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…
Idk… I’ve got some pretty long snakey bois
SAME…ladies?
Are you hitting the max yet? 100m
There are also the glass snakey bois that you could use.
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.
I ran a 100ft
It looks big, but it’s only 30 meters. It’s nothing.
If it’s anywhere near that long you should see a doctor.
Yo
Reliability 100% the snakeboi
But for speed, WiFi can actually out-perform those particular snakebois in many scenarios.
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.
Didn’t know that, thank you!
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.
TLDR, Intel banned my country
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.
Snaky boi is consistent
Unless your toilet room just so happens to have a RJ45 socket in the wall. I know one that has two of them.
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But router needs cable.
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.
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
MLO is gonna change everything
Image Transcription:
An image titled “who would win?”
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”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at [email protected]!]
An important note is it has an epic gaming aesthetic which makes it faster
Obligatory warning AVOID CCA CABLES! They can be a hazard!
Go for copper. More on this issue:
https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/cca-vs-solid-copper#page_comments=1
Ok, that was an interesting read. Learning is fun y’all
For PoE? Yeah. For data only? No. Short reply: if cable passes test for its category, it passes, otherwise it does not.
The difference in cost for 1000ft spools is <$50 CAD, and you get a product you know always works, is less brittle, can do PoE without becoming a fireball, can be used in commercial installation legally, and is actually in spec. I mean a lot of people who are actually running cables already have separate spools for solid and stranded, plenum and riser, maybe even shielded/burial… no need to add CCA to the mix with all of its downsides (and potentially make that mistake…)
I won’t defend CCA wire but aluminium is an excellent conductor… by weight, not by volume. It’s not that you can’t make good aluminium wire it’s that CCA wire are generally shoddy. Brittleness is an issue but with time copper work-hardens so you can’t mess with it infinitely, either. It’s especially useful for overhead lines as it’s so light.
Somewhat not entirely unrelatedly: Steel bike frames are generally better than aluminium. They’re it practical terms about as erm sturdy at equal weight, but steel bends quite a bit before it breaks so a good steel frame will be lighter than an aluminium frame and can get by without shock absorbers when the geometry is good, that’s why you see curved forks (not if it’s a downhill bike, of course, and “generally” means “if you’re not looking for a carbon-fibre race bike”, there’s reasons to want stiffness in bikes just not for most people).
Next up: Oxygen-free copper and audiophiles. Practically no increase in performance (and definitely none compared to simply using a tiny bit more of regular copper), meanwhile, so cheap that when you’re at a decent store (say, Thomann) and sort by price the cheapest stuff will have OFC.
My favourite thing is to hear people talk about having ‘great WiFi’ as if that is an internet connection.
I used to work for spectrum. I’d say around 60% of people legit do not know the difference between wifi and Internet. No wifi means no Internet, to them. Makes some trouble shooting harder
And you want to explain the difference, then decide it’s not worth the effort.
I really don’t understand why it’s such a common confusion. None of these people struggle with the difference between their gas supply and their oven.
I think people care about different things, networking might not be something they’re interested in so aren’t interested in spending time learning about it. Where as when you are interested in it it’s not so hard to read, watch videos about it and experiment with it. At least that’s generally how I find these things work.
But when your electricity goes out, do you even consider whether it’s the power plant, substation, distribution station, or individual service drop that is the problem? Probably not. But I’m sure many power line technicians see the phrase “my power’s out” in the same way tech-savvy people see the phrase “my wifi’s out”.
How much of that is in your control to diagnose, let alone fix? If the neighbours are out too, that means it’s already out of your hands.
When it comes to “the internet is down”, much of the time it is something within your control, whether or not you know that. It’s not a very good analogy imo.
When it comes to “the internet is down”, much of the time it is something within your control
This really isn’t true anymore. Most people use all-in-one modem+router+AP. I’d guess that unless you’re one to tinker with your router, there’s a much better chance you’ve tripped a breaker or GFCI than there is that you’ve somehow broken your home wifi.
If all the food in my fridge is warm I don’t immediately assume my electricity has been cut off rather than something is wrong with my fridge.
I consider those if only cause it may give me an idea of when power will come back on. Ill even drive around to see how much is out or if i can find repair crews.
I’m sure you driving around to find a random power truck and asking them to fix your power faster is much appreciated by the people fixing it… I’m sure they don’t make fun of you or threaten you in anyway after you drive off while they have to be out in the weather doing their job.
I said looking for repair crews said nothing about bugging them, that was your jump in logic. If I know powers down in my block then if I see a repair crew about a block away I can assume power will be on in about an hour or so. Plus I usually am grabbing food at the same time.
Soooo, ya do exactly what I said in last comment… there is a number to call for power outages. They guys in the truck are on call to a problem, you are just annoying them.
A very large portion of people who use electricity everyday have never given a single thought to where their power comes from. They are the same folks who feel like they are superior plugging in their Tesla and knowing they are making a difference… while the coal plant drops another traincar to charge it up.
The people who bitch the loudest are always the ones who have absolutely no clue how things actually work and that every single decision is give/take. And if you try to explain you are (insert ism/ist). Tards gonna tard. Way she goes, fuckin way she goes.
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They are
Them: “The WiFi is down.”
Me: ‘… No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.’
Them: “I can’t connect to Flipboard.”
Me: ‘Ohhh, the internet is down. It’s probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.’
Them: “Yep, now the WiFi is back.”
If it’s permanent, just run a cable to it
Latency is the name of the game if you’re gaming. Copper will always give you the fastest ping times compared to the fastest wifi you can buy.
The wifi latency on generic 5ghz routers is like 5ms if not less
Not even 5 ms. I have a properly set up Wi-Fi at home and you’ll feel no difference in gaming. Wi-Fi only adds like 1-2 ms latency at most.
Unless you have no choice - a good WiFi will not add noticeable latency.
Myself I am playing over 5ghz wifi. I would say I don’t feel much difference, but prefer cable any time!
WiFi 5 latency on a decent router (not the shit your ISP gives you for free) is only 0.6ms. Yes, that’s less than 1ms.
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.
You have a very shitty WiFi over there. I haven’t seen anything over 1ms ever.
I just don’t live on the moon, neighbours have WIFI too.
And?
Ranges are crowded, a lot of interference.
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
There’s no interference unless you live in a Soviet block.
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.
How would you get an entire 5g BTS without frequency regulating agency hunting your ass?
I meant to say 5ghz
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.
Please speak standards, not marketing language. Replace WiFi and number with 802.11 and letters in the end.
If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice
One packet drop for TCP creates huge latency for application level protocol. And not many games use UDP for their transport.
not many games use UDP for their transport
Citation Needed
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.
Let’s see… Terraria, Factorio, Minecraft.
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.
Oops, Factorio moved to UDP.
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)
Depends on the challenge. Snakey boiy loses if the challenge is to move around the house and go into the backyard.
But can snakey boi summon daedra?
Too old and achy to run snekbois all over the place any more (I used to), if wifi isn’t good enough, tough.
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.
You could get a Mikrotik for that price, I think.
Mobile devices -> Wifi Devices which can’t be connected via Lan (various reasons) -> Wifi Else -> LAN
It’s that simple
If it is cat6 ethernet wire wins
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.
