I have about 6 or 8 ethernet cables in use plus more in my spare cables box, and I don’t remember ever paying for one. Where do they come from? I never seem to run out.
*Excluding running ethernet cables to every room through the attic, down the walls to wall jacks. Also the cost of the jacks, and the various switches needed for several rooms. And the contractor to do it all.
But hey for like $600 I have cat6a in basically every room so
And the contractor to do it all.
Why wouldn’t you do it yourself?
Like, in an old house its a massive pain in the ass to run that, but still firmly in DIY territory.
Not everyone is comfortable drilling walls and installing plates, stripping wires, etc. and CAT cables aren’t like simple copper electrical wires.
And not everyone wants to have cables running along their floorboard and up their stairs
I’ve looked into wiring decent Ethernet through our walls, where the phone lines are. Wooden flooring isn’t very common here so pulling through the wall ducts that have dodgy AC cables and Cat-negative-1 telephone “cables” is the only realistic option. Personally I even think I’d like to run double Ethernet cables anywhere just so I can have flexibility. When I get my own place someday, the cable duct provisioning will be absolutely ridiculous, I’ve already promised myself.
The ducts are complete trash and it’s a miracle the phone lines even worked for so long. Our electricity is so goddamn noisy here that any Ethernet signal would be affected, meaning I’ll definitely need better cables and end up with worse speeds. So noisy that powerline Ethernet really sounds like a punchline. The WiFi isn’t great because the only place the AP/router has access to the phone line is right where it enters the apartment, which is from the elevator shaft - meaning a giant Faraday cage shields half the apartment from the WiFi. We’ve disconnected the phone lines in the walls because those are completely fried and have started to introduce so much noise that it’s audible on the landline and completely kills any synchronization with the phone center. Like it’s fucking bad. All that headache for 2-4 megabit unreliable DSL. Even for Lebanon, the perennially cursed paradise we call home, pretty goddamn bad.
I’ve looked into coax Ethernet, the problem is that every few years a bolt of lightning hits the TV cable network in my neighborhood and deep fries every TV that wasn’t manually disconnected at the start of the storm. Just awful. I suspect the cable integrity is better throughout the walls though. A lot of splitters though.
The best part? I live in a part of my cursed country where they’ve started connecting FTTH. And for some reason they stopped laying the cables mere meters from my building in like 2020 and just never bothered to keep going. And the fiber company has legitimately blocked every phone number I’ve since inquired from. I’m not joking when I say I’ve considered just suspending a thick thick optic (remember the lightning, there’s no grounding here!) SFP cable along the municipal power poles (let’s not discuss legality here, it’s okay, this is Lebanon habibi), putting a nice switch in a neighbor’s house, and just paying for their internet in return for making sure that one port is nice and snug.
I do think my best bet is (when the fiber finally arrives in 2097) some kind of mesh WiFi with no backhaul, or some kind of Ethernet backhaul that relies on routing the meatiest Ethernet cable I could find on the outside of the building.
Another alternative is paying out the absolute ass for a corporate Internet subscription, but microwave internet is susceptible to the weather, and the whole thing is just so much upfront cost that it can’t be worth it. Although maybe going that route five years ago would have been worth it.
Just awful. At least everyone’s on Netflix and short form video now so data caps have moved past the pathetic 20 and 30 GBs they were only a decade ago.
Counterpoint: I’ve probably saved a significant amount of money by having the odds overwhelmingly stacked against me setting off on my homelab journey. lol
Disabled, so physically cannot do it, or I would.
And then you still need a wireless router to get Internet on your phone unless you use data at home like a crazy person.
USB-C > Ethernet dongle like a true Network Master.
Unless you need 6ft of cable or you just run wires on the floor it’s more like $200 of plenium rated cable, and keystone jacks and the labor involved with the run.
My house with a half finished basement (easy access) took probably 16-20 hours running to 5 rooms.
Yeah when i did my house i was quoted $100-200 a drop and that was years ago. I bought materials for 20 drops for about 1k (cables, keystones, plates, cable tester, ethernet cutter, puncher, drywall knife, flex drill bit, wall fishing tape, network switch, and a bunch of other stuff im probably forgetting). It took me 1 hour per drop on average. Some were easy, some were a pain in the ass. Now you can save on materials slightly by doing 1 drop per room whereas i did individual drops for each jack (because i wanted full bandwidth on each line), but either way it is going to end up more costly than an access point or mesh system unless you’re just running one line within the same room.
Definitely worth it if you care about the speed or reliability of your connection but i think for most people these days it’s probably overkill.
If you do go wiring everything then now you’re mostly already set up to do some Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) devices for cameras, access points etc. And next thing you know you’re an amateur home networker!
Honestly, my place isn’t that big, but I can cover the whole place with a single wireless access point, and get fast, reliable, stable connection everywhere.
In the room with the AP (my home office and gaming PC) I have zero jitter, zero packet loss, and 2ms ping.
Wire hasn’t been needed for a good connection for a long time
Wait, what does the bomb from Halo 2 have to do with an ethernet cable?
Who buys a $300 home wifi box? They’re $50-100
if that’s the latest one that’s a great deal. it’s usually $800.
I set up a mesh router pair a while back - super easy setup, and the speed is good enough to have multiple TVs streaming at once, and without needing to run cables between rooms… Worth it.
The problem with wireless isn’t speed anymore, its stability. For a lot of applications that’s fine since buffering and whatnot hides any hiccups. but gaming for example is a nightmare on wireless still.
I’ve been playing FPS exclusively on wireless for almost 15 years (802.11n 5ghz) and stability has been fine unless you set up your access point far away from your gaming PC for some reason.
Back then you had to get a pretty nice wireless router to do it, but it still worked fine.
Now days even relatively cheap routers will let you game just fine unless you set up far away from the AP and you’re in a pro tournament.If you arent sensitive to jitter, packet loss, etc., and the various ways games react to it, then im happy for you.
Personally, i and many others hate it. It only takes 1 rubber band moment in a shooter to ruin a round, it only takes 1 round to lose a match. Even if you aren’t playing super sweaty, its not fun. Even my wife who only games casually noticed the difference between wireless vs wired in a few different shooters after i ran a wire to her new desk. And we do have a good setup overall.
Dude, what you’re describing is not a “good setup overall”.
I know I’m not sweaty, but what you’re talking about goes beyond being “sensitive” or not. Wtf is wrong with your wifi that you’re getting any packet loss.
I just ran a speed test multiple times from my phone in another room, and got jitter under 20ms, and packet loss between 0% and 0.1%
My gaming PC with external antenna in the same room as my wireless AP is going to get even better results.So I’m curious what kind of numbers you’re expecting to be noticable to a casual or even sweaty non-pro player?
Testing on my phone with a few different services: 0.0 to 0.2% packet loss. 9 to 12 ms jitter. Ping 5 to 25. (Edit: also this is same room but with 4k tv wireless streaming going on)
I’m not claiming to be a network expert on why wireless is noticably worse in practice, i picked out packet loss, jitter, etc randomly, i assumed that’s how it manifests. but i’d suspect these tests aren’t indicative of actual game netcode. They are short too. The whole point is the stability. If i play for 15 minutes no issue but suddenly have a single rubberband, thats an issue which may not show up in 100 tests.
On wireless i can feel that pretty much every session. Everything fine for a while, then not for a moment, then fine, etc.
On wired i only have an issue if the server itself or my isp itself is having an issue.
Are you connected over 5ghz or 2.4?
2.4ghz overlaps with other consumer devices that cause interference, like microwaves, drones, and cordless (landline) phones. If one of those devices turns on nearby, it could cause that until your router hops bands.I haven’t had this problem with 5ghz (so for over a decade, on my gaming PC).
Yeah ive had 5ghz for ages as well. Use a channel scan to try and avoid my couple neighbors, Pretty decent hardware (not isp junk). House is small so max distance is only 1 wall and ~15ft.
Honestly id just guess you arent as sensitive to it. Are you the type who doesn’t notice other types of screen related feeling stuff too? Like 60fps vs 120+, input lag, or screen tearing, micro stutter, macro blocking, soap opera effect, etc.?
I’ve known plenty of people who are more or less sensitive to all the various ways things fuck up.
If you are sensitive to the other things, then who the hell knows lol.
Does this ridiculous number of antennas even do anything or is it just marketing wank?
It does. Wifi uses MIMO (Multi-in, multi-out) to run multiple concurrent data streams over the same channel width, which overcomes individual channel bandwidth limitations (there’s only do much radio frequency space to go around). Each stream having its own antenna, and having larger antennas, gives stronger signal/noise ratios, less retransmitted packets, and overall better connections.
A lot of those high end “gaming” routers are often oversold though… MIMO improves throughput if you have an Internet link it can saturate; realistically even a midrange 2x2 802.11AC router will provide more wifi bandwidth than your internet does. They do nothing to improve latency no matter how many streams you run, as wifi’s inherent delay (5-15ms) is pretty much a fixed quantity due to its radio broadcast time-sharing nature. The meme is correct. A $6 ethernet cable beats any and all wifi routers and client adapters, and always will.
To be more precise it’s not each stream having it’s own antenna, you combine the signals from all antennas and then “spatially filter” it into separate streams, but the number of concurrent streams is limited by the minimum of the number of antennas at both ends of the connection, if your device has only one antenna and your access point has eight you can only have one data stream.
Great answer. Thank you
What fast of a WAN connection are you talking about?
I can’t see how a midrange 802.11AC AP could suffice for a decent WAN connection. IMO you need at least 802.11ax
2x2 AC on 5ghz has an 867mbps max PHY throughput, which after a 50% derate for signal quality and overhead is still a very comfortable 400mbps… typical cable internet is around 100 to 500mbps with a lot of places offering “1gbps” that it never actually reaches, so it’s certainly sufficient for 90% of people.
If you have a very heavy multi user (6+ devices always on) household you may find some benefit from an AX 2x2 or 3x3 router just because it can handle congestion better.
It’s not all about the WAN speed. Having fast LAN speeds is always worth it.
This will help hugely with stuff like PC game streaming (from your PC to a tablet or TV for example), screen sharing to TV, file transfers over LAN, media servers, etc.
Six plus always-on devices is rookie numbers. I’m in the twenties, in a house with a handful of people.
And yes, the router I’m currently using is faster than all my wired devices over wifi, save for the two that pair some form of 2.5/10Gb ports. Also yes, my 1Gbps WAN hits about 900-ish on the downstream, with the ISP guaranteeing at least 800 as a legal requirement. I don’t know if other regions allow ISPs to sell connections that run at 50% of the advertised speed, but… yeah, no, that’s illegal here.
Honestly, full home coverage is the biggest issue I have. If this was a new house I would have wired it as a solution, but as it is, I only got the whole home fully connected with reliable speeds by spending a bunch of money in wireless networking gear.
Yeah the meme is just trying to be superior edgy. We live in an old duplex and no, my landlord won’t let me run networking through the walls and ceiling. I tried cabled network over electricity sockets and it’s worse than a good wireless connection.
Well since the ruler’s out, 133 here. It’s hell.
Explanation: mostly younger roommates. Majority of bandwidth goes to just 21 personal machines, 4 MLO devices in particular, 1 of which uploads a fuck ton of cam stuff.
That said, most connections are idle. In particular there’s a chunky subnet of energy monitors with a low hum of usage.
I say “hell” because it takes 7 mesh nodes to reach everyone (while playing nice re: antenna strength in a congested building), maintaining security and privacy for everyone requires planning, and the second anything goes wrong everyone loses their minds.
Woof, yeah, now you’re talking.
I mean, once you factor in a phone, a computer, probably some gaming device running updates in the background, you’re thinking at least three devices per person, plus whatever tablets, smart TVs, printers and IoT garbage you have lying around the house. And if you live on an apartment you’re trying to service all of that alongside a bunch of other people trying to do the same.
Honestly, I struggled a lot to get a solid, cost effective mesh to solve the issue. I ended up going back to brute forcing it with a chonker of a router. No idea if that impacts my neighbours and, frankly, at this point it’s every bubble of electromagnetic real estate for themselves.
It’s honestly crazy how much networking you have to do at home these days, particularly if you work from home or throw in a NAS into the mix. I have no idea how the normies manage. Maybe they pay somebody to set it up?
I’ve wondered the same. Pretty sure they just lean on the ISP equipment offerings and outsource the rest to the cloud. Critically, I envision plug and play users who don’t give a shit about security or privacy, and that simplifies a lot.
Honestly if you take that setup from the ISP (which I think is often free and now usually includes a docsis 3.x with at least one repeater, installed) then just bump the default encryption and add a VPN, I wouldn’t say it’s a bad way to go at all, mainly because when there’s any issue it’s on the ISP to fix it.
It won’t be bleeding edge and you won’t be able to do any directed networking fanciness without your own gear, but the not my problem perk is nothing to sneeze at.
And yeah mesh is a headache. It’s all wired backhaul (sfp+ and copper) but nodes regularly fall out of sync and the mesh doesn’t heal properly. Main reason I kept coming back was the benefit of co-channel stacking, which makes your signal footprint small but really deep so neighboring routers move over.
Some of them are marketing wank, some of them have MIMO channels that need multiple antennas to support independent bands with multiple devices.
1 MIMO channel = 2 antennas, so this router could theoretically have 4 devices communicating bilaterally without interrupting each other.
I believe it’s for beam forming which can be used to improve signal strength in a specific direction.
Technically, it does provide better connection speeds by enabling the router to avoid channel hopping, so it can talk to multiple devices (or the same devices if it has multiple antennae) at the same time. This is part of the recent wifi6 and wifi7 standards so more and more devices will start to gain speeds using this technique
Realistically computers have at best 2 antennae and this is largely marketing wank.
Though if you have multiple devices all trying to connect to wifi, like even a phone for example, then a computer having two antenna that it can actually use 100% of the time still sounds valuable to me.
Lookup “phased array” and “beam forming”
Sure, but this isn’t that. That requires actual work put in developing and simulating the product, these are just multiple antennae for multiple channels.
Source:
trust me broI work in semiconductors at a firm that creates RF chipsI mean, beam forming is a pretty common feature of these routers.
No one should trust you if you don’t know that since .ac we have had beam forming and it got better in .ax
This router pictured is a ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 Pro that has .ax
I’m a network professional with a specialty in wireless.
Yeah, beam forming and mimo are the main reasons for antenna diversity. There’s also more radio chains in those units typically, and more radio chains can provide better speeds if you have client devices that can take advantage of the extra radio chains (both sides need to have the same, increased number of radio chains to see an increase).
The antennas are fairly small/thin pieces of wire that are not very long, so the antennas don’t need to look like that, but the quantity is useful.
As someone with a telecommunications background who’s taken apart some cheap routers that look like that: the only caveat I’ll add is that the antennas are only useful if they’re actually connected to anything. From a decently trustworthy brand you’re probably fine, but I’ve seen a few where only one or two of the antenna couplings were connected to anything internally.
There’s no shortage of liars and cheats everywhere. I’m unsurprised that a company world either intentionally, or through sheer ignorance, have “antennas” that are little more than aesthetic pieces of plastic.
Lord Sauron would like a word.
But that cable can’t summon Kel’Tuzad unlike the router.
I spend a lot more money on good Ethernet switches. But at least that works and is easier to manage than Wifi.
Yeah this kinda overlooks a lot of the issues with like… getting a cable somewhere
$6.99/5’ of cable. A weekend of manual labor running cable through my walls.
Or $300 for something I can set-and-forget.
Decisions, decisions.
It doesn’t even cost that much for a decent wifi AP either.
$300 in labor is wildly optimistic and true for a simple cable run, maybe
If run probably even a “short” run will typically be at least 20ft. Think, from a wall plate, up an 8ft wall, across a crawl space, down another 8ft wall.
Not all cable runs are simple
Curve ball… I use power line and for my property and in my use case it is not any different to ethernet.
My house is relatively new (built 2005), and they pulled cat5 for all the telephone lines and just didn’t hook up the extra pairs of wires. Since nobody uses landlines anymore, I rewired most of the outlets for RJ45.
Have pulled a few more wires, including fiber to my main office PC (so I can have a very fast connection to my NAS). Once you learn a few techniques and the way your building is laid out, it’s not that hard.
Yeah, you got to skip over the “getting the wire there” part. If you wanted to replace all that line with cat 5e or cat6 so you can get full duplex gigabit speeds it’d be a much harder task than slapping some rj-45 end onto some old cat 5.
That one in the picture is $599 isn’t it?
Wireless tech has improved greatly over the last 20 years. Speed, latency, bandwidth, stability…all generally excellent. 15 years ago I wouldn’t have wanted to use a wireless mouse or LAN connection. Now? NBD. They just work. Still have issues with poor signal in some areas, but mesh range boosters take care of that pretty easily.
Wireless peripheral devices, sure, but if I’m streaming 4K with HD sound then I still want copper.
Even shitty wireless will let you stream 4k. It only takes 50mbps. 802.11g came out in 2003 and can do 54mbps.
Shitty wireless lets you stream shitty 4K. Yay? Copper is still king for anything that’s not a goddamn webrip.
Wtf dude, that was the example you provided, and then you mocked it. Make up your mind.
If it was a shitty example, why did you use it?What would be a good example of things people commonly want and have access to but that wireless cant do?
They’re saying 50Mbps 4k is shitty, not that 4k is a bad example. Modern Wi-Fi can definitely handle high-bitrate video 99% of the time, but that 1% where someone turns on a microwave can cause hella buffering. If you have the ability to run ethernet there’s no benefit to using Wi-Fi.
Seriously, I was going to add my WiFi6e is theoretically way overkill for my limited usage and that’s supported by speed tests, yet I do notice its limitations while gaming. It’s got the bandwidth, it’s even got the low latency, but it also has the glitches. Until that speed is reliable enough to never impact my games, it’s not worth being my first choice
Even then, wired is better where appropriate because it just works. The more devices I can put on Ethernet, the fewer require the extra setup of wifi, the extra risks to eavesdropping and single points of failure, and yes the fewer where I ever have the frustration of glitches
Why are you limited to 50Mbps 4k, if not limited by the server? I haven’t had an issue with microwaves in like a decade. Maybe it’s an issue for people with bachelor apartments where their router and microwave are on the same table?
Get reliable connection ?
What do you consider a reliable connection?
I just tested my connection to my ISP on my wireless gaming computer, and I got:
2ms ping
0ms jitter
0% packet loss\500mbps down
And almost those same numbers from my phone in the next room.So what do you consider the qualifications for “reliable” connect, if that doesn’t meet them?
The fact that you don’t have to worry about Wifi suddenly getting weak for one
50mbps is a fuckterrible bitrate for 4k HDR video content.
You should be playing physical media anyway, though.
Nah, wifi is pretty good today. I just dont like the consumer devices like the router shown here. Recently redid my wireless and went with a non wifi router, a poe switch and a few access points, connected through ethernet. I wouldnt dream of going back to the conventional one wifi router. Still use wired for stationary devices I can reach with a cable though… TV, AV, consoles, PC are all wired.
To be honest, I think a lot of Lemmy users are old and yearn for the older technologies simply because they have been more familiar with them than newer ones. They would have used the first gen of a technology, which may not be efficient, and dismiss it altogether, without realising that subsequent generations of that technology improves over time.
I have had that realisation of cognitive bias when I had Bluetooth headphones back in early 2010s. The wireless connection isn’t great and gets cut off every now and then. I dismissed the technology as less efficient than wired earphones. It was over the years with the popularity of airpods that I gave wireless earphones another chance. And honestly, the Bluetooth connectivity vastly improved than I expected and I would not go back to using wired earphones again on regular basis because I don’t have to deal with the wires getting tangled or yanked. I only use wired ones as backup if my wireless earphones went missing or broke.
Sorry to say this to OP, but it seems that you’re being an old man yelling at the clouds. Look, I’m also old and I admit I have had that moment of yelling at the clouds too. We will have that more moments as we age.
I have a similar setup to @PieMePlenty@lemmy.world in regards to my home network and I wouldn’t dream of removing my wifi network. I still consider wired to be superior though it rarely matters at those latencies.
My Windows laptop on wifi:
My Fedora on wired network:
Phased arrays are not a joke. You can get ridiculous dynamic range with those
Given the choice, I’d definitely choose a cable for anything I know will require high internet usage. Wireless is just too slow, even on a 5G connection.
I still remember I once broke my Windows installation (young me had tried dual-booting the Windows 10 beta and my Windows 7 installation). I had to get system restored discs from the manufacturer. It wasn’t particularly tricky to fix, but it took a long time to download those Windows updates after it finished. I noticed an immediate change once I remembered I had an old 30 ft. ethernet cable lying around and plugged it in. (This was maybe 8-10 years ago.)
