should be secure by default and come with fines if they aren't.

As for the extracting of data, yes that happens on a massive scale. In free products that no one is forced to use. And I would argue that, by now, almost everyone should know that comes at a price, it's just not monetary to the user. At that point it's a choice people make and should be allowed to make.

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

#225

Post by spragl »

This is a clear case of "you get what you measure". Measuring speed is so easy, everybody can do it, and do it all the time. No wonder that providers optimize for speed. But it also works the other way around. We have developed a focus on speed as it was the only thing that mattered.

I have worked with networks for many years, and users blaming all sorts of issues on the network is a classic, so of course in their minds they need more speed and more bandwidth. But improvements only makes sense up to some point. After that it is just psychological.

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

#226

Post by topspin »

Denatonium wrote: post #168
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.

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…

> A better solution is repurposing unused 75Ω coaxial cable with MoCA 2.5 adapters

I'll second this. MoCA works. You can get MoCA adapters off Ebay or whatnot for cheap: look for Frontier branded FCA252. ~90 MBps with a 1000BASE-T switch in the loop. I see ~3 ms of added latency. I've made point-to-point links exclusively, as opposed to using splitters and putting >2 MoCA adapters on shared medium, but that is supported as well.

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

#227

Post by ssl-3 »

ipython wrote: post #52
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 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…

That's sounds like a good concept: I'm no stranger to cheap IoT devices chewing up local 2.4GHz bandwidth with chatter and I have a lot of that going on. But does it matter in 2025?

As a broad concept: Ever since my last Sonos device [that they didn't deliberately brick] died, I don't have any even vaguely bandwidth-intensive devices left in my world that are 2.4GHz-only.

Whatever laptop I have this year prefers the 5GHz network, and has for 20 years. My phone, whatever it is today, does as well and has for 15 years. My CCwGTV Chromecast would also prefer hanging out on the 5GHz network if it weren't plugged into the $12 ethernet switch behind the TV.

Even things like the Google Home Mini speakers that I buy on the used market for $10 or $15 seem to prefer using 5GHz 802.11ac, and do so at a reasonably-quick (read: low-airtime) modulation rate.

The only time I spend with my phone or tablet or whatever on the singular 2.4GHz network I have is when I'm at the edge of what I can reach with my access points -- like, when I visit the neighbors or something, where range is more important than speed and 2.4GHz tends to go a wee bit further.

So the only things I have left in normal use that requires a 2.4GHz network are IoT things like smart plugs and light bulbs and other small stuff like my own little ESP/Pi Zero W projects that require so little bandwidth that the contention doesn't matter. (I mean... the ye olde Wii console and PSP handheld only do 2.4GHz, but they don't have much to talk about on the network anymore and never really did even in the best of times.)

It's difficult to imagine that others' wifi devices aren't in similar form, because there's just not much stuff left out there in the world that's both not IoT and that can't talk at 5GHz.

I can see some merit to having a separate IoT VLAN with its own SSID where that's appropriate (just to prevent their little IoT fingers from ever reaching out to the rest of the stuff on my LAN and discovering how insecure it may be), but that's a side-trip from your suggestion wherein the impetus is just logical isolation -- not spectral isolation.

So yes, of course: Build out a robust wireless network. Make it awesome -- and use it for stuff.

But unless I'm missing something, it sounds like building two separate-but-parallel 2.4GHz networks is just an exercise in solving a problem that hasn't really existed for a number of years.

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

#228

Post by ssl-3 »

robocat wrote: post #179
cycomanic wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I moved into my last house with roommates their network was gaaarbage cuz everything was running off the same router. The 2.4ghz congestion slowed the 5ghz connections because the router was having to deal with so much 2.4ghz noise. I don't know why you're saying, a 2.4 GHz device should not interfere with 5 GHz channels unless it's somehow emits some harmonics, which would most definitely make i noncompliant…

> do you mean the modem was so crappy > but I would assume the modems Your assumption is sometimes incorrect as cheap devices can share some RF front end. Also apparently resource contention can also occur due to CPU, thermal, and memory issues. https://chatgpt.com/share/68e9d2ee-01a4-8004-b27b-01e9083f7e... (Note that Prof is one "character" I have defined in the prompt customisation) Or: https://g.co/gemini/share/1…

Ah, splendid. I'm so glad that you have come before me today to present this bot's confounding quandary, and I receive it with tremendous glee.

Please allow me to proffer the following retort: The answer to having a shitty, incapable router is to use one that is not shitty, and is capable.

(The routing-bits have no clue what RF spectrum is being utilized, and never have. They just deal with packets. The packets are all shaped the same way regardless of the physical interface on which they arrive, or which they are destined for.)

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

#229

Post by protocolture »

toast0 wrote: post #209
protocolture wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao. People say this until it takes 3 days to restore a fibre cut, when the wireless guys just work around the problem with replacement radios etc. Issue with Wireless is usually the wireless operator. And most of them do work hard to give wireless a bad rep.

Where I live we have what seems like an unusual amount of fiber cuts... whenever the cable company or the phone company fiber is cut, at least one of the major wireless networks is offline too; maybe calls work, but data doesn't. They could potentially restore service through wireless backhaul, but they don't. They also rely on utility power and utility power outages longer than about 4 hours mean towers are going to…

Yeah sounds very true.

I am aware of a datacentre, whose principal fibre bundle transits a fast tracked development area where theres always construction and always fibre cuts.

I am also aware of a wireless backhaul path with close to 2 weeks battery backup, running entirely off of solar. They only truckroll of they get consistent bad weather.

I used to maintain an absolutely perfect 25km link that only went offline due to wind twisting the mast the radio was mounted on.

I also have maintained an absolute dogs breakfast of a network where customers frequently lost connection. Like daily.

I had one fibre link supporting 1000 customers or so, that the provider admitted had so many joins they could scarcely maintain it. And to add insult to that injury, they mislaid the service id, and would always take an adjacent service offline while troubleshooting it.

The technology is rarely the problem, its the implementation.

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

#230

Post by matwood »

ahartmetz wrote: post #115
marssaxman wrote: post #53

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…

You can lay your own cables, either to the next wall socket or directly to a switch. Flat ethernet cables can be very helpful for hiding and for crossing doorways. Generous "unnecessary" wire length helps with keeping them out of sight.

Just want to second your suggestion about flat cables. They are great for situations as this.

I’m in an old stone house and currently have flat cables snaked around until I can piggy back on the workers putting in conduit for other things.

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