It's kinda wild to me how many devices we have connected to our Wifi nowadays. There really is only a single wired device left (our apple tv). Even my desktop is now Wifi connected. It's largely pure laziness and because after the remodel the sockets no longer line up well with where the desks are. - ThreadSky

mitsuhiko.at • 89 days ago

It's kinda wild to me how many devices we have connected to our Wifi nowadays. There really is only a single wired device left (our apple tv). Even my desktop is now Wifi connected. It's largely pure laziness and because after the remodel the sockets no longer line up well with where the desks are.

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mitsuhiko.at•89 days ago

Still, it all ... works? I'm honestly impressed how stable all of this is. It's not excessive yet, but during the day the connected device count alternatives between around 40 and 60. No interference, good speeds and latency. No comparison to a few years back where I needed to wire stuff up.

mitsuhiko.at•89 days ago

(Actually not entirely correct, the Sonos speakers for the TV are wired)

hynek.me•89 days ago

Given the USB-C dongle nonsense you wrote about too, my impression is that on average modern Wifi with good hardware (eg iPhone + AVM) is better than Ethernet. Even if it flakes out occasionally, at least it’s self-healing and one doesn’t have to crawl on the floor and power-cycle switches

dsyzling.bsky.social•89 days ago

personally I struggle with an older NetGear Orbi unit (running 2 as a mesh - wifi backhaul) - the backhaul seems to cause issues when multiple people use the internet slightly more heavily - conference calls, streaming etc. I've been reluctant to upgrade to newer devices (6/7 units)

dsyzling.bsky.social•89 days ago

I've a workaround which repositions the router - because I can, but a new ISP would render that solution impossible. Problem with wifi is you don't know in your particular solution whether it will work reliable (obstructions) - wired backhaul better - but impossible right now in my case.

hynek.me•89 days ago

Yes, in theory. In practice if you have the wrong combo of ethernet adapter and switch you get regularly frozen switches that you have to power-cycle. I had to throw out all my Netgear and TP-Link and replace them with Linksys which seems to work NOW. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/

abovevacant.bsky.social•89 days ago

OFDMA + MU-MIMO + 1024-QAM + BSS coloring + TWT doing their dance (if this is 802.11ax).

mitsuhiko.at•89 days ago

It is at least in part. But yeah, lots of cool engineering went in to make this work.

abovevacant.bsky.social•89 days ago

The really nice aspect of these technologies, besides each being cool on its own, is that even non-ax devices will profit in such a network since they all contribute to lowering medium-access contention considerably.

gcp.sjeng.org•89 days ago

While building the house:

"Let's have CAT5e everywhere so we don't need to rely on Wifi"

(2 kids later)

"Oh, our attic doesn't have Ethernet cabling..."

Still using PowerLine now. Wifi probably would have more throughput, not sure about latencies.

amadeusz.bsky.social•89 days ago

I imagine most of those devices rarely send any requests.

alexsuzuki.com•89 days ago

The only thing that is hard-wired at our home is the HP printer, but that I think has more to do with its rotten firmware and less with Wi-Fi's suitability as an Ethernet replacement.
Ok, the PS5 too (for those 100+ GB updates).

burntsushi.net•89 days ago

I re-did my home network a few weeks ago and directly wired as much as I could hah. I've got 10 directly connected devices and 43 on wifi (many of which are smart plugs, and the count is slightly inflated because of xmas lights).

Wifi works fine, but I just wired what I could.

burntsushi.net•89 days ago

I do really need to directly wire my NAS and my workstation though. Both of which I use over SSH from wifi connected devices. I work on my laptop, but most coding, for example, is done on my workstation over ssh. If both ends were wifi, the latency would be brutal!

burntsushi.net•89 days ago

With my current setup, I even use X11 forwarding sparingly. It's not exactly fast (because latency), but works well enough for when I need it.

etra0.lat•89 days ago

Yeah I did the effort of connecting both the workstation and my mini pc to ethernet because the latency over ssh was incredibly annoying, even while running things in LAN, it's worth it IMO.

jkachmar.com•89 days ago

maybe it's just crowded spectrum living in a city, but anything that needs lots of bandwidth still needs to be wired in IME.

everything got faster once I pulled my PS5, Apple TV, & desktop off of WiFi.

mitsuhiko.at•89 days ago

I'm in a crowded city too. (Though I suppose the walls might be thicker between apartments here).

graydon-pub.bsky.social•89 days ago

Same. You will pry cat 5 from my cold dead hands.

mitsuhiko.at•89 days ago

I thought so too for a while but it seems … fine? I might give re-wiring this a chance next year when I have some more time. But it really is way better than expected.

penryu.bsky.social•89 days ago

Switching Ethernet is so much more efficient than timeslicing RF bands.

graydon-pub.bsky.social•89 days ago

One funny thing occurred to me recently: we always tell this story about how clever ethernet is with its CSMA and exponential backoff .. but actually only wireless stuff does that anymore. Switched full duplex ethernet has a dedicated sending wire per node, per direction. Nothing ever collides.

graydon-pub.bsky.social•89 days ago

I mean I guess it's still in the protocol? I actually have no idea but I assume so.

penryu.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yeah, the protocol still has it. Not all switches are FDX.

Even so, fortunately Ethernet is still efficient even when it doesn't need to be so clever!

dcreager.net•89 days ago

cat 13

dcreager.net•89 days ago

crimping the RJ-712 connector is a real pain

georgethom.bsky.social•89 days ago

I try to be wired (Ethernet) whenever possible due to the speed. Recently, WiFi 6 is making me rethink that strategy.

ggn.me•89 days ago

I just got some home renovation done and got a bunch of wired connections in all rooms with a central hub. Bunch of Raspberry Pis, some IoT stuff and my NAS will be connected to the new network.

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