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…
I ran a 100ft snakey boi to my desk around the start of COVID and it’s still there.
Bonus: switch mounted under desk feeds another 75 footer to kid’s room and PC.
Only the best.
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.
I would argue that the public needs to be better educated or at least saved from themselves with WiFi, however, nobody will be doing that. Having multiple lower-powered APs in a space can dramatically reduce how far outside of your premise the signal travels, and provide fast speeds indoors, however, it only takes one dummy to pick up a long-range AP, and put it in their apartment to ruin the wifi for everyone else around them.
Unless we start EM isolating apartments, or get everyone to start using modern lower-powered WiFi with multiple access points for coverage, things won’t change. I largely consider it to be impossible to fix WiFi in large buildings; especially established apartment buildings. No company is going to spend on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz isolation insulation to be installed between units just for their renters to have better WiFi, and the general public as a whole… well, it’s basically a fool’s errand to convince everyone to do anything without government regulation, and bluntly, the government, made of the same idiots that make up the general public, isn’t any better and won’t be forcing everyone to “do it correctly”… so we get this dystopian landscape of WiFi for any high-density area.
IMO, new builds don’t really have an excuse not to, it’s a trivial additional cost to install while things are being built, putting AP hookups in the ceilings, and WiFi blocking measures in the walls between units, but they still don’t, because cost. They want to spend nothing and collect huge rent payments for basically squatting on a plot of land.
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.
Also WiFi is half duplex so you only get those speeds in one direction at a time.
I have a 10 meter cat5 cable I use for one application that can’t have any interruptions or lag.
Calling it cat5 cable makes any woman who hears me want to leave their man for me. Good to see another king our there using the proper terminology, stay tight player
Physical limit for 2.4GHz is 1.11 gigabits per second or only 143 megabytes per second AT ALL. For 5GHz it’s slightly more than twice as much, but still less than even shitty cat5e, that allows 2.5GBE at 100 meters or in certain conditions 5GBE.
While with cat6 you’ll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem,
Cat6 is 5gbps no problem at 100 meters and 10gbps at 55 meters.
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.
“fast ethernet” is defined as 100mbps. I know what you meant, but there’s an actual industry definition for “fast” ethernet…
Most of the marketing is showing a combined speed at 100% optimal conditions. Unless you live in a faraday cage and have 4x4 802.11 equipment on all of your 5Ghz devices, and 2x2 at least on all of your 2.4Ghz equipment, then do massive, consistent and continual one-way data transfers using UDP or something which doesn’t have window sizes and can support one-way no-reply transfers like with multicast, all with a perfect signal and the highest wireless PHY rates, you’re not going to even remotely see that much speed.
Unless your toilet room just so happens to have a RJ45 socket in the wall. I know one that has two of them.
What communitys do you browse that dont load satisfactorily with a normal wifi router?
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.
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.
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 remember running out of those at work, & intentionally crushing the cheap-ass crimp-tool in my hand, just so I could finish up the next day with pass-through connectors & my Klein tool, rather than spend the next two hours re-terminating connectors that I ‘should have’ gotten exactly right the first time.
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?
Adding new connectors means you only need about an inch extra on each side. Very low skill required if you have the (cheap) tools to do it. Actually putting new wires in place is a bit harder but still fairly easy. Attach some string to the old cable, pull it all the way through the walls. Attach the new cable to the string, then pull that through the walls. Then just add the connectors like the other scenario.
Replacing connectors is east, but won’t solve your problem if the issue is bad cables in the walls. Pulling new cables entirely depends on how well they were installed. A lazy install will actually be much easier to replace, because a lazy installer won’t bother stapling cables in place. They’ll just run the cables across the attic/crawl space and leave it where it lands.
If you’re lucky and got a lazy installer, then you can be equally lazy; The old cable in the wall is going to be your pull line for your new cable. Step 1 is figuring out which lines are which. This is easier with something like a cable sniffer, but there are a few ways to do it. But assuming you know which cables are which, the rest is fairly straightforward.
Use electrical tape to affix the old cable to the new one. Just make a bend on each cable, hook the resulting bends together, then wrap them tightly with electrical tape. The bends hooked together allow the cable to hold the strain, rather than the adhesive on the tape. And you want to use electrical tape because it stretches. Pulling it tight when you wrap ensures that the tape will compress the cables with every wrap. You also want to try to make the connection as “smooth” as possible, so it won’t snag on anything when you pull it.
Now that the old cable is attached to the new, just grab the other end of the old cable and start pulling. It’ll drag the new cable through the wall for you as you pull it out of the wall. Fair warning this is much easier if you have someone feeding the new cable in as you pull, to ensure it doesn’t snag on anything as it enters the wall. It also only reliably works on installs without a lot of bends and corners; Every corner you have to pull around is another potential corner to get snagged on. If you get snagged, sometimes pulling it backwards (tugging on the new cable entering the wall) can help you reset to try again. But sometimes there’s no replacement for good old fashioned legwork; If you get really stuck, or your tape comes undone, or your cable breaks from the strain, you may need to go crawling around your attic to fix it. This is a fast method, but it’s not 100% reliable.
This is why Pro level is to terminate all of your permanent cabling with punch down jacks and patch panels, then use throw-away patch cables from jacks to devices.
Crimp tool: 2$
100 RJ45: 3$
Your problem will be solved for rest of you life and life of your children for 5 dollars.
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
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.
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!
