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…
> 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.
There is other stuff to watch - like uhd bluray backups and those need more than the crappy 100mbps lan port can deliver.
The reality is that most people only have a single cord coming into the house So they would have to do quite a bit of work to run cable. Also people living in apartments that cant just start drilling through walls. I'd say most ppl use wifi because they have too, not pure convenience
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…
We just moved from a 70's-era house where I spent some time with a fish tape running cable to a 2025 three story townhouse (drywall already finished when we purchased).
For some reason the cable service entry is on the third floor in the laundry room. Ethernet and the TV signal cable runs from there to exactly one place, where the TV is expected to be mounted. Nothing in the nice office area on the other side of the wall.
My guess is that the thinking these days is that everyone's on laptops with wifi and hardwired network connections are only of interest for video streaming. Probably right for 99% of purchasers.
If you're not sure what a router is, you should probably look that up, because it sounds like you want another router.
I know what a router is lol. I just was wondering what are the available options to use all the coax connections already in the house so I could connect everything via Ethernet , if you wanted to avoid running Ethernet through the walls or don’t want Ethernet cables visible When I was younger and before WiFi was a thing I naively thought I’d just plug in a new modem.
My house had quite old (likely 1980s) coax home runs and it worked flawlessly. All I did was change out the entry (root)splitter for one that had a point of entry filter. I’m not sure that was even needed, but it seemed sensible and was not expensive or difficult.
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…
I was mostly wired throughout the house. But with the smoke mitigation after a kitchen fire, pretty much all the hard wiring for both audio and Ethernet is gone or hopelessly messed up. There's no way I'll spend the time and effort to redo everything at this point.
This is such a great write-up it highlights a truth that’s been hiding in plain sight for years: we’ve optimized Wi-Fi for headline speeds, not human experience. Emphasis on throughput reminds one of the "megapixel wars" of early digital photography a simple, clear-cut figure that completely misrepresents actual quality. Responsiveness and reliability are the actual measures that control day to day satisfaction, but…
This is such a great write-up it highlights a truth that’s been hiding in plain sight for years: we’ve optimized Wi-Fi for headline speeds, not human experience. Emphasis on throughput reminds one of the "megapixel wars" of early digital photography a simple, clear-cut figure that completely misrepresents actual quality. Responsiveness and reliability are the actual measures that control day to day satisfaction, but…
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…
Powerline Ethernet is a coin toss though. Depending on how many or few shits the last electrician to work on your house gave, it could be great or unusable. Especially if you're in a shared space like an apartment/condo: in theory units are supposed to be sufficiently electrically isolated from each other that powerline is possible; in practice, not so much. I've been in apartments where I plugged in my powerline gea…
Powerline Ethernet is directly equivalent to littering in the park. By using it you are littering and being a jerk, even if you don't realize it. The FCC only tests such setups in very limited contrived ways. When it comes to actual house wiring the copper wiring is never impedance controlled, constantly approaches and leaves large metal objects, etc, so that it is always radiating radio waves. And powerline ethernet is HF (<30MHz) frequencies so those radio waves travel around the entire earth, ruining a shared medium. Just like littering in a public park is ruining a shared medium.
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.
If one must forgo the comfort of complete isolation from the vulgarities of contemporary media and visual indulgence – an unwise choice, yet one that many appear compelled to make – then prudence demands mitigation rather than surrender. A measured compromise would entail the meticulous profiling of the TV’s network traffic, followed by the imposition of complete blocking at the DNS level (via Pi-hole, NextDNS and al…
I don't connect my TVs to the Internet; instead I hook up Apple TVs to an HDMI port and just use the TV as God intended - as a dumb display device. The Apple TV is connected to the Internet and functions as my portal to, as you say, the vulgarities of contemporary media and visual indulgence. Without the downsides of buggy and spyware ridden TV firmware.
I bought a Wi-Fi 6 TP-Link router recently and found out that it's normal for people to have performance/responsiveness issues due to all the "advanced" features enabled. I turned them all off and use the simplest possible connection settings, but somehow there is still a 20-second delay when my smartphone tries to access a web page (and I use 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8, and this never happened on previous wifi routers). The great enshittification rolls on.