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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?

#271

Post by quickthrowman »

godelski wrote: post #145
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…

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…

> 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.

I’m trying to understand how removing an entire sheet of gypsum (or cutting a 6” by 8’ channel) and installing an empty PVC raceway is ‘a few extra minutes of work’. Installing the PVC might be, but you’re looking at hours of work over multiple days to replace the drywall and refinish the wall.

Raceways are unnecessary in stick built houses if you have a fish stick and fish tape. If you’re building a new house, then sure, install 1” EMT as raceway for Cat6A before putting up the drywall.

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

#272

Post by Hikikomori »

izacus wrote: post #245
molszanski wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Powerline. This €40 device will turn your electrical sockets into an 100-500 mbps Ethernet cable. Simple and efficient. Just check if sockets you want to connect are on the same circuit breaker. If yes, chances are really high it would work very well. I’ve connected a switch and a second access point with mine. Also I think they work best if there fewer of them on the same circuit. But not sure. Check first.

Powerline almost never comes close to performance of wifi in the same conditions. It's literally wifi just over an even worse medium.

Through thick brick walls?

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

#273

Post by phil21 »

stacktraceyo wrote: post #247
sokoloff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have coax, look into MoCA. I have one attic device on a MoCA connection and it runs very well.

How does the age of the copper affect performance. Will look into it thanks.

It will be less the age of the actual cable, and more the standards used when cabled. The largest issue is likely to be splitters behind the wall that limit frequencies passed through.

Usually those can be found in the wall boxes behind the plate - but not always!

These used to be a bane on cable modem installs for apartment complexes, but the situation should generally be better 25 years later...

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

#274

Post by gh02t »

toast0 wrote: post #213
gh02t wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have, doesn't really help very much unfortunately. Setting an RSSI threshold on the AP can also help devices roam, but its hard to set it at a level that works for all devices (since different devices have different sensitivities so an RSSI threshold that works well for my phone might cause some other device to constantly get dropped).

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

#275

Post by phil21 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #233
yardstick wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many consumer devices suck wrt to wifi. For example, there seem to me ZERO soundbars with wired subwoofers. They all incorporate wifi. Sonos has its issues, but I do need to point out that their subs (and the rest) all have Ethernet ports in addition to WiFi.

And also, previously: In the dark times when end-user wireless network bandwidth very low and glitchy (and most home users didn't care much), and before "mesh" became a term associated with a single-box collection of items that could be bought at Wal-Mart, Sonos devices were able to mesh together and form their own wireless network that Just Worked. In software-land, they even solved latency inequalities well-enough…

> So a person can hard-wire their Sonos sub, soundbar, and surround speakers into the LAN without fear of badness -- or use one or more of those wirelessly, instead. All without problems.

Eh, I just had to go through and disconnect all ethernet from a bunch of Sonos devices in my house a couple months ago due to issues. It's on my list to go through and connect everything to the LAN when I get the time to make another couple ethernet drops - but mixing wifi/ethernet connected Sonos devices is not a great experience even in 2025.

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

#276

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Younger generations seem attached to internet access over wifi in an unheallthy, irrational way

Proliferation of consumer hardware that lacks ethernet ports is probably a contributing factor

IMHO, the greatest utility of wifi is wireless keyboards and monitors, not wireless internet access

The ability to remotely control multiple computers not on the same network from the same keyboard, for example

But I've always had a bias for using a (mechanical) external keyboards over built-in laptop keyboards, even before there were wireless keyboards

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

#277

Post by phil21 »

chrneu wrote: post #127
sidewndr46 wrote: post #79

Earlier 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

It's way less about device count, and more about AP density - especially in RF challenging environments.

I pretty much just deploy WiFi as a "line of sight" technology these days in a major city. Wherever you use the wifi you need to be able to visually see the AP. Run them in low power mode so they become effectively single-room access points.

Obviously for IoT 2.4ghz stuff sitting in closets or whatever it's still fine, but with 6ghz becoming standard the "AP in every room" model is becoming more and more relevant.

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

#278

Post by jval43 »

OJFord wrote: post #270
jval43 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this years ago using the very thin (3mm, round) Unifi Patch Cables in white. Very clean and reliable, and getting 1 Gbit/s without issue. Another benefit is that I can cram 4 of them inside a single cable runner at the one spot I have to (no space for a switch). Where it's just one cable you run them bare and they look very clean. The old ones I have are still CAT5e, the newer ones they sell are CAT6 at the sam…

Patch cables are meant for connections between equipment, e.g. in a networking cabinet. Cable for the runs between terminal points (like the cabinet's patch panel and a workstation, or your home TV, etc.) is less flexible - more shielded and I think solid core instead of multi-stranded (like twin & Earth vs. flex) - I'm not sure if it's available flat or skinny though.

I know and agree. My point is in a home setting at 1 Gigabit you don't really need it. Obviously YMMV.

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

#279

Post by grogers »

tetris11 wrote: post #76
ttshaw1 wrote: post #25

I don't get what the point of the article is. Is the takeaway that I should lower the channel width in my home? How many WAPs would I need to be running for that to matter? I'd argue it's more important to get everyone to turn down TX power in cases where your neighbors in an apartment building are conflicting. And that's never going to happen, so just conform to the legal limit and your SNR should be fine. Anything…

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

Wow! There are certain areas of my house that I get such bad wifi signal that I often switch to cellular data since it's more reliable. I didn't even know you could change a setting like this to reduce speeds but improve reliability - it worked like a charm, thanks!

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

#280

Post by toast0 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #218
toast0 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> Neither end will get stuck trying to make a 1000BASE-T connection with only the orange and green pairs being contiguous.

They can get stuck, because negotiation happens on the two original pairs (at 1Mbps), and to-spec negotiation advertises the NIC capabilities and selects the best mutually supported option. Advertising fewer capabilities for retries is not within the spec, but obviously helps a lot with wiring problems.

The key thing with the ethernet wiring requirements is that most of the specs are for 100m of cabling with the bulk of that in a dense conduit with all the other cables running ethernet or similar. Most houses don't have 100m of cabling, and if you're reusing phone cabling, it's almost certainly low density, so you get a lot of margin from that. I wouldn't pull new cat3 for anything (and largely, nobody has since the 90s; my current house was built in 2001, it has cat5e for ethernet and cat5e in blue sheaths for phone), but wire in the wall is worth trying.

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