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
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.
If it is cat6 ethernet wire wins
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
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
Mesh is also pricey as fuck if you want to do it right. Most people don’t need it. If your living space is under 3000 sq ft (which most homes are), a single router is fine. Mesh is worth the cost only in mansions and high rise apartment buildings with a lot of competing traffic.
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…
$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.
Thing is: You can get better hardware for $250. OpenWRT support for mikrotik devices is spotty, though, not many people care as the things already run Linux (with proprietary network stack and management interface looking, well, like an enterprise-grade router, not server). That is, the issue is not that they’re locked down (they’re not) but lack of interest in using custom firmware, these aren’t dumbed-down html interface only types of machines but office endpoints from a company producing ISP-grade hardware.
Generally speaking having wifi is usually a good idea because smartphones and guests exist but connecting PCs via wifi is nuts. First of all, I’d have to buy a wifi card and sacrifice pcie lanes…
And lastly, a fun reminder: Once upon a time there was a German black hat, and he used wifi. The police already had evidence that he lived in a particular neighbourhood, but nothing specific enough to get a search warrant. So they went war-driving in the area, correlating spikes in (encrypted) wifi traffic with messages in a chat room where nefarious things were planned, until they figured out which house the traffic was coming from, then parked a bit nearby until they had statistical significance tighter than a fingerprint. They never had to get that search warrant once they presented the court with the data it issued an arrest warrant straight away and no degree of disk encryption could save the guy from a verdict.