[HN Gopher] Does our "need for speed" make our wi-fi suck?
___________________________________________________________________
Does our "need for speed" make our wi-fi suck?
Author : jamies
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-10-10 18:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (orb.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (orb.net)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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-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 more traveled route of more channels
| and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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 more traveled
| route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
|
| Absolutely. Everything other than cell phones and laptops-not-
| at-a-desk should be on Ethernet.
|
| I had wires run in 2020 when I started doing even more video
| calls. Huge improvement in usability.
| typpilol wrote:
| 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
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Visiting museum ships also showed me you can sometimes
| route cables over living and working spaces.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| This is what I did. Takes minimal effort and then you
| never have to worry about it again.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| Citizen8396 wrote:
| when done right, raceway along (or even behind the)
| baseboards works nicely
| ericd wrote:
| Why? Run them along baseboards in the corners, you'll
| never notice them (or at least we didn't at our last
| house, white on white).
| jandrese wrote:
| What if you ran the cable on the top of the wall and
| covered it with crown molding?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| MoCA adapters are an option if you're already wired for
| coax
| ellisv wrote:
| MoCA is how I get Ethernet upstairs. Works great.
| eikenberry wrote:
| 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.
| passivegains wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm pretty tech-addicted, but I've never felt the need
| for a hard-wired drop in the bathroom.
| xethos wrote:
| I assumed to get from one side of a doorframe to the
| other, instead of crossing underneath the door, go around
| the perimeter of the room the door is for. Which seems
| like a lot to remove a trip hazard, but I suspect the
| Wife Approval Factor plays a role
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| rtpg wrote:
| the one sort of asterisk I'd put there is that ethernet
| cable damage is a real risk. Lots of stories of people
| just replacing cables they have used for a while and
| seeing improvements.
|
| But if you can pull it off (or even better, move your
| router closest to the most annoying thing and work from
| there!), excellent
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Mu-MIMO would help. The real problem is that energy between
| a unit and an AP is not in a pencil-thin RF laser-beam ---
| it is spread out. Other nodes hear that energy, and back
| off. If we had better control of point-to-point links, then
| you could have plenty of bandwidth. It's not as if the
| photon field cannot hold them all. When we broadcast in all
| directions, we waste energy, and we cause unnecessary
| interference to other receivers.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| it was quite a while back but I read some press release
| about a manufacturer that would make an access point that
| had mechanically steered directional antennas.
| Unfortunately I don't think it ever made it to market.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That can help in one direction, but networks are bi-
| directional.
|
| No matter how fancy and directive the antenna arrangement
| may be at the access point end, the other devices that
| _use_ this access point will be using whatever they have
| for antennas.
|
| The access point may be able to produce and/or receive
| one or many signals with arbitrarily-aimed, laser-like
| precision, but the client devices will still tend to
| radiate mostly-omnidirectionally -- to the access point,
| to eachother, and to the rest of the world around them.
|
| The client devices will still hear eachother just fine
| and will back off when another one nearby is
| transmitting. The access point cannot help with this, no
| matter how fanciful it may be.
|
| (Waiting for a clear-enough channel before transmitting
| is part of the 802.11 specification. That's the Carrier
| Sense part of CSMA/CA.)
| jdeibele wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| My son has ethernet in his dorm with an ethernet switch so
| he can connect his video game consoles and TV. I think
| that's pretty common.
| runjake wrote:
| _> 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 bedrooms.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Adding cat5e or cat6 to each room is just a cost.
| Builders generally compete on cost.
| Retric wrote:
| It's a cost that doesn't show up on listings. There's a
| surprising number of ways new US construction sucks that
| just comes down to how it can be advertised.
| creato wrote:
| Most people think they can just use WiFi, and most of
| them are probably right.
| tguvot wrote:
| i live in 2003 built house in usa. i have 2 x cat5e and 2
| x coax (they are bundled together ) coming to outlet in
| every room. everything goes to (un)structured media
| enclosure.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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 gear
| and literally nothing happened: no frames, nothing.
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Aye.
|
| Cat5/6/whatever-ish cabling has been both the present and
| the future for something on the order of 25 years now.
| It's as much of a no-brainer to build network wiring into
| a home today as it once was to build telephone and TV
| wiring into a home. Networking should be part of all new
| home builds.
|
| And yet: Here in 2025, I'm presently working on a new
| custom home, wherein we're installing some vaguely-
| elaborate audio-visual stuff. The company in charge of
| the LAN/WAN end of things had intended to have the ISP
| bring fiber WAN into a utility area of the basement (yay
| fiber!), and put a singular Eeros router/mesh node there,
| and have that be that.
|
| The rest of the house? More mesh nodes, just wirelessly-
| connected to eachother. No other installed network wires
| at all -- in a nicely-finished and fairly opulent house
| that is owned by a very successful local doctor.
|
| They didn't even understand why we were planning to cable
| up the televisions and other AV gear that would otherwise
| be scooping up finite wireless bandwidth from their
| fixed, hard-mounted locations.
|
| In terms of surprise: Nothing surprises me now.
|
| (In terms of cost: We wound up volunteering to run wiring
| for the mesh nodes. It will cost us ~nothing on the scale
| that we're operating at, and we're already installing
| cabling... and not doing it this way just seems so
| profoundly dumb.)
| toast0 wrote:
| Sheesh. I would expect a high end house to have ceiling
| mount ethernet jacks for fancy APs in most rooms. At
| least family room(s) and bedrooms. Very much not worth it
| to retrofit later in a multistory building, but would be
| super handy.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yeah, that first meeting with the other contractors was
| like walking into bizarro-world.
|
| They (the homeowner) were getting dedicated custom-built
| single-purpose wall-mounted shelving for each of these
| Eeros devices, along with dedicated 120V outlets for each
| of them to provide power.
|
| Now they're still getting that, plus the Ethernet jack
| that I will be installing on the wall at these locations
| because that's the extent to which I am empowered to
| inject sanity.
|
| (Maybe someone down the road will look at it and go
| "Yeah, that just needs to be a wall-mounted access point
| with PoE," and remove even more stupid from the things.
|
| Or... not: People are unpredictable and it seems like
| many home buyers' first task is to rip out and erase as
| much current-millennia technology as possible, reducing
| the home to bare walls under a roof, with a kitchen, a
| shitter, and some light switches and HVAC.)
| dpb001 wrote:
| 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.
| ipython wrote:
| Well, unless you're multihomed, you'll always only have one
| cable coming in.
|
| It's what you do with that cable that matters :)
|
| Even the telco provided router/ap combo units usually have
| a built in switch, so you don't even need another device in
| most cases.
| stacktraceyo wrote:
| I wish I could have multiple modems coming into the house
| using the same provided cable. Why's that not possible?
|
| When I was younger I went and bought a new modem so I could
| play halo on my Xbox in another room than where my parents
| had the original modem. Found out then I'd need to pay for
| each modem.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| If you're not sure what a router is, you should probably
| look that up, because it sounds like you want another
| router.
| jgeralnik wrote:
| It actually sounds like they just want a switch
| stacktraceyo wrote:
| 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.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Makes sense when you put it that way.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you have coax, look into MoCA. I have one attic device
| on a MoCA connection and it runs very well.
| stacktraceyo wrote:
| How does the age of the copper affect performance. Will
| look into it thanks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't think age of copper itself matters (assuming it
| supports TV already), other than what might come along
| with that.
|
| https://en-
| us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1... will
| give you some additional info.
|
| 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.
| phil21 wrote:
| 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...
| StillBored wrote:
| 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
| getting a quote will tell you if its true. The vast
| majority of houses arent that hard, even old ones. Attic
| drops through the walls, cables below in the crawlspace,
| behind the baseboards. Hell just about every house in the
| USA had cable/dish at one point, and all they did was nail
| it to the soffit and punch it right through the walls.
|
| Most people don't need a drop every 6 feet, one near the
| TV, one in a study, maybe a couple in a closet/ceiling/etc.
| Then those drops get used to put a little POE 8 port switch
| in place and drive an AP, TV, whatever.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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 want to either
| run a managed switch that you can force to 100M or find
| an unmanaged switch that can't do 1G ... Otherwise you're
| likely to negotiate to 1G which will fail because of
| missing pairs.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| TIL that they can get stuck in no-man's-mand with 2
| pairs. That seems stupidly-incompatible, and it isn't
| something I've witnessed myself, but it makes sense that
| it can happen.
|
| My intent wasn't to dissuade anyone from trying to make
| existing cat 3 wire work (which I've never encountered in
| any home, but I've not been everywhere), but to try to
| set reasonable expectations and offer some workarounds.
|
| If a person has a house that is still full of old 2- or
| 4-pair wire, and that wire is actually cat3, and is
| actually home-run (or at least, features aspects that can
| usefully-intercepted), then they should absolutely give
| it a fair shot.
|
| I agree that the as a practical matter, the
| specifications are more guidelines than anything else.
|
| I've also gone beyond 100 meters with fast ethernet (when
| that was still the most commonly-encountered) and
| achieved proven-good results: The customer understood the
| problem very well and wanted to try it, so we did try it,
| and it was reliable for years and years (until that
| building got destroyed in a flood).
|
| If the wiring is already present and convenient, then
| there's no downside other than some time and some small
| materials cost to giving it a go. Decent-enough
| termination tools are cheap these days. :)
|
| (Most of the cat3 I've ran has been for controls and
| voice, not data. Think stuff like jails, with passive,
| analog intercom stations in every cell, and doors from
| Southern Steel that operate on relay logic...because that
| was the style at the time when it was constructed. Cat3,
| punch blocks, and a sea of cross-connect wire still
| provides a flexible way to deal with that kind of thing
| in an existing and rather-impervious building --
| especially when that building's infrastructure already
| terminates on 25-pair Amphenols. I'll do it again if I
| have to, but IP has been the way forward even in that
| stodgy slow-moving space for a good bit now.)
| ziml77 wrote:
| Can confirm on the gigabit because I've got my gigabit
| internet running over old phone line right now. I'm not
| sure exactly how long the run is, but it goes to this
| floor's electrical room where the ONT is housed into a
| closet in my apartment where it's then spliced into CAT-5
| to reach the router. I really didn't expect it to work
| but speed tests report that I'm getting 900+ Mbps.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Everyone gets one cord coming into the house and into the
| "master" router. You then branch it out to things you own
| through switches. The suggestion isn't to pay for multiple
| internets for each of your equipments.
| fragmede wrote:
| And the big one I want to point out, is that this AI stuff
| has me downloading so many ten gigabyte model files to run
| them locally that I'm really feeling the lack of speed that
| my setup has.
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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 wifi-only device with no RJ45 port.)
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > 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.
| jojomodding wrote:
| We have them at home as well and they really suck. They
| lose connection every 20ish minutes at best, and take
| about 5 to reconnect. Makes Zoom meetings impossible,
| among other things.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I've used Ethernet over coax in my current apartment.
|
| It's worked well!
|
| You do need to be a bit careful as coax signal can be
| shared with neighbors and others sometimes.
| variaga wrote:
| You can isolate your ethernet over coax from your
| neighbor with a MoCA POE "point of entry" filter which
| blocks the frequencies used by MoCA.
|
| You can buy them online for around $10 and they install
| without tools,
|
| Besides neighbors, you may also need a POE filter if you
| have certain types of cable modem.
| tguvot wrote:
| cable companies require poe filters. if they find that
| there is some "noise" leaking from your house, they may
| put a big filter of their own outside, that can degrade
| speed of modem
| dwood_dev wrote:
| For PoE you want two networks for the best performance.
| One for each phase of your mains.
|
| In general they do suck, but they can be pretty decent if
| you stick them all on one phase, even better if all on
| the same breaker.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Powerline Ethernet != PoE (power over Ethernet)
| dwood_dev wrote:
| Yes, no idea what I was thinking when I typed that. I've
| used both extensively, in fact this message was sent over
| a PoE enabled WiFi AP.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I used those during covid to get a reliable connection
| for video calls and it was a huge step up over wifi. The
| bandwidth was like 1/10th of actual gige, so I got a wire
| pulled to my office when I went to fibre but there's no
| question in my mind that decent powerline adaptors are
| the winner for connection stability.
| Denatonium wrote:
| 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 75 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.
| kbouck wrote:
| 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.
| topspin wrote:
| > A better solution is repurposing unused 75 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.
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| Some friends live in a rental that they've decorated well.
| It wasn't until multiple visits that I realized they had
| run Ethernet throughout the house.
|
| You can get skinny Ethernet cables that bend easily. If you
| get some that match your paint, and route them in straight
| lines, those can be unobtrusive. Use tricks like running
| the cables along baseboards and other trim pieces. If you
| really want to minimize the visual impact you can use cable
| runners and paint over them. The cables are not attention-
| grabbing compared to furniture or art on the wall.
|
| If you're willing to drill holes (if you terminate the
| cable yourself, the hole can be narrow), you can pass the
| cables through walls. If you don't want to drill, you can
| go under a door.
|
| If you've got fourteen outlets, it seems like there ought
| to be some solution to get cables everywhere you need.
| jval43 wrote:
| 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 same thinness. All unshielded (UTP).
|
| 10/10 would buy again.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Thanks
|
| Here is a link for others who want to know how thin:
|
| https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-cables-
| dacs/...
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| jval43 wrote:
| I know and agree. My point is in a home setting at 1
| Gigabit you don't really need it. Obviously YMMV.
| econ wrote:
| I use to wire houses. (Here all wires go in tubes.) The
| absurdity of not adding a few empty tubes for later use
| endlessly amazed me.
|
| I think I've done only one house where the owner wanted
| to be able to put speakers in every corner of every room
| on every floor with multiple possible locations for his
| stereo.
|
| Then he wanted multiple cable tv connections per room,
| multiple sockets for landlines, Ethernet everywhere.
|
| The speaker tube was left empty and a few short distance
| sockets didn't have wires in them.
|
| It seemed excessive even to me but it isn't actually a
| lot of work to run 5 tubes in stead of 1. You might add
| 1-2% to the renovation bill. Even less for a new house.
|
| The end result was wonderful. He could do his chores with
| music all over the house. Move his TV sofa bed or desk
| where ever he wanted.
|
| Doing this after the house is finished is more expensive,
| it takes a lot more work and the result is inferior.
|
| I think nowadays we should have an USB socket next to
| each power outlet that provides both internet and extra
| fast charging. In reality I've never even seen such
| socket.
|
| With a few small updates Android could switch off wifi
| and mobile networking and seamlessly switch to calling
| over <s>wifi</s> wired internet when you plug in the
| charging cable.
|
| Who knows, maybe the mobile phone could even be a first
| class citizen in the landline network.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I think nowadays we should have an USB socket next to
| each power outlet that provides both internet and extra
| fast charging. In reality I've never even seen such
| socket.
|
| I've seen power outlets with embedded USB power adapters.
| I think I've seen usb ethernet adaptets with embedded USB
| power for like chromecasts and similar. But not both
| smooshed into the same outlet. It might be problematic
| because nobody wants to mix low voltage and high voltage
| together in the wall. But it's technically feasible.
|
| > With a few small updates Android could switch off wifi
| and mobile networking and seamlessly switch to calling
| over <s>wifi</s> wired internet when you plug in the
| charging cable.
|
| I'm not sure you need updates. I think if the adapter
| exposes as usb cdc-ethernet that would likely work out of
| the box, and there may be drivers for specific usb nics
| available as well; I haven't checked, but this is a thing
| that is used by ChromeCast devices and AndroidTV devices,
| so it should also work on Android. Seamlessness is maybe
| in the air, but if it's seamless from wifi to cellular,
| it should be better going from wired to something else,
| because wired has an unambigious and timely disconnect
| signal.
|
| > Who knows, maybe the mobile phone could even be a first
| class citizen in the landline network.
|
| IMHO there's less value here; the landline network has
| degraded and there's not really any first class citizens
| anymore. Few people retain landlines, and those that
| remain tend to be ATAs in the home; if you care to use
| that with an android, there's likely better options than
| interfacing with the analog side.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| 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'll also be
| less likely to be accidentally damaged (stepping on them,
| rodents, water damage, etc). I seriously cannot understand
| why this is not more common practice (leave the pull string
| in). You might save a few bucks but you sacrifice a lot
| more than you're saving... (chasing pennies with pounds)
|
| If rental, you could put in an extender. If you're less
| concerned about aesthetics you can pop the wall place off
| and directly tie into the existing cable OR run a new one
| in parallel. If you're willing to donate the replacement
| wire and don't have access to the attic but do to both ends
| of the existing cable then you can use one to pull the
| other through. You could coil the excess wire behind the
| plate when you reinstall it. But that definitely runs the
| risk of losing the cable since it might be navigating
| through a hard corner. If you go that route I'd suggest
| just asking your landlord. They'd probably be chill about
| it and might even pay for it.
| silversmith wrote:
| There are times I do envy people living in stick houses
| with hollow walls.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| I do live on the west coast of the US. Unreinforced
| masonry doesn't do well in earthquakes, but reinforced
| masonry or concrete is probably more durable. I've got 25
| year old wood siding, and it might make it to 30, but
| there's no way it'll be in reasonable shape at 40. It
| probably won't be too expensive to replace though.
| godelski wrote:
| Probably another great example of chasing pennies with
| pounds. {re,green,pink}bar is really cheap. Yes, it's
| more expensive but only 10-20% more. It's an upfront cost
| that that saves you tons of damage, which costs money
| too! Even more when you put off repair.
|
| It's incredible how people do not understand boot
| theory... which seems to be something most people know
| but don't employ in practice
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
| applied_heat wrote:
| My wood siding is original cedar that has been painted
| several times since 1970s when house was built ... I
| haven't considered it not lasting indefinitely
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Until it gets cold outside and you need to heat them, or
| cool then obviously
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| tguvot wrote:
| there are baseboards with build in raceways. installing
| some right now
| hopelite wrote:
| Molding is your friend to create and hide channels, and
| it will make your place look more sophisticated than just
| the cube cave it is, my cave man friend.
| godelski wrote:
| Install a veneer
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > 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.
| godelski wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand how removing an entire sheet
| of gypsum
|
| This is a fixed task. Required if you install the conduit
| or not. You have to cut the wall to make the port. If you
| have the port you can just use a slightly longer conduit,
| brace it where you can reach, and oh no you need an extra
| 2" of cable? > Raceways are unnecessary
| in stick built houses
|
| Your mental model is too naive. Have you done this
| before? Have you then replaced it or added additional
| lines?
|
| The conduit makes all that easier, and provides the
| additional protection that I discussed. By having a
| conduit you're far less likely to get snagged on
| something while fishing the lines. You can stop hard
| corners that strip your cables while pulling on them.
| It's also a million times easier to see while you're
| chasing those cables. Sure, your house is a framing with
| wood but you still have insulation and who likes icy
| hands?
|
| Really, think about it. What is the cost _now_ compared
| to the _future_?
|
| Is an additional 10 or let's even say a crazy 50%
| additional work _now_ really that costly when you have to
| do the whole thing again in the future? And multiple
| times? It 's a no brainier lol. Definition of chasing
| pennies with pounds. Just be nice to your future self. Be
| lazy long term, not lazy short term because lazy short
| term requires more work
| 1718627440 wrote:
| You know about Ethernet over power lines right?
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| It depends on your wiring but I've had pretty good success
| with AV2000 powerline ethernet. I get about 400Mbps and a
| _reliable_ 2ms ping which is good enough for gaming and
| streaming from my media center.
|
| The endpoint in my living room also has a wifi AP so signal
| is pretty good for laptops and whatnot.
|
| In NYC every channel is congested, I can see like 25 access
| points at any time and half are poorly configured. Any wired
| medium is better than the air, I could probably propagate a
| signal through the drywall that's more reliable than wifi
| here.
|
| So having something I can just plug into the wall is pretty
| nice compared to running cables even if it's a fraction of
| gigE standards.
| kindacuriouzzx wrote:
| Does this advice still hold true for Internet that is
| provided through power sockets in the house?
| hylaride wrote:
| If you live in a dense area with lots of APs and regularly
| get performance issues, power line networking will provide
| excellent ~400Mbps connections that are more than adequate
| for things like video calls unless your power cables are
| ancient or under-spec'd (some older houses can sometimes
| have lower gauge cables that may not perform as well and I
| imagine some knob and tube setups are not ideal for data
| transfer, either).
|
| If you have newer clients that support it, Wifi
| 6E/7/802.11ax (or whatever it's called) uses the 6GHz
| spectrum that isn't as heavily used (yet). I've had good
| success with it in my multi-unit apartment condo (feels as
| clean as 5GHz did ~2010). Some higher end APs can also use
| multi-antenna beams that can help, too.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| When i bought my house i was very pleasantly surprised the
| previous owners had installed pvc pipes from corner to corner
| (so at least three connnections per corner) when they
| installed floor heating. It made installing ethernet and
| speaker cables everywhere i needed so much easier. Should i
| ever require more than 1Gbit i could easily replace it for
| fast fiber cables.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ethernet pretty much sucks and has not improved substantially
| in consumer devices since the previous century. It also has
| pretty severe idle power consumption consequences for PCs,
| unless you are an expert who goes around fixing that.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You still get the best speeds over ethernet today because of
| how wifi standards are slow walked, both on the router and
| the device connected with the router. Ethernet standards are
| slow walked too of course but we are talking slow walking a
| 2.5g or 10g connection here, even otherwise crappy hardware
| is likely to have 1g ethernet and it's been that way for at
| least 10 or 15 years.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you want to transfer the contents of your old mac to
| your new mac, your best options in order of speed are 1)
| thunderbolt, 2) wifi, and 3) ethernet. You do not, in any
| sense, get "the best speeds" from ethernet. The market
| penetration of greater-than-1gb wired networks in consumer
| devices is practically nothing.
| astrange wrote:
| I have all 2.5gbit at home with some 10gbit SFP copper
| connections, it wasn't particularly difficult. The
| devices with built-in Ethernet ports are all gigabit of
| course, but the ones with USB-C ports have 2.5gbit
| adapters.
|
| I could go to 10gbit but the Thunderbolt adapters for
| those all have fans.
| pbronez wrote:
| If you're the kind of person who wants better than
| gigabit Ethernet, it's very available. 2.5Gbe is just a
| USB adapter away. Mac Studio comes with 10GbE. Unifi
| networking gives you managed multi-gig and plenty of
| others do unmanaged multigig at affordable prices. Piles
| of consumer NAS support multigig.
|
| I think this market is driven by content creators. Lots
| of prosumers shoot terabytes of video on a weekly basis.
| Local NAS are essential and multi-gig local networks
| dramatically improve the editing experience.
| kulahan wrote:
| brb ima turn on my microwave halfway through your
| transfer
| bobbiechen wrote:
| To this day I expect my wifi to drop whenever I hear a
| microwave, thanks to the one in my parents house:
| https://digitalseams.com/blog/microwave-ovens-wi-fi-and-
| http
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Shouldn't such microwaves be decommissioned? I would
| assume that microwaves that are not properly shielded are
| dangerous to people in their vicinity?
| chrneu wrote:
| or a single shitty wifi chipset in your network thanks to
| a cheap iot device.
|
| Wifi is garbage. This person has no idea what they're
| talking about. It sounds like they read a blog post like
| 5 years ago and stuck with it cuz it's an edgy take.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, me and the other literally billions of people who do
| not use wired Ethernet to their TV are just parroting an
| old blog. The OP who says Ethernet is an absolute
| requirement for Netflix is clearly correct. You sure got
| me.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Yes thunderbolt is best but look at costs. Apple is
| selling a 4ft cable for $130. I have a ton of random cat
| 5e and cat 6 and they go for a couple dollars.
|
| Now lets talk about my actual "old mac" and "new mac" Mid
| 2012 mbp and my m3 pro. The 2012 only can do 802.11n so
| not gigabit speeds. It does have a gigabit ethernet
| however.
|
| Even if I was going m3 pro to m3 pro, I'm only getting
| full wifi 6e speeds if I actually have a router that
| makes use of 160hz channels. My router can't. It is hard
| to even gleam router offerings to see which are offering
| proper wifi 6 because there are like dozens of skus sold
| even to different stores from the same brand getting
| slightly different skus. Afaik my mac does not support
| 160hz wifi 6 either.
| wtallis wrote:
| A 4ft USB 4 cable is $30. That's more bandwidth per
| dollar than an Ethernet cable. Thunderbolt cables aren't
| cost prohibitive any more (though the devices at either
| end are still very expensive).
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is so insanely wrong that I almost feel like we're
| being trolled. Yes, a direct Thunderbolt connection would
| be best. Failing that, a guaranteed 1Gb Ethernet
| connection, which is ubiquitous and dirt cheap, and has
| latency measured in microseconds, is going to wipe the
| floor with real-world Wi-Fi 7 speeds. And for what you'd
| pay for end-to-end Wi-Fi 7 compatible gear, you could be
| using 10Gb Ethernet, which is in a different league of
| stability and actual observed throughput compared to
| anything wireless.
|
| I have Firewalla Wi-Fi 7 APs connected via 10Gb Ethernet
| to my router. They're brilliant, very expensive, very
| high quality devices. I use them only for devices which I
| can't hardwired, because even 1Gb Ethernet smokes them in
| actual real-world use.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > wipe the floor with real-world Wi-Fi 7 speeds.
|
| I see that you have never tried this. By the way, Mac
| Migration Assistant doesn't need Wi-Fi infrastructure at
| all.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sure have, within the last 2 weeks when I helped a
| coworker migrate to a new machine! Both were November
| 2024 MacBook Pros, so Apple's current top-of-the-line
| laptops.
|
| Running over Wi-Fi dragged on interminably and we gave up
| several hours in. When we scrounged up a could of USB
| Ethernet dongles and started over, it took about an hour.
|
| So yeah, my own personal experience confirms exactly what
| I'd expect: Wi-Fi is slow and high-latency compared to
| Ethernet, and you should always use hardwired connections
| when you care about stability and performance more than
| portability. By all means, use Wi-Fi for routine laptop
| mobility. If you have the option, definitely run a cable
| to your stationary desktop computers, game consoles, set-
| top boxes, NASes, and everything else within reach of a
| switch.
| tass wrote:
| My isp-supplied router had 10gbe on both wan and lan
| sides. I swapped it for my own, but that is what modern
| consumer equipment looks like.
|
| You can find a 2 port 10gbe+4 port 2.5gbe switch for just
| over $30 on Amazon.
|
| If the run isn't too long this can all run over cat5.
| Handily beats wifi especially for reliability but
| Thunderbolt is fastest if you only have 2 machines to
| link.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| I have a U7 Pro XGS hooked up to a Pro HD 24 POE switch
| (all 2.5gb ports or faster).
|
| The only way I've managed to convince _any_ Wifi 7 client
| to exceed 1gbps is by freshly connecting to it over 6ghz
| while standing physically within arm 's reach of the AP.
| That's it. That's the only time it can exceed 1gbps.
|
| In all other scenarios it's well under 1gbps, often more
| like 300-500mbps. Which is great for wifi, but still
| quite below the cheapest ethernet ports around. And 6ghz
| client behavior across OS's (Windows, MacOS, iOS, and
| Android) is _so bad_ at roaming that I actually end up
| just disabling it entirely. The only thing it can do is
| generate bragging rights screenshots, in actual use it 's
| basically entirely DOA.
|
| And that's ignoring that ~$200 N150 NUCs come with
| 2.5gbps ethernet now.
| tass wrote:
| I'm with you on 6ghz wifi disappointment. My phone does
| well with it since it supports MLO but my macbook will
| refuse to roam away from 6ghz until it's close to
| unusable.
| tryauuum wrote:
| even with 1Gbit/s ethernet, measure latency. It will be
| smaller and more predictable than any wifi you can have.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >Ethernet [...] has not improved substantially in consumer
| devices since the previous century.
|
| We've gone from 100 Mbps being standard consumer level to 2.5
| or 10 Gbps being standard now. That sounds substantial to me.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There is not any meaningful sense in which 2.5gb ethernet
| is "standard". There are no TVs with 2.5gb ethernet ports.
| Or even 1gb ports. Yet they all have WiFi 5 or better.
| dpark wrote:
| In practical terms, WiFi 5 is slower than 1gb Ethernet.
|
| It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet
| ports on TVs though.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet
| ports on TVs though.
|
| It's a few pennies cheaper and i'm sure they have some
| data showing 70%+ will just use WiFi. TCL in particular
| doesn't even have very good/stable drivers for their
| 10/100 NIC; there's a ton of people on the Home Assistant
| forums that have noticed that their android powered smart
| TV will just ... stop working / responding on the network
| until it's rebooted.
| dpark wrote:
| I'm sure you're right, but the fact that it's almost
| certainly literal pennies makes it very lame. Lack of
| stable drivers is also ridiculous given how long gbps
| Ethernet has been around.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| No video streams out there uses over 100mbits so makes
| sense.
| dpark wrote:
| I've read that 8k streams can exceed 100mbps. I have not
| dig very far into that though since I don't have an 8k tv
| or any 8k sources.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Streaming services are extremely compressed. Netflix only
| recommendeds 15mbps for 4k, even. A naive straight
| quadrupling of that for 8k is only 60mbps, and in reality
| they'll just dial up the compression anyway and probably
| use a 30mbps stream.
| toast0 wrote:
| > It is bizarre that they are putting 100mbps Ethernet
| ports on TVs though.
|
| It's not that bizarre. About the only media one might
| have access to that is above 100mbps is 4k blu-ray rips
| which can hit peaks above 100m; but TVs don't really
| cater to that. They're really trying to be your conduit
| to commercial streaming services which do not encode at
| that high of a bitrate (and even if they did, would
| gracefully degrade to 100Mbps). And then you can save on
| transformers for the two pairs that are unused for
| 100base-tx.
| esseph wrote:
| Home user CPE we install have multiple 2.5G Ethernet
| ports.
| wtallis wrote:
| 2.5GbE only started gaining steam when cheap Realtek
| chips became available (especially since the Intel chips
| that were on the market earlier were buggy). Those have
| been adopted by almost all desktop motherboards now on
| the market, and most laptops that still have Ethernet.
| Embedded systems are lagging because they're _always_
| behind technologically and because they have longer
| design cycles, but it 's pretty clear that most devices
| _designed_ in the last year or two are moving beyond 1GbE
| and 2.5GbE will be the new baseline going forward.
| userbinator wrote:
| 10G Ethernet is not quite that common yet, but should
| become very common soon:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44071701
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They exaggerated a little bit on the timeline. But 20+
| years ago 1gbps became standard, and today there are signs
| of change but 1gbps is still standard.
| lxgr wrote:
| Compared to what?
| chrneu wrote:
| Ethernet will usually hit hardware limits of your HDD or SSD
| before it actually maxes out. 1gb ethernet is better than
| wifi in 99% of cases because wifi in the real world is pretty
| bad, even with modern standards. Why else do they have to
| continually revamp the standards to get around congestion and
| roaming issues? Cuz wifi is garbage in the real world.
| Ethernet = Very little jitter, latency, or packet loss. Wifi
| = Tons of jitter, latency and packet loss.
|
| Your take is really weird and doesn't represent the real
| world. What blog did you read this on and why haven't you
| bothered to attack that obviously wrong stance?
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is the most ridiculous lie in the thread. An ethernet
| link that can barely keep up with a $150 SSD costs $1250
| per switch port, and needs a $1200 NIC and can go only 3m
| over copper before you need a $1000+ optic assembly. There
| is nobody with an ethernet setup in their home that outruns
| consumer-grade SSDs. "Ethernet is limited by SSDs" is a
| Charlie's Hoes level of wrong.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Yes even an HDD can keep up with 1GbE.
|
| But if you actually want your Ethernet to be similar
| speed to your SSD, you don't need to spend that much. Get
| some used gear.
|
| 32 port 40GbE switch (Dell S6000) $210 used
|
| Dual port 40GbE NIC (Mellanox MCX354A-FCCT) $31 used
|
| 40GbE DAC 1 meter new price $22 _or_ 40GbE optics from
| FS.com (QSFP-SR4-40G) $43 new + MMF fiber cable
|
| Of course, that's probably not going to be very power
| efficient for home use - 32 port switch and probably only
| connecting a handful of devices at most.
| avree wrote:
| Unfortunately, Unifi only supports DFS channels (which is the
| only real way for 'each device to have its own wifi channel in
| a crowded area) on some of their models.
| esseph wrote:
| What unifi AP doesn't support DFS?
|
| Sometimes DFS certification comes after general device
| approval, but I'm not aware of any that just flat out doesn't
| support it. It supported it 10+ years ago.
| varenc wrote:
| Yea I've had all sorts of UniFi gear and have never seen an
| access point that only works on DFS channels. That'd make
| no sense and their admin software actively discourages DFS
| channel selection.
|
| I'd guess OP might be trying to use 160mhz channel width on
| 5ghz band, which will only work on DFS channels though. I
| wouldn't recommend 160mhz channel width unless you have a
| very quiet RF environment and peak speed is very important
| to you. Also I've found it hard to get clients to actually
| use the full 160mhz width on a network configured this way.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Yeah, we built our home and i made sure whenever there would be
| devices on the wall there was an ethernet cable there, best
| decision ever.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| yes, and... convenience says 'use WiFi'. No wires! I've said,
| if it moves - wireless. If it doesn't -- wired. Counterexamples
| that 'work': AM / FM / TV / Paging big transmitters to
| simple/cheap receivers. For the 1-way case, that works. But for
| 2-way....
| paulddraper wrote:
| There are two kinds of networks: wireless networks and reliable
| networks.
|
| Wired connection is an absolute hack.
| lxgr wrote:
| I hear people say this often, but when you look into what
| they actually mean, it's often a comparison of having a
| single mediocre ISP CPE in a corner of an apartment, at most
| with a wireless repeater in another, vs. Ethernet. Of course
| the wire wins in that comparison.
|
| Now put an access point into every room and wire them to the
| router, and things start looking very differently.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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 turn off.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| ipython wrote:
| > 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
| network, if you're able to get enough coverage. Prefer wired
| backhaul and more access points, as you're better off with a
| device talking on another channel to an ap closer to it rather
| than tieing up airtime with lots of retries to a far away ap
| (which impacts all the other clients also trying to talk to
| that ap)
|
| WiFi is super solid at our house but it took some tweaking and
| wiring everything that doesn't move.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Solid idea and something I should work towards. We have
| Ethernet drops in every room but you're right about IoT
| devices. Now I have some more planning to do.
| kiney wrote:
| skip wifi and use zigbee for IoT where possible.
| chrneu wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| A good way of thinking about it is that every 2.4ghz device
| you add onto a network will slow all the other devices by a
| small amount. This compounds as you add more devices. So
| those smart lights? Yeaaahh
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| so does your phone :)
| drnick1 wrote:
| Yes, but unlike TVs, my phone runs free software
| (Graphene) and is free of the spyware "smart" TVs are
| known for.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Most people don't run Graphene so point stands.
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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.
| hvb2 wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| The "it spies on you because it's free" thing hasn't been
| true for many years now. TVs that cost almost a grand
| still spy on you, as do cars that cost tens of thousands.
| Youtube/Netflix/Spotify/... still spy on you even if you
| pay for the premium/whatever tier.
|
| If something is free, you're the product. But if it isn't
| free, you're paying to be the product.
| inkyoto wrote:
| 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 alike) first, whilst blacklisting the
| outgoing CIDR's on the router itself at the same time.
|
| This course of action shall not eliminate the privacy
| invasion risk in its entirety - for a mere firmware
| update may well redirect the TV traffic to novel hosts -
| yet it shall transform a reckless exposure into a
| calculated and therefore manageable risk.
| ipython wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > 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 with various FC standards. Or do you mean the
| modem was so crappy it couldn't deal with processing noisy
| 2.4 GHz channels at the same time as 5GHz ones? That might
| be true, but I would assume the modems would run completely
| different DSP chains on different asics, so this would be
| surprising.
| robocat wrote:
| > 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-01e9083
| f7e... (Note that Prof is one "character" I have defined
| in the prompt customisation)
|
| Or:
|
| https://g.co/gemini/share/1e8d55831809
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.)
| robocat wrote:
| There's no need to be rude.
|
| cycomanic knows stuff but their answer was basically
| contradicting chrneu, which nobody likes. It is
| counterintuitive to me (and I'm guessing cycomanic too)
| that the different bands should interact so much.
|
| The AI answers passed my shit-detector... And I think it
| is the same as trying to be helpful but providing a
| search link in the past. Other HN users can make their
| own decision about reading the prompt or reply (although
| using links does make me wonder about cross account
| tracking and doxing myself).
| ssl-3 wrote:
| The false supposition built into the question asked of
| the bot combined with the resulting answer to the bad
| question result in the whole thing being -- at very best
| -- a boondoggle of a red herring.
|
| It's all quite well-worded, and yet is still completely
| unrelated to what is being discussed.
|
| Real people: "Hey, let's talk about networks!"
|
| Eventually: "Cool, I like networks! Did you know that
| down is actually up, and up is actually down? In fact, I
| asked a sycophant bot to demonstrate this fiction with
| its wily words, and it did so with with wonderful
| articulation. Here's a link!"
|
| Having tolerance towards this kind of make-believe anti-
| truth is not something that I would consider to be a
| healthy human function. Especially when this nonsense has
| deflected through a third party that is completely absent
| from the discourse and isolated from the context, such as
| a sycophant bot, and particularly so when there's an
| implied appeal to authority for that absent third party.
|
| (I have no intention of considering whether this kind of
| action is deliberate or not. I simply recognize this move
| for how consistently successful it is at poisoning a
| discussion amongst a group of people.)
|
| ---
|
| If you were to ask me, a person, the following question:
|
| > "What is the most likely reason that a cheap router/AP
| would slow down servicing clients on 5GHz when also
| servicing clients on a congested 2.4GHz spectrum"
|
| ...then I would not have responded to that question with
| a single confidently-stated and presumptive answer, but
| instead by opening a dialogue.
|
| And I would begin this dialogue by asking about the
| reasons that lead you to believe that this would ever be
| true in the first place.
|
| (But that's not the path that was chosen here.)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| ipython wrote:
| There is no non-IoT 2.4ghz network in my design. All "fast"
| devices are on a 5ghz only network. The only 2.4ghz network
| is dedicated to IoT devices. This also eliminates the need
| for devices to hunt and roam between 5ghz and 2.4ghz
| unnecessarily. Just need to balance tx power to make sure
| the 5ghz handoffs are as smooth as possible between APs.
| bxparks wrote:
| You are lucky. In 2025 I have to run most of my 20-30 wifi
| devices on 2.4 GHz because 5 GHz won't penetrate the walls
| in my house, especially diagonally.
|
| My dev laptop is about 10 m (30 ft) away from the wifi
| access point, but goes through about 6 walls diagonally,
| due to some weird layout, and 2.4 GHz is way faster.
|
| The house has some thick walls.
|
| Same with phones. As soon as I'm in a different room, 2.4
| GHz is faster. So I just keep things on 2.4.
|
| Yeah, I've been planning to wire the house with Cat-6 into
| every room and add some access points. It's been on the
| backlog for 6 years..
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've lived in houses like that.
|
| My last house, which was rather small (by midwestern
| American standards, anyway) had some interior walls that
| were very good at blocking 5GHz transmissions. (I never
| took them apart to look, but I suspect that some of them
| had plaster with metal lath as one or more layers.)
|
| I started with one access point downstairs at the front
| (because that's where the cable modem lived) but it
| didn't work so well upstairs, at the back (diagonally) in
| the room I was using as an office.
|
| So I added another access point upstairs at the back and
| that fixed it: Wifi became solid-enough both upstairs and
| down, and also covered the entire back yard, and also
| worked great for the neighbors when they asked if they
| could borrow a cup of Internet. It took some literal
| gymnastics in some very weird normally-unseen spaces to
| accomplish that run, but it got done. :)
|
| As an side: It's interesting that being blocked by walls
| is also part of what makes 5GHz wifi so speedy indoors
| (in addition to having a lot more spectrum to use), for
| many [not all] people. By being attenuated so well by
| walls, the co-channel interference from the neighbors is
| reduced rather dramatically. With neighbors nearby, the
| RF environment tends to be a lot quieter at 2.4GHz than
| at 5GHz.
|
| ---
|
| Present-day house is a bit lucky: All of the thirsty tech
| is on the first floor, and it's very simple to get
| ethernet cables routed 'round in the basement (it's all
| utility space). I was able to find enough pre-existing
| holes in the floor (from old cable TV installs and also
| floor-mounted outlets that have been removed and covered)
| that getting ethernet to every useful area of every
| first-floor room with tech in it was a very simple ordeal
| that did not require a drill. (Yeah, that means that
| there's a wire poking up through the floor behind the
| desk I'm sitting at right now instead of a tidy RJ45
| receptacle on a wall plate with a nice port designation
| label. I'm over it; it works perfectly and inertia is a
| hell of a drug.)
|
| But I'm not completely "lucky." The present house has
| aluminum siding and low-E windows. It's a great house
| that is amazingly inexpensive to heat and cool for how
| old it is, but it has aluminum siding and low-E windows
| and approximates a somewhat-leaky Faraday cage.
|
| Thus, my cell phone barely works indoors, but it works
| great outside. And wifi barely works outside on the porch
| (front or back, doesn't matter), and really not at all
| beyond the porch (but things like my phone think that it
| should work, which is problematic).
|
| I worked around that well-enough for the detached garage
| and back yard area by adding another access point in the
| garage, configured as a wireless repeater. Its advantage
| is that it has antennas that are optimized to work well,
| instead of some that are optimized to be very small (like
| those inside my phone, or my laptop). It's identical to
| the one inside the house and gets OK signal to/from the
| main AP, which it has a visual line-of-sight to through a
| couple of windows.
|
| As an impromptu solution made from stuff I already had
| leftover from the last place, it works. I'm not winning
| any speed records with that remote access point... but it
| seems to be reliable, and reliability is good.
|
| (Maybe some day I'll actually get around to upgrading the
| electricity to the garage to support some easy-to-access
| rooftop solar and/or car charging and/or welding and/or
| something, and when that trenching happens I'll also drop
| in some single-mode fiber. A single run of pre-terminated
| fiber is very cheap to buy, the "optics" at the endpoints
| are very inexpensive, and it is very safe with its
| essentially-absolute electrical isolation. It feels like
| overkill, but it's also once and done.)
| rbranson wrote:
| > It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet
| that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled
| route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
|
| Certainly this is the brute-force way to do it and can work if
| you can run enough UTP everywhere. As a counterexample, I went
| all-in on WiFi and have 5 access points with dedicated
| backhauls. This is in SF too, so neighbors are right up against
| us. I have ~60 devices on the WiFi and have no issues, with
| fast roaming handoff, low jitter, and ~500Mbit up/down. I built
| this on UniFi, but I suspect Eero PoE gear could get you pretty
| close too, given how well even their mesh backhaul gear
| performs.
| xmprt wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with SF construction materials but I
| wonder if that plays a part in it too? If your neighbors are
| separated by concrete walls then you're probably getting less
| interference from them than you'd think and your mesh might
| actually work better(?)... but what do I know since I'm no
| networking engineer.
| rbranson wrote:
| It's all wood construction, originally stick victorians
| with 2x4 exterior walls. My "loudest" neighbor is being
| picked up on 80MHz at -47 dBm.
| hansvm wrote:
| Man, at times in my life I would've killed to get a -47
| dBm or better signal.
| varenc wrote:
| Old Victorians in SF will sometimes have lathe and
| plaster walls (the 'wet wall' that drywall replaced).
| Lathe and plaster walls often have chicken wire in them
| that degrade wifi more than regular drywall will.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| you have five access points and 60 devices? How many square
| feet are you trying to cover?
| chrneu wrote:
| 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
| Tenemo wrote:
| 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.
| sahruum9 wrote:
| A smart home will definitely run those numbers up. I have
| about 60 WiFi devices and another 45 Zigbee devices and
| I'm only about halfway done with the house.
| phil21 wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| lol 5 APs for ~60 devices is so wasteful and just throwing
| money at the problem.
|
| I'm glad it works but lol that's just hilarious.
| Marsymars wrote:
| FWIW you don't need POE Eero devices for a wired backhaul,
| all of their devices has support it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| TV streaming seems like a bad example, since it's usually much
| lower average bandwidth than e.g. a burst of mobile app updates
| installing with equal priority on the network as as soon as a
| phone is plugged in for charging, or starting a cloud photo
| backup.
| vel0city wrote:
| Kind of true, but potentially also untrue. If that TV is
| running a crappy WiFi chip running an older WiFi standard on
| the same channel, it'll end up performing worse or not
| playing as nice with other clients during those bursts of
| buffering. That'll potentially be seen by other clients as
| little bursts of jitter.
|
| That's true of any client with older and crappier WiFi chips
| though, but TVs are such a race to the bottom when it comes
| to performance in so many other things.
| drob518 wrote:
| That tip about not using it also works with Ethernet and other
| technologies, BTW.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I wish I could put Ethernet everywhere but I live in a German
| apartment in a German house and here walls are massive and made
| out of brick and concrete. Routing cables through this without
| it being a massive eyesore is pretty hard.
| molszanski wrote:
| Try Powerline. This EUR40 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.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I tried that but the performance was worse than wifi.
| MaKey wrote:
| G.hn powerline devices are better than the ancient
| HomePlug AV2 ones. Which devices did you try?
| izacus wrote:
| Powerline almost never comes close to performance of wifi
| in the same conditions.
|
| It's literally wifi just over an even worse medium.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Through thick brick walls?
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Does it have any wiring? I've lived in old homes with coax
| for cable and those can be used with moca adapters to do
| ethernet. They can do 2.5gbps too.
| molszanski wrote:
| Oh, one more idea. You can use existing coax cables (tv
| cable) via adapters to get 1-2 reliable gbps over cable. For
| e.g. a switch with an additional access point
| alyandon wrote:
| I use powerline ethernet adapters to hook up the media center
| in the living room. They aren't super fast (~100 mbps) but they
| are so much more _consistent_ than wifi.
| m463 wrote:
| > _not use it._
|
| A few things come to mind...
|
| - You can buy ethernet adapters... for iPhone/ipad/etc.
| Operations are so much faster, especially large downloads like
| offline maps.
|
| - many consumer devices suck wrt to wifi. For example, there
| seem to me ZERO soundbars with wired subwoofers. They all
| incorporate wifi.
|
| - also, if anyone has lived in a really dense urban
| environment, wifi is a liability in just about every way.
|
| - Whats's worse is how promiscuous many devices are. Why do
| macs show all the neighbor's televisions in the airplay menu?
|
| - and you can't really turn off wifi on a mac without turning
| off sip. (in settings, wifi OFF toggle is stuck on but greyed
| out)
| yardstick wrote:
| > 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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 to keep things properly in-phase at 20KHz
| between different devices, to allow stereo imaging to work
| correctly betwixt two wirelessly-connected speakers. (This
| seems very passe' in these modern enlightened times of
| seemingly-independent wireless Bluetooth earbuds, but it
| was a tough nut for them to crack back in 2002[!].)
|
| It wasn't all smiles and rainbows, of course, because the
| world never properly settled on one, true, universal
| implementation of something like Spanning Tree Protocol and
| agreed on how to use it. It was very possible for a person
| to really hose up their network by connecting Sonos gear
| the "wrong" way -- by connecting "too much" of it directly
| to the LAN.
|
| But those potential problems were broadly mitigable by
| picking exactly one Sonos device to bridge the wireless
| SonosNet into the home's LAN: Ideally, a Sonos Bridge would
| -- uh -- provide that bridge, but any random Sonos speaker
| (or subwoofer!) would do just as well. This worked, but it
| involved some aspect of wifi.
|
| And yeah, the problems could also be mitigated in other
| ways if they showed up: A person could certainly plug in
| their Sonos sub, sound bar, and surround speakers into
| Ethernet -- which was really quite neat and tidy if it
| worked, and it often worked. But it was a pickle if it
| didn't work because STP implementations can be an
| unadjustable boondoggle in the consumer space.
|
| They had a really neat and rather unique thing going for
| quite a long time before the market shifted to make their
| products apparently be fickle, outdated, inferior, and
| expensive. ("What, no Bluetooth?" people once said, even
| though, being an independent network-based streamer, it
| doesn't have Bluetooth problems like a person walking to
| the other side of the house with their phone where everyone
| but them can hear it noisily glitch out until they wander
| back.)
|
| Nowadays, SonosNet seems to be mostly dead, and the STP
| problems died with it. Common home wifi has also grown up a
| _lot_ since 2002. 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.
|
| It was pretty neat. It's still pretty neat today.
| phil21 wrote:
| > 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I thought that was fixed with S2, by basically ditching
| the glory (and pitfalls) of ye olde SonosNet.
|
| Are you still on S1?
| varenc wrote:
| > Why do macs show all the neighbor's televisions in the
| airplay menu?
|
| That's a feature that can be configured on the TV/AirPlay
| receiver. They've configured to allow streaming from
| "Anyone", which is probably the default. They could disable
| this is setting and limit it to only clients on their home
| network. And you can't actually stream without entering a
| confirmation code shown on the TV.
|
| When you stream to an AirPlay device this way it sets up an
| adhoc device-to-device wireless connection which usually
| performs much better that using a wifi network/router and is
| why screen sharing can be so snappy. Part of the 'Apple
| Wireless Direct Link' proprietary secret sauce also used by
| AirDrop. You can sniff the awdl0 or llw0 interfaces to see
| the traffic. Open AirDrop and then run `ping6 ff02::1%awdl0`
| to see all the Apple devices your Mac is in contact with (not
| necessarily on your wifi network)
|
| > and you can't really turn off wifi on a mac without turning
| off sip.
|
| Just `sudo ifconfig en0 down` doesn't work? You can also do
| `networksetup -setairportpower en0 off`. Never had issues
| turning off wifi.
| dylanowen wrote:
| 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
| Denatonium wrote:
| MoCA is truly amazing. I'm getting full symmetrical 940 Mbps
| speeds simultaneously over upload and download using RG59
| cable with a pair of ECB6250. It helps that our house is
| fairly small, as the high frequencies that MoCA uses get
| attenuated pretty quickly on RG59 cabling, but even still,
| I'm impressed by the results.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| And all iot devices on protocol such as zwave
| varenc wrote:
| An idle Wi-Fi client with no traffic should have a very minimal
| effect on your network's quality. The TV is only going to be
| slowing things down if it's actually using the network and
| downloading/uploading. Which regrettably, is a problem with
| smart TVs. But there's no reason to limit the number of idle
| clients on a Wi-Fi network assuming your gateway can handle it.
| The challenge is though in the real world many devices that
| should be idle aren't.
|
| For my IoT network I just block most every device's access to
| the internet. That cuts down on a lot of their background
| chatter and gives me some minor protection.
|
| Also honestly, I feel the majority of wifi problems could be
| fixed by having proper coverage (more access points), using
| hardwired access points (no meshing), and getting better
| equipment. I like Ubiquiti/Unifi stuff but other good options
| out there. Avoid TP-Link and anything provided by an ISP. If
| you do go meshing, insist on a 6ghz backhaul, though that hurts
| the range.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > 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.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| If the playback device isn't terrible (though smart TVs
| probably are), 100 Mbps should still be adequate as long as
| the average bitrate stays below that (which I think is the
| case for almost all UHD blurays?) and you get close to the
| nominal speed. For example if it peaks at 120 Mbps, then
| you're only draining your buffer at 2.5 MB/s, so a 150 MB
| buffer gets you an entire minute of peak bitrate as long as
| it was full. A quick search suggests very few movies go above
| 100 Mbps for longer than a few seconds at a time and averages
| are usually below 80.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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
| semiquaver wrote:
| The 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 are regularly conducting speed tests
| without being asked?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > What WiFi devices are regularly conducting speed tests
| without being asked?
|
| ISP provided routers, at least Xfinity does. I've gotten emails
| from them (before I ripped out their equipment and put my own
| in) "Great news, you're getting more than your plan's promised
| speeds" with speedtest results in the email, because they ran
| speed tests at like 3AM.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening often across all the
| residential ISPs, most likely for marketing purposes.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I have noticed Spectrum internet shits the bed at 12:30am
| pretty reliably.
| typpilol wrote:
| Really? My spectrum has been super reliable in Michigan.
| Way better than when I had Comcast here
| gm678 wrote:
| Pretty sure Verizon does this as well, when I had a tech come
| out he had access to historical speed test results from my
| router (I didn't ask any questions about it at the time so
| don't have any more info).
| lxgr wrote:
| That would be a speedtest between the router/modem and CMTS
| then, not one between a Wi-Fi connected device and the ISP,
| no?
| esseph wrote:
| Ubiquiti UniFi used to, I don't know if it still does.
| pbronez wrote:
| It's configurable
| nativeit wrote:
| At least in my UniFi instance, this is only done when
| manually triggered, but I seem to recall a setting where it
| could be automatically updated daily.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Eero does this automatically (mine says it was last run 2 days
| ago at 5:08am) and I had software on my DD-WRT router
| (OpenLede) that did it, though obviously not many people
| (overall) are running that.
|
| I used to run a docker than ran a speed test every hour and
| graphed the results but I haven't done that in a while now.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Eero I think just tests internet speed from the gateway, so
| no Wi-Fi involved.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google Nest access points do this, but they do it only when
| networks are idle, so I fail to see the negative consequences.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| DOCSIS cable modems perform perform regularly scheduled tests,
| but it's only between devices, and shouldn't affect available
| bandwidth, because there's far more bandwidth within the DOCSIS
| network than between the network and the Internet.
| lxgr wrote:
| > there's far more bandwidth within the DOCSIS network than
| between the network and the Internet.
|
| Really? DOCSIS has been the bottleneck out of Wi-Fi, DOCSIS,
| and wider Internet every time I've had the misfortune of
| having to use it in an apartment.
|
| Especially the tiny uplink frequency slice of DOCSIS 3 and
| below is pathetic.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| ttshaw1 wrote:
| 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 that needs to be high
| performance shouldn't be on wifi anyway.
|
| If you want to spend a really long time optimizing your wifi,
| this is the resource: https://www.wiisfi.com/
| jerf wrote:
| This sort of thing is definitely in the class of "are you
| experiencing problems? if not don't worry about it".
|
| If you are experiencing problems, this might give you an angle
| to think about that you hadn't otherwise, if you just naively
| assume Wifi is as good as a dedicated wire. Modern Wifi has an
| awful lot of resources, though. I only notice degradation of
| any kind when I have one computer doing a full-speed transfer
| for quite a while to another, but that's a pretty exceptional
| case and not one I'm going to run any more wires around for for
| something that happens less than once a month.
| tetris11 wrote:
| 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
| bcrl wrote:
| Every doubling of the channel width costs roughly 3dB.
| Shannon's law strikes again!
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Every doubling of the channel width doubles the Shannon
| limit*
|
| * An a gaussian white noise environment, which WiFi usually
| isn't in.
| grogers wrote:
| 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!
| operator-name wrote:
| Wow, that is an awesome resource and something I wish I knew
| about earlier!
| jpc0 wrote:
| 2.4GHz wifi at 40MHz squats literally half of the usabke
| channels, you speed improvement, very likely you now get
| 100mbps. If you just disabled 2.4GHz and forced 5GHz you would
| get the exact same improvement and wouldn't be polluting half
| of the available frequencies.
|
| Add another idiot sitting on channel 8 or 9 and the other half
| of the bandwidth is also polluted, now even your mediocre IoT
| devices that cannot be on 5GHz are going to struggle for signal
| and instead of the theoretical 70/70mbps you could get off a
| well placed 20MHz channel you are lucky to get 30.
|
| Add another 4 people are you cannot make a FaceTime call
| without disabling wifi or forcing 5GHz
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Everytime I have questions about Wi-Fi I search for this
| distinctive site wiisfi.com ... I should bookmark this.
|
| The best Ressource out there. Period.
| varenc wrote:
| The takeaway is that you'll probably experience more reliable
| wifi if you turn your 5ghz channel width down to 40mhz and
| especially make sure your 2.4ghz width is 20mhz not 40mhz. As
| noted, you can't do anything about the neighbors, but making
| these changes can improve your reliability. And I think the
| larger takeaway is that if manufacturers just defaulted to
| 40mhz 5ghz width, like enterprise equipment does, wifi would be
| better for everyone. But if your wifi works great then no need.
|
| Also that's an amazing resource, thanks for linking.
| 725686 wrote:
| "The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices"... wtf?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| And that's not to mention everything else on the 2.4GHz band :)
| Bluetooth, zigbee, your microwave, etc
| MrZander wrote:
| That seems very high to me. A family of four each has 5 devices
| connected at the same time?
| paxys wrote:
| Smartphone, laptop, tablet, watch - that's 4 already. And
| this isn't just counting personal devices. Include TV,
| streaming stick, game console, printers, bulbs, plugs,
| speakers, doorbell, security cameras, thermostat and you'll
| hit that number pretty quick.
| MrZander wrote:
| There are 16 devices on my WiFi right now and I would've
| though I was above average. I have a bunch of weird stuff
| like 3 Raspberry Pis that most households would not have,
| but I don't have most of the stuff you listed.
|
| I guess I am less "connected" than the average American.
| Can't say I feel like I am missing out, though.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Check your network and see how many wifi devices you have.
| I'm up to 60+ thanks to a handful of IoT devices, smart
| speakers, etc... It adds up quick.
| drob518 wrote:
| Most of your mobile devices are doing background tasks. It's
| not typically high bandwidth stuff, but they are connected
| even when you aren't using them.
| tzs wrote:
| I'm single and have 11 devices on 2.4 GHz:
| Wireless temperature monitor Sync module for some Blink
| cameras 2 smart plugs Roomba 5 smart lights
| RPi 3
|
| 3 of the smart lights I currently don't need and and so
| aren't actually connected. That leaves 8 connected 2.4 GHz
| devices.
|
| On 5 GHz I've got 16 devices: Amazon Fire
| Stick iPad Printer Echo Show Apple
| Watch Surface Pro 4 iMac Nintendo Switch
| EV charger Mac Studio A smart plug Google
| Home Mini Echo Dot RPi 4 Kindle
| iPhone
|
| The iMac and the Surface Pro 4 are almost never turned on,
| and the printer is also most of the time. That leaves 13
| regularly connected 5 GHz devices.
|
| That's a total of 21 devices usually connected on my WiFi,
| right what the article says is average. :-)
| IshKebab wrote:
| Doesn't seem unreasonable. Look at your router. I have 17 and I
| would say we're a totally normal household - the kids don't
| even have phones yet.
|
| We have 2 phones, a tablet for the kids, a couple of Google
| homes, a Chromecast, 2 yoto players, a printer, a smart TV, 2
| laptops, a raspberry pi, a solar power Inverter, an Oculus
| Quest, and a couple of things that have random hostnames.
|
| It adds up.
| isaacdl wrote:
| I live alone, and just counted, I have 10 in regular use. A few
| more that can connect to WiFi but aren't (why would I want my
| tower fans on the internet, anyway?)
|
| I had probably 20 prior to swapping out some smart light bulbs
| and switches for Zigbee.
|
| 21 for an average household isn't nuts.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Doesn't take long to add up. Family of 4 - every phone,
| including prior generation which might be off in a draw: 3-8
|
| Router, and extenders (multi floor house): 1-4
|
| Chromecast|Sonos|Apple
| speaker/Chromecast|google|firestick|roku|apple TV/smart
| speaker/hifi receiver/eaves dropping devices: 2-10
|
| Smart doorbell/light switch/temperature sensor/weather
| station/co2|co detector/flood detector/bulb/led strip/led
| light/nanoleaf/garage door: 4-16
|
| Some cars: 0-2
|
| Some smart watches speak wifi: 0-4
|
| Computers.. maybe the desktops are wired (likely still support
| wifi), all laptops, chromebooks, and tablets : 3-8
|
| All game consoles, many TVs, some computer monitors: 3-8
|
| Some smart appliances: 0-4 (based on recent news of ads, best
| to aim for 0)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The numbers still feel pretty outlandish to me.
|
| The biggest factor in your count, and I think it _is_ the one
| with the highest ceiling, is smart devices. Trouble is, even
| by sources like
| https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/average-number-
| of..., around half of all households still have _zero_ , and
| the average household has only 2.6 people.
|
| In this thread (from its root), we have various users
| defending the reasonableness of the numbers, some providing
| numbers in their own houses: 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 23, 28, 34,
| over 50, 60+. Averaging, I'll say, about 27, and that's with
| two pretty big outliers--if you excluded them (maybe
| reasonable, maybe not), you'd be down to 19.5. And these
| sorts of users are _already_ likely to be above-average, it's
| the nature of HN, compounded by them being the ones
| commenting (confirmation bias). Yet _already_ (with the
| fiddling of removing what I'm calling outliers) they're under
| the claimed average. And for each one of them, there's
| another household with _zero_ smart home devices; and the 20%
| of the population with no broadband are, I imagine,
| effectively using zero wifi devices, though discounting in
| this way is a little too simplistic. However you look at it,
| the average will drop quite a bit. In fact, if you return to
| the original 27 and simplify the portion of the population
| without smart home devices to a 30% zero rate (mildly
| arbitrary, but I think reasonable enough as a starting point)
| and let the other 70% be average... your 27 has dropped to
| about 19. In order to reach the 21 across the population,
| you'd need to establish these HN users, defenders of high
| wifi device counts, to be _below average_ users of wifi
| devices, which is implausible.
|
| If the number was 10, I'd consider it plausible, though
| honestly I'd still expect the number to be lower. But I think
| my reasoning backs up my initial feeling that 21 is pretty
| outlandish for your _national average_. I'd like to see
| Deloitte Insights' methodology; I reckon it's a furphy. I bet
| it's come from some grossly misleading survey data, or from
| sales figures of devices that are wifi- _capable_ even though
| half of them never get used that way, or from terrible
| sampling bias (surveys are _notorious_ for that), or
| something like that. Wouldn't be the first wildly wrong or
| grossly misleading result one of those sorts of companies
| have published.
| tempestn wrote:
| 34 devices connected to my router at the moment, 8 wired and 26
| wifi. About 8 of the wifi devices are phones, tablets, and
| laptops; the rest are various iot things: locks, plugs, alarm,
| thermostat, water heater, doorbell, etc.
| seemaze wrote:
| I just checked;
|
| I currently have 23, my parent's house has 19
|
| People have all kinds of stuff on wifi these days - cameras,
| light bulbs, dishwashers, irrigation, solar, hifi..
| rdschouw wrote:
| I got 28 online right now according to my Eero. 3 people, with
| smartphones and laptops. Several game consoles, a few Apple TVs
| and music streaming devices, Ring camera, Zwave Hub, printer,
| washing machine, garage opener, Ring doorbell and an assortment
| of Echo dots.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yep. And each of your neighbors also has that many devices and
| you're all sharing the same channels.
| commandersaki wrote:
| I count 14 in a 2 person household, 4 bedroom house; 3 wired.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm probably not average, but I have over 50 wifi devices
| registered on my UBNT system and 15 wired.
| jsight wrote:
| It is pretty easy to get there when everyone has a phone, a
| laptop, and there are a few shared tablets around. Add work +
| personal machines and it goes up a bit more.
|
| Add a few wifi security cameras and other IoT devices and 30+
| is probably pretty common.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Honestly what's unsaid in a lot of this is that it would be
| really nice if there were more and wider ISM bands. So much makes
| use of 900Mhz, 2.4GHz and 5GHz in novel and innovative ways, that
| if the government and FCC really actually wanted to spark
| innovation including augmenting wifi performance, they'd stop
| letting telcos and other questionable interests hoard spectrum
| and release it as ISM (and no, they shouldn't steal from ham
| bands to make ISM bands either).
| esseph wrote:
| The only way forward is new frequencies and larger blocks of
| spectrum.
| ianburrell wrote:
| WiFi 6E added 6 GHz spectrum bigger than 5 GHz. The problem is
| that not that many devices support it. I think it is required
| in WiFi 7. I think it is shared with other users so devices
| have to find free space. I think most developed countries have
| allocated it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Many ISPs, device manufacturers, and consumers automate
| periodic, high-intensity speed tests that negatively impact the
| consumer internet experience as demonstrated.
|
| Is that actually a thing? Why would any ISP intentionally add
| unnecessary load to their network?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I've only met around 10 people that even know what a speed test
| is. I'm not sure how most consumers would even go about
| automating one. What would be the first step?
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| See https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/cisco-announces-intent-
| to-... for example, SamKnows is in millions of homes measuring
| performance and now sending the data to Cisco.
| chrneu wrote:
| For what it's worth, I think most ISPs that do this will host
| their speed test in-network so their speeds are inflated. This
| benefits both the ISP and whoever is in charge of the speed
| test(like speedtest.net).
|
| So they're not really increasing their network load a
| measurable amount since the data never actually leaves their
| internal network. My ISP's network admin explained this to me
| one day when I asked about it. He said they don't really notice
| any difference.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| That's why Netflix has fast.com, which pulls actual video
| content _, meaning it's hard for the ISP to inflate the
| number.
|
| _ (at least as per my understanding)
| somanyphotons wrote:
| Is there a good guide on what the right things to do are?
| chrneu wrote:
| Hardwire everything you can over ethernet to get them off Wifi.
|
| Use a dedicated 2.4ghz AP for all IoT devices. Firewall this
| network and only allow the traffic those devices need. This
| greatly reduces congestion.
|
| Use 5ghz for phones/laptops and keep IoT off that network.
|
| That's really about it. If you have special circumstances there
| are other solutions, but generally the solution to bad wifi is
| to not use the wifi, lol.
| XorNot wrote:
| In the IoT space I really wish an "ESP for power line Ethernet"
| existed these days.
|
| I have 50+ ESP based devices on WiFi and while low bandwidth (and
| their own SSID) I really wish there were affordable options that
| they could be "wired" for comms (since they mostly control mains
| appliances, but the rules and considerations for mixing data and
| mains in one package are prohibitively expensive).
| Neywiny wrote:
| Have you considered 1 WiFi device and 49 sub-ghz devices?
| XorNot wrote:
| The point isn't wifi contention per se (it's working fine) -
| it's that having home automation depend on wireless signals
| at all is both a vulnerability, and feels silly when all
| those devices have hard wired power.
| kuon wrote:
| For me the only thing that really matters, and globally sucks
| with WiFi is roaming.
|
| My house is old and has stones walls up to 120cm, including the
| inner walls, so I have to have access points is nearly all rooms.
|
| I never had a true seamless roaming experience. Today, I have TP-
| Link Omada and it works better than previous solutions, but it is
| still not as good as DECT phones for examples.
|
| For example if I watch a twitch stream in my room and go to the
| kitchen grab something with my tablet or my phone, I have a
| freeze about 30% of the times, but not very long. Before I
| sometime had to turn the wifi off and on on my device for it to
| roam.
|
| I followed all Omada and general WiFi best practice I could find
| about frequency, overlap... But it is still not fully seamless
| yes.
| bcrl wrote:
| 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. Customers _always_ cheap out when it comes to
| their in home wireless networks while failing to understand the
| consequences of their choices (even when carefully explained to
| them).
| protocolture wrote:
| "Wheres your router"
|
| "The basement"
|
| "Uh, i can send someone out to install some repeaters for
| $$$"
|
| "No just make internet good now"
| gh02t wrote:
| 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 past the point they should have switched to the other AP.
|
| The design of roaming being largely client initiated means
| roaming doesn't really work how people intuitively think it
| should, because at least every device I've ever seen seems to
| be programmed to aggressively cling to a single AP.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| gh02t wrote:
| 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).
| Marsymars wrote:
| I use a DECT VoIP phone for most of my phone calls. It's great!
| jval43 wrote:
| I live in a similar building.
|
| I assume you have hardwired all the APs, otherwise that would
| be the first step. Make sure they're on different channels, and
| have narrow MHz bands (20Mhz for 2.4GHz, 40MHz for 5GHz)
| selected.
|
| Only use 1,6,11 for 2.4GHz and don't use the DFS channels on
| 5GHz as they will regularly hang everything.
|
| Afterwards you can try reducing the 5GHz transmission power so
| there is no/less overlap in the far rooms.
|
| Unfortunately you probably need the 2.4GHz (at least I do) but
| as the range is so much higher it might make sense to
| deactivate it on some APs to prevent overlaps.
|
| Doing this basically eliminated the issues for me.
| userbinator wrote:
| _The average US household has 21 Wi-Fi devices_
|
| I wonder how many of those could be wired.
| harrall wrote:
| I actually switched from 40 MHz to 80 Mhz when a friend
| complained about slow downloads on my Wi-Fi.
|
| So yeah, I do think speed is more important.
|
| Responsiveness doesn't matter that often and when it does,
| plugging in Ethernet takes it out of the equation.
| chrneu wrote:
| You can't use that speed if your device is dropping half the
| packets.
| amluto wrote:
| 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 maybe devices
| could mostly use narrow channels and only use more RF bandwidth
| when they actually need it.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| And do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way
| that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other
| to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel?
| Preferably even if they're from different vendors and even if
| the users are not experts?
|
| > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps
|
| I'm a little vague on the details, but those are rather old
| and I don't think there is anything that low-rate in the
| current MCS table. Do they actually work well? Do they
| support modern advancements like LDPC?
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| > > 802.11(og), 1 & 2 Mbps > I'm a little vague on the
| details, but those are rather old
|
| They're the original, phase shift keyed modulations.
|
| > Do they actually work well?
|
| They work great, if your problem is SNR, and if you value
| range more than data rate.
|
| They are, of course, horribly spectrally inefficient which
| means they work better than OFDM near the guard bands. OFDM
| has a much flatter power level over frequency, so you have
| to limit TX power whenever the shoulder of the signal nears
| the guard band. IIRC, some standard supports individually
| adjusting the resource unit transmit power which would
| solve this as well. PSK modulation solves this somewhat
| accidentally. Guardbands especially suck since there's only
| 3 non overlapping 2.4GHz channels.
|
| > I don't think there is anything that low-rate in the
| current MCS table.
|
| > Do they support modern advancements like LDPC?
|
| Dunno! Generally though, each MCS index will specify both a
| modulation mechanism (BPSK, OFDM, ...) and a coding rate.
| All of the newer specs allow you to go almost as slow if
| you want to, usually 6-7mbps ish , and this is done with
| the same modulation scheme just a bit faster and with newer
| coding.
|
| > do those ax resource units work, in practice, in a way
| that allows two APs that are moderately close to each other
| to coexist efficiently within the same 20MHz channel?
|
| Yes and no. It doesn't improve RF coexistence directly. But
| in many cases allows much more efficient use of the
| available airtime. Before every outgoing packet to a
| different station consumed a guard interval and the entire
| channel bandwidth, but now for a single guard interval you
| can pack as many station's data as will fit.
| throw0101d wrote:
| The next release standard is 802.11bn, "Wifi 8", and it has been
| dubbed _Ultra High Reliability (UHR)_ :
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11bn
|
| So other considerations are being considered.
| superkuh wrote:
| It might help. But wifi, like all radio, is a shared medium.
| Unlike actual transmission lines like ethernet where you get
| the entire electromagnetic spectrum to yourself to use
| _multiple times_ , once for each twisted pair. Even if ethernet
| itself only uses baseband modulation and doesn't efficiently
| fill the spectrum it's more than enough. The reliability is
| incomparible to radio.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| A households bandwidth use is quite a bit different to a
| business. While a household may have a lot of devices most of
| them are doing very little at any given time, but the primary
| device in use requires the best speed possible. In a business
| however there are a lot of primary devices and not a lot of idle
| little devices and as such fairness and reliability dominate the
| needs as does getting the frequencies maxed out for coverage and
| total bandwidth available.
|
| Wifi 8 will probably be another standard homes can skip. Like
| wifi 6 it is going to bring little that they need to utilise
| their fibre home connnections well across their home.
| kazinator wrote:
| > Because consumers have been conditioned to understand only raw
| speed as a metric of Wi-Fi quality and not more important
| indicators of internet experience such as responsiveness and
| reliability.
|
| Whie the two are not the same, they are not exactly separable.
|
| You will not get good Internet speed out of a flaky network,
| because the interrupted flow of acknowledgements, and the need to
| retransmit lost segments, will not only itself impact the
| performance directly, but also trigger congestion-reducing
| algorithms.
|
| Most users are not aware whether they are getting good speed most
| of the time, if they are only browsing the web, because of the
| latencies of the load times of complex pages. Individual video
| streams are not enough to stress the system either. You have to
| be running downloads (e.g. torrents) to have a better sense of
| that.
|
| The flakiness of web page loads and insufficient load caused by
| streams can conceal both: some good amount of unreliability and
| poor throughput.
| Havoc wrote:
| Is it really that big of an issue? With device spread over 2.4 5
| and 6 ghz you really need a lot of them to run into issues
| mithcs wrote:
| Not the "Need for Speed" I expected.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| "Behind every good wi-fi network is an excellent wired backbone
| infrastructure." - the Tao of Wi-Fi
| stingraycharles wrote:
| "Those who understand wireless use cables" - random guy on the
| internet.
| LikeBeans wrote:
| I'm surprised, at least for businesses, small cell wifi is not a
| thing. For example, if you walk into an office building everyone
| seems to have a physical phone on their desk that is hard wired.
| What if that is also a small cell AP. Like a personal AP. Using
| automation and central provisioning and analytics can make this
| doable. Yeah handoff and roaming has to be seamless and quick but
| it doesn't feel that hard, no? If so this would be pretty neat
| and would solve the contention issue in the air.
| varenc wrote:
| Apple has a draft specification for a better way of measuring
| network quality than just doing speed tests:
| https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness
|
| Their `networkQuality` implementation is on the CLI for any Mac
| recently updated. It's pretty interesting and I've found it to be
| very good at predicting which networks will be theoretically
| fast, but feel unreliable and laggy, and which ones will feel
| snappy and fast. It measures Round-trips Per Minute under idle
| and load condition. It's a much better predictor of how fast
| casual browsing will be than a speed test.
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| spragl wrote:
| 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.
| MedAzizBenSalem wrote:
| 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 they are harder to
| define and won't neatly go on a store shelf. What is fascinating
| here is that speed tests themselves actively degrade the network
| performance. It's like taking your pulse by first dashing a lap
| in sprinting mode. Whether we'll see more router makers or ISPs
| start offering "responsiveness scores" instead of speed numbers
| once the consumer pays attention to latency and airtime
| contention remains to be seen. At any rate, this post nails the
| broader cultural problem in networking: the industry still chases
| awe inspiring numbers instead of better experiences.
| vlan0 wrote:
| How do you think speeds effect airtime
| utilization/optimization? And how does this change with lower
| PHY rates?
| immibis wrote:
| Not linearly. The data may take twice as long to transmit at
| half the rate, but there's overhead which doesn't change. If
| you can use half the channel width and transmit at half the
| rate, you halve the Hz-seconds used for preambles and stuff,
| while keeping the Hz-seconds used for data the same.
| ieie3366 wrote:
| AI slop
| knorker wrote:
| Is this still true with OFDM and subchannels or whatever it's
| called?
|
| Also MIMO.
|
| And don't think it's relevant to compare what to do in a large
| space with what one should do at home. The requirements are
| entirely different.
|
| In a large space with many users I'd use small channels and many
| access points. I want it to work good enough for everyone to have
| calls, and have good aggregate throughput.
|
| In a two bed home I'd use large channels and probably only one
| AP. Peak single device speed is MUCH more important than
| aggregate speed.
|
| And in a home it matters much more what channels are being busyed
| by neighbors.
|
| For latency, of course, there is only wired. Even with few
| devices.
| celeryd wrote:
| I always assumed it was Ethernet protocol itself that made wi-fi
| suck
| vlan0 wrote:
| Honestly, none of the comments here coming from a place with
| enough protocol knowledge to talk about the "whys"
|
| I operate a large enterprise wireless network with 80mhz 5Ghz
| channels and 160Mhz 6Ghz channels. It is possible if your
| environment allows.
| everdrive wrote:
| Wifi sucks in general. You ever get on a video call and someone
| has starts talking like a robot? And then, out of pure
| superstition they start walking around their house hoping to
| "find" the better reception? And it never really works, but they
| keep trying it anyhow, and then they either say "maybe I need a
| better internet" or "but I have full bars." No information is
| really given to a normal (or in some cases, even technical users)
| which would allow them to actually correctly diagnose their
| problem. So like Skinner's pigeons, they just keep playing their
| ritual even though it has no effect.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| WiFi is pretty magical in general. Sometimes it sucks.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Anyone know what Google Wi-Fi devices are set to?
|
| I don't see a way to change that setting and I don't see a way to
| see what it's currently set to.
| ksec wrote:
| >The IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8) working group has acknowledged the
| need for a shift in focus, framing the standard's goals
| differently from past generations: not chasing ever-higher peak
| speeds, but improving reliability, lower latency (especially at
| the 95th percentile), reduced packet loss, and robustness under
| challenging conditions (interference, mobility).
|
| For people who dont follow WiFi closely. While WiFi 8, or 7 or 6
| all has the intended features for its release, they are either
| not mandated or dont work as well as it should. Instead every
| release was a full refined execution of previous version. So the
| best WiFi 6 ( OFDMA ) originally promised will only come in WiFi
| 7. And current WiFi 7 feature like Multi-Link Operation will
| likely work better in WiFI 8. So if you wanted a fully working
| WiFi 8 as they marketed it, you better wait for WiFI 9.
|
| But WiFi has come a long way. Not only have they exceeded 1Gbps
| in real world performance, they are coming close to 2.5Gbps,
| maximising the 2.5Gbps Ethernet. And we are now working on more
| efficient and reliable WiFi.
| drewg123 wrote:
| One of the things that makes our wifi suck are HP (and other)
| printers using wifi direct. Looking at a wifi scan, I can see new
| fewer than 5 of my neighbors printers screaming to the top of
| their lungs.
|
| The only thing that makes wifi in a large condo building viable
| is the 6Ghz channels available on wifi 6e
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-11 23:01 UTC)