What's the criteria?
Speed and reliability? Snakeboi.
Ability to move around unimpeded and/or taking a dump while being on Lemmy? $350 router with spikes.
And if prison rules, I'm going router with spikes...
Reliability 100% the snakeboi
But for speed, WiFi can actually out-perform those particular snakebois in many scenarios.
In perfect conditions for Wi-Fi. I live in a high rise and the 2.4 Ghz band is hardly usable. My previous phone didn't have dual band Wi-Fi and it was much faster on 4G than WiFi.
Plus, modern routers and APs often rely on band aggregation and so even with devices that have dual band, crowded airwaves will have a negative effect on speed.
Wi-Fi is very fast when I'm in my cabin in the countryside. But when I get home with the same devices, it's barely usable.
You could argue that I need a better router with the newest protocol and gizmos but so far, even with new bands and protocols, Wi-Fi is still a competition of which router and devices will shout louder than their neighbors.
Snaky boi is consistent
There are some pretty long snakebois in prison, there usually in the shower areas
But router needs cable.
What communitys do you browse that dont load satisfactorily with a normal wifi router?
Normal router wasn't one of the options
I handle a lot of internal support for a dev outfit.
"My shit's slow."
"That's because you're on wireless at your house. Not my problem, but I'll try to help. Can you hardwire it?"
"That would be IMPOSSIBLE!"
"Suffer."
I used to work on a tech support hotline for a ISP 10 years ago and that was the usual thing.
- My shit's slow
- Ok, I see you've got perfect parameters for your ADSL, I just logged into your router, trying out download... and upload... It works exactly as it should, so maybe your WiFi? Could you connect a wire?
- Plz come fix asap, TECHNICIAN VISIT WHEN??!!
If the WiFi sucked on router provided as part of the service then sure, I could send a technician, but usually the router only had one ethernet port.
Have that router. Snakey boy wins.
You must have forgotten to sharpen the spikes 😹
How do you find it? Do you manage the scary spikes?
If you flip it upside down it’s a Halloween spider decoration.
Cables are fine until that stupid clip breaks off and every nudge unplugs the fucking cable ever so slightly that it doesn't work but you can't see it.
Get a crimp tool and a 50-pack of connectors. If one breaks, it takes all of 60 seconds to re-crimp the end and you’ll only lose about an inch of cable length.
I re-cabled my entire apartment when I first moved in. Best decision I ever made. I just used the existing Cat5 lines to pull my Cat6a instead. Apartment got a free upgrade to Cat6a (which they never even knew about, because I wasn’t going to lose a deposit over something stupid like “unapproved upgrades”) and I got my tasty gigabit.
I was trying to download Red Dead Redemption 2. It was like 120GB, and was going to take hours at 10Mbps on the existing Cat5. I quickly said “fuck that, I can run new lines in 45 minutes and have the download done in 20 minutes with gigabit.” Sure enough, about an hour later, I was playing my game.
I had whatb I assumed was a fault modem/router from the isp and one of the ports ran at 100mbps while the other ran at 1000. I figured this out when it took forever to transfer a file that was just a few gb.
I have a collection of 3d prints on thingiverse that reattach that part. Highly recommend.
It's pretty easy to crimp a new one back on, and even easier with a 30 dollar tool.
Easy fix with a tight layer of electrical tape to act as a wedge. You can also shove a toothpick in the top for extra staying power.
Haha true story
Crimp tool: 2$
100 RJ45: 3$
Your problem will be solved for rest of you life and life of your children for 5 dollars.
Stealing them off my workplace :0$
The sheer amount of engineering, FCC regulations, and wizardry that goes into making 802.11 fast is insane. It feels weird seeing so much data get shoved through radio waves which are still subject to only one transmission at a time which is why we have stuff like CSMA/CA and MIMO
Still no match for good ol ethernet though lol
Just the sorcery that makes wifi a thing is amazing itself.
802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we've become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.
After the usual "Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals" reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.
Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?
Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they're about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.
Airtags is just bluetooth WiGLE for one vendor
Even plain old wifi is fascinating in terms of signaling, they use ofdm, or orthogonal frequency division multiplexing to encode data. The whole concept is crazy.
To summarize, the waveform (sine wave) is measured by degrees from zero, where 90 is the peak, 180 is when it crosses the middle line again, 270 is the trough, and at 360 it returns to zero. What OFDM does is interrupt the normal sine wave and jump from 90 to 180 to encode bits.
What gets crazier is that this is divided into dozens of different positions that represent different bit encodings. Then they go more crazy and run... I think it's 10 by 2mhz wide carriers, all doing this same thing (for a 20mhz wide channel width) to encode more data into the bandwidth.
Then they get more crazy and implement AM on top of it, so you get high power OFDM and low power OFDM divisions that can do upwards of double the symbols on the same carrier.
The wizardry to make all this work is insane, and the fact that we've mastered it to the point where we can sell wifi cards for something like $20 USD just kind of blows my mind. This is crazy to me!
MLO is gonna change everything
If it's permanent, just run a cable to it
I tend to encounter a cable's greates enemy: Walls in a rented appartment you can't just drill through
I drilled holes in the ceiling of my rented house to run cable through the attic and down into separate rooms. Never heard anything. Don't need a big hole so it's easy to patch when they come through for nail holes and such which are expected.
Protips for diy renters: you can buy conduit baseboards. They're baseboards that have a void behind them for cabling. If you're good with tools, you can remove the existing baseboards and put those on. When you leave, either replace the original baseboards or just pull the wires out and leave them there....
What I did was use cup hooks to put wire along the top of walls. A small step stool helped me get up to the ceiling line, put a nail partway in to get a "pilot" hole, then screwed in the cup hook... did one hook every 18-24 inches about 2 inches from the ceiling. With larger cup hooks, I easily fit 4 ethernet lines in. I also got some wall mount wire conduit to go down the wall to my router. For doors and such, vertical wall mounted conduit to the hinge, under the door at the hinge, then back up the wall on the other side to the ceiling to continue (or along baseboards to the device). I only had trouble with the vertical conduit (I only had one) when I left since it was attached with mounting tape.
My way was pretty clean, never had to look out for cables on the floor, I didn't really notice them at all, and all the important stuff was wired.
If you're just going between neighboring rooms (eg. Your router is in one bedroom and you want to get to the bedroom next to it), look for telephone/cable TV hookups. If there appears to be one on both sides of the wall in the same spot, open it up, there's a good chance the wiring box for those lines goes straight through the wall. If you want a more professional look to it, buy keystones and use a short bit of wire to link two together, and just put them on either side of the wall using Keystone faceplates... so you can just pass the cable through the wall....
There's also MoCA if you have coax in every room. Look it up, it's great.
There's a ton more I could say on this, I'm a big believer and advocate for ethernet over WiFi, because after spending a long time working on WiFi professionally, I've realized that all wifi sucks. My mantra is "wire when you can, wireless when you have to". If it's feasible to run a wire, do it. For mobile and non-stationary devices, wireless since those move around and it's impractical or impossible to put ethernet everywhere it could be.
True story:
*Grabs Cat2 cable out of lab storage and hooks everything up to it*
"Why is everything so slow?"
4 Mbit/s baby! Now we’re working with power! Hachacha!
Image Transcription:
An image titled "who would win?"
On the left side is an image of an Asus RT-AC5300 Tri-Band Wireless Gigabit Router, a square, black router with a red line around the side near the upper edge, and 8 antennas coming up from the bottom. The text beneath the image reads "A $350 router with scary spikes"
On the right side is a blue Cat6 ethernet cable. The text beneath this image reads "A $3 snakey boi"
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at [email protected]!]
An important note is it has an epic gaming aesthetic which makes it faster
My favourite thing is to hear people talk about having 'great WiFi' as if that is an internet connection.
I used to work for spectrum. I'd say around 60% of people legit do not know the difference between wifi and Internet. No wifi means no Internet, to them. Makes some trouble shooting harder
I hate that people refer to ethernet, unironically as a "wifi cable".
It hurts my soul.
Them: "The WiFi is down."
Me: '... No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.'
Them: "I can't connect to Flipboard."
Me: 'Ohhh, the internet is down. It's probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.'
Them: "Yep, now the WiFi is back."
Obligatory warning AVOID CCA CABLES! They can be a hazard!
Go for copper. More on this issue:
https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/cca-vs-solid-copper#page_comments=1
Ok, that was an interesting read. Learning is fun y'all
I'm just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.
For PoE? Yeah. For data only? No. Short reply: if cable passes test for its category, it passes, otherwise it does not.
The difference in cost for 1000ft spools is <$50 CAD, and you get a product you know always works, is less brittle, can do PoE without becoming a fireball, can be used in commercial installation legally, and is actually in spec. I mean a lot of people who are actually running cables already have separate spools for solid and stranded, plenum and riser, maybe even shielded/burial... no need to add CCA to the mix with all of its downsides (and potentially make that mistake...)
I won't defend CCA wire but aluminium is an excellent conductor... by weight, not by volume. It's not that you can't make good aluminium wire it's that CCA wire are generally shoddy. Brittleness is an issue but with time copper work-hardens so you can't mess with it infinitely, either. It's especially useful for overhead lines as it's so light.
Somewhat not entirely unrelatedly: Steel bike frames are generally better than aluminium. They're it practical terms about as erm sturdy at equal weight, but steel bends quite a bit before it breaks so a good steel frame will be lighter than an aluminium frame and can get by without shock absorbers when the geometry is good, that's why you see curved forks (not if it's a downhill bike, of course, and "generally" means "if you're not looking for a carbon-fibre race bike", there's reasons to want stiffness in bikes just not for most people).
Next up: Oxygen-free copper and audiophiles. Practically no increase in performance (and definitely none compared to simply using a tiny bit more of regular copper), meanwhile, so cheap that when you're at a decent store (say, Thomann) and sort by price the cheapest stuff will have OFC.
I don't like to use aluminum for anything, mainly that it fatigues more easily and will thin/break of strained. My home insurance provider also hates aluminum, I couldn't get insurance if I have any aluminum wire for my electrical work. Anytime I see it, I just want to pull it out.
CCA feels like the worst of both worlds.
Copper is king for me.
There's a plethora of problems that can be listed for both aluminum and copper and CCA. Aluminum/CCA is cheaper, but the trade-offs are not worth the savings IMO.
Well until you have to guide that snaky boy through the whole apartment and through door frames.
I ran mine through the ceiling vents when I rented in college lol
If your TV vendor decides to only put 100Mb cards in their TV then unfortunately spikey boy wins and you lose unless you're willing to downrez your AV catalog.
Venn diagram of people who understand this specific technicality and people who don't want to deal with the shitty TV software is almost a circle though.
I'd rather get a Android box at the very least.., or just HTPC.
I'm in that Venn diagram but I'm married with kids and the UX of anything but the TV remote and Plex software is a bit much for me to convince the family to learn. And potentially relearn when I find the next great app like jellyfin 😅
I think there's another circle with at least significant overlap between those two of family techies who just can't convince the rest of the family to care.
What the hell are you watching that has a bitrate of >100Mb? Because unless you have a 16K television I suspect the answer is nothing.
I have a 4k blu-ray remux of Misery that has a 104 Mpbs bitrate. But there are only a couple of movies in my collection that break 100. Most of my remuxes are around 50 to 70.
Anyhoo it's all moot in terms of network speed since I just use a htpc to play all of them.
Is that why my shit keeps buffering any time I try to stream a movie larger than 50-60 GB, despite the fact that I have a gigabit connection and a 2.5Gb router? TIL. BRB, running some speed tests on my TV...
It's been 9 hours, how did it go?
I don't understand how it's acceptable for $2,000 TVs to have only 100 mbps ports, wouldn't it only cost a few cents per unit to upgrade?
Latency is the name of the game if you're gaming. Copper will always give you the fastest ping times compared to the fastest wifi you can buy.
Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that's why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.
Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people's routers nearby.
The wifi latency on generic 5ghz routers is like 5ms if not less
Your experience varies massively depending on your RF environment. In my suburban neighborhood, I’m getting a stable 3.4ms to my router. The same hardware when I was in a dense urban environment was around 11ms. I’ve never looked at retry counters, but if I had to guess, I’m getting close to zero right now, but was getting considerably higher in a dense area.
WiFi 5 latency is only two times higher than cooper (0.3ms vs 0.6ms). WiFi 6 has the same or even lower latency. WiFi 7 is even better. If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice. Unless you have spare money for an industrial 100Gbps set up. Which you don't.
But can snakey boi summon daedra?
Depends on the challenge. Snakey boiy loses if the challenge is to move around the house and go into the backyard.
Nay, with long enough cable you'll get consistently good performance. With wifi it's a hit and miss due to interference and walls.
We ran snakey boys throughout the house using command hooks on the ceiling when my wife and I had to go WFH 3 years ago.
The temporary fix is still going strong. At this point, the place would look weird without hastily strung up CAT5 all over the place.
I’ve had a line across my hall since early 2020 like some college apartment…😣
That's 3+ years of stable internet, friend! Who cares how it's run?
Toss a floor runner over it! Works great for my apartment.
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix
Why is this my top post? What joke am I missing? So confused.
The joke is that you have to spend $350+ on a router if you want a lot of bandwidth to spare for all your devices -- and more importantly -- a strong, reliable connection (especially if you live in an area with a lot of competing WiFi traffic, like an apartment building). Or you could just buy a $3 ethernet cable and get the same thing.
Happened to me. The cheap $100 routers kept dropping the signal, so I blew $400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support. Problem solved. That said, if it weren't for the fact that smartphones exist (and the fact that I have a girlfriend with a laptop), I wouldn't bother with WiFi at all. I miss the 2000s, when all you needed was a 10Mbps switch, and WiFi was something you only got if you wanted to brag to your friends that you can browse the internet in your backyard..
What's the speed? Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you're easily saturating that line either way.
Do you have gigabit? Then Ethernet, but then again getting like 600mbps wirelessly is good enough.
Biggest thing is having GOOD coverage. My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere. People with a shitty ISP router shoved in the cupboard in their basement make no sense lol.
Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you're easily saturating that line either way.
Only if latency doesn't matter. WiFi has a lot more jitter, no matter if your WAN connection is 10 or 1000mbps.
Packet loss really, and the latency and jitter said loss can contribute to.
Radio waves go faster (speed of light) than through a medium (copper). Not that it matters at such a small scale, but it's helpful to have a good picture of the elements at work here. The further you are from the receiving point, the more obstacles (matter) that can obstruct it. But in ideal conditions WiFi is better than most people think. Replicating those ideal conditions though...
I had 100mbps ethernet because incompetent ISP worker who crimped only two pairs out of four. And I had AFAIR 150mbps plan! Don't know what to wish for that idiot.
My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere
As an IT professional who has worked with a lot of wireless systems, I approve. This is the way.
Real talk though, I own that router and it's awesome. Can't say the wifi signal is much different than any other router I've owned, but it's got loads of awesome features I use for hosting stuff. DDNS support plus Let's Encrypt plus OpenVPN support in one box. Very handy.
You could get a Mikrotik for that price, I think.
Mobile devices -> Wifi Devices which can't be connected via Lan (various reasons) -> Wifi Else -> LAN
It's that simple
As someone who runs a mini homelab in a building I don't have access to the Internet hardware, you'd be surprised how a combination of the two can be very reliable and fairly fast.
All my devices have a gigabit connection to one another but the web router is just a 5gHz link.
I can't believe this is so far down. I do SMB tech support. I have clients where I have installed cable, wifi and power lane. In one case cable, wifi, and wifi,/cable powerline.
Which is best? Depends on your use case. Is cable, 2m away from the router best? Well, if you use a laptop that moves from the desk several times a day, it becomes a pain.
Working IT for many different companies mainly in the MSP and SMB markets, yes. There's reason to have different kinds of connections. Powerline is fine if you're on the same circuit, but Powerline can't really jump a split phase in North America where I am, so if you happen to have them on different circuits which happen to be on different sides of the split phase, you're going to have a bad time.
It becomes either a guessing game, or you need to have a journeyman level of knowledge of electrical to figure out if it will work. MoCA is a better option if you can, and of course, ethernet is king.
Anyone doing wiring for ethernet in 2023, I say to you this: for the love of God, don't use Cat5e. Cat6 is the minimum, and Cat6A should be standard. Cat6 supports 10G up to 55m, which should be enough distance for any home applications with few exceptions, and 10G should be enough for the foreseeable future of home networking, since we're barely touching 2.5G/5Gbps ethernet in homes now.
There's a lot of good tech to solve any communication needs, so as someone who has spent far too long troubleshooting wifi, please run a wire wherever it is practical. Save yourself the headache.
If it is cat6 ethernet wire wins
This is quality
I'm guessing snakey boy is copper clad aluminum though.
Wait, are CCA ethernet cables actually a thing?
Yes, all over Amazon.
It's become a cancer
Aside from you knowing what copper clad aluminum is I didn't even know that was a thing for CAT cables.
Don't forget the hundreds or thousands of dollars it'll take to wire up your whole house with Ethernet plus the wireless router you'll need anyway for any device that doesn't have an ethernet plug
FTTP + mesh wifi FTW!
A good mesh WiFi system will cost you under 100 and it's more than adequate for any consumer level application. Elitist ethernet users can't accept this
Yeah but I have hobbiest level applications
That's cool, wireless as a main data stream isn't good for prosumers like you, but it's not representative of the general population.
Most people don't upstream 4k CCTV cameras to their local storage and therefore WiFi is adequate. Unfortunately there is a lot of elitism on lemmy
Doesn't matter, I'm on 5g home internet (about 10 times faster than the best wired option and 3 times cheaper) and I'm not about to drill holes into the rental or run cable on the floor to still have higher than average ping. I don't play multiplayer games.
I wouldn't run cable for a higher ping either. I might for a lower one, though.
Why am I being downvoted? I have shit ping in games with 5g internet and the marginal improvement that going wired from the modem to my computer would bring isn't worth the work.
Holy ducking hell you nerds.
A 5ms round trip isn't causing noticeable latency in games.
You are just bad. Stop blaming your router. You sound as dumb as idiots plugging in controllers because they think they are a step away from being a pro gamer.
Well it'd be fine if it actually was 5ms round trip, however even with Wifi 6 you're looking at ~90ms round trip, which actually is a noticable difference.
Sure boss
You can hate all you want, but I tested my xbox controller connected to the PC via cable, bluetooth and the xbox dongle. The dongle was very much on par with the cable, probably because they use a custom 5GHz protocol, but bluetooth had noticeable latency. It's not horrible, but clearly worse than the othet 2 options.
