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.
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
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.
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…
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.
As someone who runs a mini homelab in a building I don’t have access to the Internet hardware, you’d be surprised how a combination of the two can be very reliable and fairly fast.
All my devices have a gigabit connection to one another but the web router is just a 5gHz link.
I can’t believe this is so far down. I do SMB tech support. I have clients where I have installed cable, wifi and power lane. In one case cable, wifi, and wifi,/cable powerline.
Which is best? Depends on your use case. Is cable, 2m away from the router best? Well, if you use a laptop that moves from the desk several times a day, it becomes a pain.
Working IT for many different companies mainly in the MSP and SMB markets, yes. There’s reason to have different kinds of connections. Powerline is fine if you’re on the same circuit, but Powerline can’t really jump a split phase in North America where I am, so if you happen to have them on different circuits which happen to be on different sides of the split phase, you’re going to have a bad time.
It becomes either a guessing game, or you need to have a journeyman level of knowledge of electrical to figure out if it will work. MoCA is a better option if you can, and of course, ethernet is king.
Anyone doing wiring for ethernet in 2023, I say to you this: for the love of God, don’t use Cat5e. Cat6 is the minimum, and Cat6A should be standard. Cat6 supports 10G up to 55m, which should be enough distance for any home applications with few exceptions, and 10G should be enough for the foreseeable future of home networking, since we’re barely touching 2.5G/5Gbps ethernet in homes now.
There’s a lot of good tech to solve any communication needs, so as someone who has spent far too long troubleshooting wifi, please run a wire wherever it is practical. Save yourself the headache.
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.
I run a 20m from my landline Box to my Router. In the hallway I route it behind the furniture. On doors I router it along the frame with transparent Self-adhesive cable older I got of Amazon.
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.
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.
The cheapest way to get cables is to know somebody who crimps it themselves, but for the majority of people probably buy from shitty places like walmart for a 1,000% upcharge.
just a heads up for anyone deciding to make their own cables, make sure you buy pass through rj45 ends or it becomes substantially more annoying to make a successful crimp. with pass through you can prep your cable and it doesn’t matter how long you make the strands you’re working with because you cut the excess off, with non-pass through you have to cut them to a specific size and if it’s too long when they bottom out, your conductors will stick out making your crimp weaker inviting poor connection issues later in the cable’s life.
thank you for tuning in for this controls tech tip
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.
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.
You can hire low voltage writing contractors to do it, they usually charge per run (up to a certain length), and they only leave you with what you will use. They’re a bit more costly, since you’re paying for their time, but it will save you the hassle of buying tools, learning how to use them, buying cable, running the line, doing the crimping (usually several times as you will probably mess up at least a few), and everything.
Saves a bunch of headaches… just an option I’ll throw out there.
Don’t hire an electrician for the work, most don’t understand the requirements of low voltage or ethernet, they’re simply not trained for it. They can wire up your fridge or whatever perfectly great, but the rules that apply to high voltage are very different than what is needed for low voltage… specifically Ethernet.
…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.
It’s not that you can’t get crimpers that cheap here (cheapest I found on Amazon is 3.50 Euros, incl. 19% VAT) it’s that they’re almost guaranteed to be made from chinesium with the engineering and manufacturing precision to match. There’s a difference between inexpensive and cheap.
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’s me lol. I’m still sitting on my spool of Cat6 I bought a few years ago. At pre-COVID prices it was approximately (CAD) $1 per termination, and $1 per 6 feet of cable.
Today at Infinite Cables and other Canadian stores I can buy premade lengths at almost those costs, shockingly. Prices really came down.
On the left side is an image of an Asus RT-AC5300 Tri-Band Wireless Gigabit Router, a square, black router with a red line around the side near the upper edge, and 8 antennas coming up from the bottom. The text beneath the image reads “A $350 router with scary spikes”
On the right side is a blue Cat6 ethernet cable. The text beneath this image reads “A $3 snakey boi”
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Is the notebook or desktop wifi NIC and antenna important or only the router? Because when I had a shitty laptop a few years back the latency sucked ass, both at home and at my university (where I hope they had good network components but idk)
With wifi, everything is important, even the number of people connected on your channel… not the number of wifi networks on the channel, the number of total nodes using the same channel. The ap hardware factors in, your wifi card (client) factors in, even drivers and other things can factor in. The band (2.4/5/6 GHz), the non-wifi traffic, spurious emissions from other harmonic frequencies, even electrical noise from gadgets and other devices nearby. You can even factor in distance to the ap and cosmic background noise.
On top of that, it’s half duplex, so only one node can successfully transmit at a time. So it interferes with itself.
It’s a complete mess of unknowns and unknowable things, unless you have a very good spectrum analyser to look into it.
IMO, this is what makes WiFi so terrible. There’s simply too many factors that can be slowing you down, most of which you can’t see and aren’t obvious.
Right. Like even in the shittiest scenario that’s not a major difference. There’s stuff like interference and the speeds are lower, sure, but 1 gigabit is plenty for non enterprise situations
I just tested ping between my weak computers, one of which supports only 100mbit ethernet and are sequentially connected via cheap 2$ dumb switch and ISP-provided router and got 0.187ms average, while ping via same system, but using 802.11ac for one device got 8.16ms with standard deviation of 11.9, maximum of 67ms and minimum of 1.44ms.
your latency on your network might be 0.6ms, but for most practical use-cases, it will be orders of magnitude more. Partly due to the interference and half duplex nature of wifi, but also because of CSMA/CA (carrier sense multi access / collision avoidance) algorithm, which listens before transmitting to ensure the channel is clear, and waits when it’s busy until it’s clear before transmitting. The actual transit time for each frame is very short, but getting to the point where you can actually transmit is the main challenge for wifi.
Propegation time for a 1500 byte frame on gigabit Ethernet is approximately 12 µs, or 12 microseconds, aka 0.012 ms. So the argument is kind of squished here. Given that you have a dedicated channel to the switch (and not needing a carrier sense, collision avoidance of detection algorithm with ethernet) the frame can be immediately sent, so the total transit time from a computer connected by ethernet to a router or switch is orders of magnitude faster.
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.
Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that’s why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.
Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people’s routers nearby.
Ehhh… not quite. There’s evidence that copper runs closer to the speed of light (aka c), than fiber. Light through glass runs at around 2/3 c, making it the slowest option.
Wireless technically runs as fast as light, through atmosphere that’s a tiny bit slower than c, but as close as we can get.
There’s also a large argument among physisicts and electrician YouTubers about the speed of electricity through a wire, and I don’t understand the conclusions, though they were articulated quite well by the YouTubers, it just didn’t stick in my brain. The premise is how fast a lightbulb would illuminate if it had one light-second of pure copper (or superconducting) wire between the power source and the bulb, with little to no resistance. It’s interesting but nuanced and complex.
Wifi, being EM waves (same as light) should run the fastest, copper ethernet close behind and fiber dragging it’s heels at 2/3rds c. However, in practical applications, wifi has more to overcome since it’s a shared medium. Copper and fiber have a dedicated medium, so they have no competition in signaling, wifi needs to contend with everything from other wifi networks spurious emissions from other frequencies, even background cosmic radiation, as well as itself (half duplex). Because of all of that, you generally end up with wifi in last because it has so many protections and checks that it delays itself to ensure that it’s transmission will be recieved intact. The packets are generally larger and take longer to get started, so all the additional (mostly artificial) slowdowns make it slower. However, if you use highly directional antennas, a pair of them, on different but otherwise equivalent frequencies for send/receive, and cut out a lot of the other factors by designing the system well, then disable most of the protections because they’re not needed by design, it will be faster, at least in terms of latency, than fiber or copper in almost every case.
Since designing a multi-access system that doesn’t need wifi’s protections is borderline impossible, this is limited to very controlled point to point systems where both ends are tightly constrained.
So the argument “wifi has a lower minimum latency” is correct, but irrelevant in 99.99% of use-cases. Copper is easier and cheaper than fiber and actually runs faster, than fiber, but it’s only viable for extremely short runs, up to 100m in most cases, and fiber, while “slow” at 2/3rds c, is better for longer distance since there’s less line-loss across the glass per foot.
This is a very deep topic and I’m no physicist, but I’ve been endlessly fascinated by this issue for a very long time. The information here is the result of my research over many years. I still consider fiber to be the gold standard of data communication, ethernet to be next-best and overall best for relatively short connections, and wireless to be dead last due to all the challenges it faces that are not easily overcome.
WiFi 5 latency is only two times higher than cooper (0.3ms vs 0.6ms). WiFi 6 has the same or even lower latency. WiFi 7 is even better. If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice. Unless you have spare money for an industrial 100Gbps set up. Which you don’t.
I have never heard of a latency-sensitive game that doesn’t use UDP for inner loop communication. Sure they use TCP for login and server browser, but the actual communication for gameplay almost always uses UDP.
Minecraft and Terraria use both TCP and UDP, presumably in the way I described (TCP for initial connection, asset download, etc. and UDP for world state sync). Factorio uses UDP exclusively, and implements reliable transport where needed in software.
Unless it’s changed in the past year which I doubt, Minecraft exclusively uses TCP for client/server communication. I’ve been modding the game for years and am pretty familiar with the protocol. I think it’s actually one of the few which don’t use UDP to some capacity.
Ah okay, didn’t know that does it differently since I’ve never touched it. Makes me wonder why they used UDP for it but didn’t use it in the Java protocol yet.
Can’t find any UDP implementation or even UDP protocol description for Terraria, while there are implementations of Terraria protocol that use TCP and documentation for it. Basically no evidence of UDP and a lot of evidence of TCP for gameplay.
Minecraft uses only TCP. Sources: wiki.vg, myself, myself and friend of mine and myself again(no link for now, but two minecraft proxy server implementations)
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