But my WiFi is just fine!

SAME...ladies?

Are you hitting the max yet? 100m

Yo

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.

Nope. While WiFi has fancy claims you're not going to get any more than around 1200mbps at 20 metres on the best day with the best gear.

While with cat6 you'll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem, and even 10gbps. Even cat5e will do those speeds at certain distances.

Snaky boi is consistent

I have 0 faith that a router which doesn't have high speed ethernet will ever be able to deliver such fast WiFi. If they've cheaped out on the ethernet I doubt they've splurged on WiFi most devices can't use. And if you're talking about fast ethernet, then WiFi is chanceless.

Normal router wasn't one of the options

If you flip it upside down it’s a Halloween spider decoration.

Make sure to get pass-through RJ45 connectors.

It's 10x easier to trim the excess after crimping, rather than getting the lengths spot on before.

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 zero experience with networking hardware. How hard is it to recable an apartment for a newb like me? How does that even work, do I gotta pull wires out of the walls?

Look at mr moneybags with their fancy data closet.

Stealing them off my workplace :0$

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!

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.

Sometimes you can have great success using the wires that are already in your walls, provided it's in good nick and isn't isolated. Try a powerline adaptor.

Otherwise, do like i did and run a 50m cable halfway around the house.

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.

4 Mbit/s baby! Now we’re working with power! Hachacha!

I hate that people refer to ethernet, unironically as a "wifi cable".

It hurts my soul.

'Ohhh, the internet is down.'

One could argue that's not right either 😉

Most consumer devices these days, if they detect the internet is down over a wifi connection (e.g. by inability to reach 1.1.1.1), will automatically disconnect from that wifi network, or at least show the same UI as if it had.

I really don't understand why it's such a common confusion. None of these people struggle with the difference between their gas supply and their oven.

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 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.

I like the ones that have a separate little sleeve with a pass though. You put the wires through it, clip them, then insert it as a unit into the connector.

Like these.

Alright but I'm storing enough tools and large coils of various cable/wire at my home so I'm going to pass until I move into a bigger place. I don't even work in IT so I'd probably snip one segment and have the rest laying around forever. Still cheaper than buying finished cables at the store, though, I give you that.

Crimper costs you about 2$

Pffft flathead screwdriver.

...no seriously if you want to buy a crimper spend 10 bucks upwards or so, people have spent more on screwdrivers. A knipex one costs about 30 bucks, we're not talking fibre splicers here. Regarding outlets, those 10 buck LSA Plus things are perfectly fine. Finagling those things with a flathead is way harder if you want more than an electrical connection but actual signal quality.

Depending on local building codes, you can run them through vents so long as they're fireproof coated, but TBH that's pretty silly.

I'll just say: attic. That's all.

Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP

Nah, the remaining spool will be useful for the rest of its/your lifetime, it always comes in handy as a generic 4-pair twisted pair signal cable for any non-ethernet purpose. I've used my old spool twice this year; first for an m-bus cable to my power meter and then for a limit switch for my garage door.

That shouldn't be a problem for a thing built in the last decade for sure.

My router handles that just fine?

It’s a newer version of Spike, too.

Wrong generation

My last several multicore multithreaded "smartphones" each sucked at multitasking; why should I hold myself to a higher standard than the entire telecom industry?

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.

I set up an hdmi-Ethernet converter and run Ethernet between my TV and main desktop. It solves problems.

Hell no! Only DVI or DisplayPort. No money to patent trolls!

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.

I have plenty with higher bitrate audio that can hit 80. And with the overhead of the rest of the connections, and possibly just some limits on the chipset for TCP overhead etc, it starts stuttering around that 80mbps limit.

A TV I mean why not, but on a Laptop? Is it from the nineties O_o ?

Could be something wrong with a cable? A damaged cable can downgrade your connection from gigabit to 100mb

It's been 9 hours, how did it go?

Not even 5 ms. I have a properly set up Wi-Fi at home and you'll feel no difference in gaming. Wi-Fi only adds like 1-2 ms latency at most.

WiFi 5 latency on a decent router (not the shit your ISP gives you for free) is only 0.6ms. Yes, that's less than 1ms.

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.

How would you get an entire 5g BTS without frequency regulating agency hunting your ass?

No shit?

I mean copper runs at 2/3 the speed of light.

Wireless is pretty much the speed of light.

I thought they used dedicated fiber for their links.

Please speak standards, not marketing language. Replace WiFi and number with 802.11 and letters in the end.

If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice

One packet drop for TCP creates huge latency for application level protocol. And not many games use UDP for their transport.

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.

$400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support

I think I need to bold this up. Custom firmware support, especially OpenWRYT, means that your router will live for years to come.

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...

What crap are you doing that so intensive WiFi causes latency? It's essentially a negligible difference unless you are saturating the signal. We're taking less than 3ms for a reliable round trip.