Keep it simple
Keep it simple
156 comments
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Does this ridiculous number of antennas even do anything or is it just marketing wank?
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Technically, it does provide better connection speeds by enabling the router to avoid channel hopping, so it can talk to multiple devices (or the same devices if it has multiple antennae) at the same time. This is part of the recent wifi6 and wifi7 standards so more and more devices will start to gain speeds using this technique
Realistically computers have at best 2 antennae and this is largely marketing wank.
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Lord Sauron would like a word.
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It does. Wifi uses MIMO (Multi-in, multi-out) to run multiple concurrent data streams over the same channel width, which overcomes individual channel bandwidth limitations (there's only so much radio frequency space to go around). Each stream having its own antenna, and having larger antennas, gives stronger signal/noise ratios, less retransmitted packets, and overall better connections.
A lot of those high end "gaming" routers are often oversold though.... MIMO improves throughput if you have an Internet link it can saturate; realistically even a midrange 2x2 802.11AC router will provide more wifi bandwidth than your internet does. And for gaming, they do nothing to improve latency no matter how many streams you run, as wifi's inherent delay (5-15ms) is pretty much a fixed quantity due to its radio broadcast time-sharing nature. The meme is correct. A $6 ethernet cable beats any and all wifi routers and client adapters, and always will.
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To be more precise it's not each stream having it's own antenna, you combine the signals from all antennas and then "spatially filter" it into separate streams, but the number of concurrent streams is limited by the minimum of the number of antennas at both ends of the connection, if your device has only one antenna and your access point has eight you can only have one data stream.
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Great answer. Thank you
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MIMO improves throughput if you have an Internet link it can saturate; realistically even a midrange 2x2 802.11AC router will provide more wifi bandwidth than your internet does.
And that's where the fat controller says you are wrong. I have 1000 Mbps down. I've yet to actually hit that speed with WiFi 6.
Also newer WiFi standards significantly improve latency. That's nothing to do with having more antennas though you would be correct there.
The meme is correct. A $6 ethernet cable beats any and all wifi routers and client adapters, and always will.
With current technology you would be correct. But as for the always part: Ethernet is an electrical signal, so it's actually slower than microwave signals used by WiFi, and the WiFi signals can also take a more direct path. So in the future WiFi or LiFi could in fact be faster. It's the processing delay, and scheduling that makes WiFi have higher latency. Not the physical medium.
Before you say this is all academic because of the small distances involved I would remind you that propagation delay is actually a large issue in current microelectronics and computers. Sometimes parts of the same chip are far enough apart to create problems for the engineers due to the high clockspeeds of modern devices.
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I'm a network professional with a specialty in wireless.
Yeah, beam forming and mimo are the main reasons for antenna diversity. There's also more radio chains in those units typically, and more radio chains can provide better speeds if you have client devices that can take advantage of the extra radio chains (both sides need to have the same, increased number of radio chains to see an increase).
The antennas are fairly small/thin pieces of wire that are not very long, so the antennas don't need to look like that, but the quantity is useful.
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As someone with a telecommunications background who's taken apart some cheap routers that look like that: the only caveat I'll add is that the antennas are only useful if they're actually connected to anything. From a decently trustworthy brand you're probably fine, but I've seen a few where only one or two of the antenna couplings were connected to anything internally.
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I believe it's for beam forming which can be used to improve signal strength in a specific direction.
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Some of them are marketing wank, some of them have MIMO channels that need multiple antennas to support independent bands with multiple devices.
1 MIMO channel = 2 antennas, so this router could theoretically have 4 devices communicating bilaterally without interrupting each other.
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Hay $800 worth of copper, I found a 1000ft roll of shielded pure copper for $2.11 because someone misplaced the decimal point I know because it was listed for $2.1199 every thing was automated through amazon so they just shipped free shipping to, thank for listening $800 worth of copper, your the best.
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you're
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Still cheaper
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My PC, laptop, work laptop, are all wired using gigabit. But my laptop on wifi reach 1200Mbps so it's faster than cable!
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Faster than gigabit, but not 2.5 gigabit. Your cables likely support the speed, just your ports and switching hardware are capped at gigabit.
It's not extremely expensive, but unless you move around a lot of big files, you're probably getting very diminished returns, even spending less than twice as much for 2.5x speeds.
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Impressive, I lose half my speed with the router around the corner.
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If you have only one device on Wi-Fi, multiplexing turned off, or especially if you have MU-MIMO support, Wi-Fi can be faster than a single wired connection. It is still higher latency and subject to other drawbacks such as security and power consumption, but of course it offers advantages that can outweigh the disadvantages depending on use case and user needs.
That said, it's technically not faster than the cable, but rather faster at the data link or network layer. For example, CAT8 physically supports up to 40Gbps, but most consumer and even professional electronics only support up to 2.5Gbps. Only really enterprise level switches can push up to like 100Gbps onto copper, and even then that's using QSFP transceivers, not RJ-45 connections. Fiber cables regularly push 400Gbps.
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*Excluding running ethernet cables to every room through the attic, down the walls to wall jacks. Also the cost of the jacks, and the various switches needed for several rooms. And the contractor to do it all.
But hey for like $600 I have cat6a in basically every room so
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And the contractor to do it all.
Why wouldn’t you do it yourself?
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Like, in an old house its a massive pain in the ass to run that, but still firmly in DIY territory.
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Disabled, so physically cannot do it, or I would.
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And then you still need a wireless router to get Internet on your phone unless you use data at home like a crazy person.
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USB-C > Ethernet dongle like a true Network Master.
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Ethernet is obviously better but running ethernet around your home can be a pain in the arse
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A pain in the arse you only need to do once, and you can hire someone to do it for you for basically the same cost as a couple of the high end wireless routers, so in like 5 years, you break even.
Also, how much have you spent on your computer (s), phone(s), tablet(s), and all your other internet connected devices, and you won't spend like $500 on something that can run all that stuff simultaneously? Pouring literally thousands of dollars on connected devices, but most won't pay more than they would for a toaster, to get them on the internet, then pay out the wahzoo for gigabit internet that your crummy d-link router can't handle, and you wonder why all your fancy gadgets run like shit.... It's a lot like buying a Ferrari to drive on dirt/gravel roads.
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I think it’s a little more than $500 to get Ethernet ports installed all around your house. Especially if you need to run through fire breaks and insulation. Will have to wait till a remodel before I can get those installed.
That said, I didn’t skimp on my home networking, even though it’s all wireless. I’ve got 4 WiFi 6 APs on PoE with Cat 6 runs thru the attic. I can get 700 Mbs+ download speeds pretty much anywhere in and around the house.
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Preach! I just finished a long DIY remodel and running ethernet to everyroom was less than a $100 in cable and connectors. Obviously it was easier and cheaper for me because I already had a lot of the drywall down.
Either way such a good point you make, people will drop 1k on a phone no questions asked but a few hundred is too much to get the best home upgrade a tech enthusiast could ever ask for.
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Or if you rent. I could run an Ethernet cable to my office from my router, but it would have to run upstairs and across a few doorways.
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Way less so if your home is constructed such that the wireless is borked
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That can be an advantage. Some of the enterprise-level tech has trickled down to consumer WiFi in recent years, which includes browsing between multiple access points. With several access points with relatively weak signal, you get signal right where you need it without broadcasting up and down the street.
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But what if you're gaming downstairs and the router is upstairs and then you have to go upstairs for pizza rolls so you take your gaming laptop upstairs and you're eating right next to the router and so you're just plugged in and then what if you forgot to turn off the oven and your girlfriend is yelling at you "You're going to start a fire! Why can't you remember to turn off the oven? What's wrong with you?" and then you go back downstairs to finish gaming?
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If that happens often enough to be worth 43 times more than the cat cable, then it sounds totally justified to me. But also, what if you got a toaster oven for upstairs? To put next to the router?
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What if you used the router as the toaster oven? Tapping_head.gif
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I use the microwave for my pizza rolls like a savage. Problem solved.
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I eat my pizza rolls cold, like a savage
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Let's see that ethernet cable do orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing...
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Twisted pairs go brrrrrr
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Dude I just bought 4 refurbished Linksys MX4200 (tri-band) access points for $80 (total), put on OpenWRT, and built a mesh system. I'm incredibly happy with the result, especially for the price. And, I've got wireless bridges all through the house so I can keep some things off the forwarding channels and only in the back haul.
It's not wired, but it's close enough and doesn't require me drilling through all my walls running cable or carving out a space in the house for all of it to coalesce.
Granted, I'm in an area with not a lot of wireless interference...I work in enterprise networking and I've had a lot of issues with remote workers on wireless networks that weren't capable of handling the volume of data that the users were uploading. Sometimes just because there's too much interference...but a lot of the time it's because of misconfiguration (either out of ignorance or because the good features, like multicast-to-unicast, are missing), or printer drivers that spam the wireless with multicast whenever the printer is offline (which I've seen a surprising amount of times).
If you're on wireless...multicast is bad, mmmkay? Only "one" device can talk at a time on wireless (barring MIMO shenanigans), and when it's multicast traffic...it has to get sent at the lowest compatible rates. A lot of routers set this to 6Mbps or even 1Mbps by default. So your nice fancy "1200Mbps" wireless has to slow down a crawl every time your Roku wants to tell Alexa that it's there. Which is surprisingly often. Scale up for all the internet-of-crap stuff people have and it's a miracle their wireless works at all.
Oh and I've found people with extenders they don't know about. Ring Chime? Apparently it functions as an 802.11n (only) extender. Huge bottleneck right there. And then it can only be as good as the signal it gets from the next access point.
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I’m a nice fellow who provides free internet to all of my neighbors.
It’s a pain sometimes.
I worry about the teenager upstairs, but all the others are old ladies and it doesn’t bother me a bit…until I want to do something serious.
I’m about to (tax time) invest in a router that allows me to control their bandwidth. It’s free, so if 20mbps don’t work for them they can pay for it.
I will open up the kid’s PS5 so he can game. His laptop is getting 10mbps though.
Old ladies rocking 4k to sleep is too much.
They don’t pay for internet so they get the good good on their services. I’m too sorry and antisocial to go deal with it.
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Legit would've commit crimes for 20mbps growing up. And I was one of the lucky ones too
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I'm seriously thinking of getting a usbC-ethernet dongle for my mobile, for when I'm at my desk.
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If you have wireless charging then you should definitely get the dongle. I have one for those times I need stability. Get a thin lightweight USB C extender so the dongle is not getting in the way.
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I, too, have shitty wireless. In fact, for my work laptop, that's exactly what I do. So much more reliable. Way too many wireless connections on too many channels close by.
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Wireless tech has improved greatly over the last 20 years. Speed, latency, bandwidth, stability…all generally excellent. 15 years ago I wouldn’t have wanted to use a wireless mouse or LAN connection. Now? NBD. They just work. Still have issues with poor signal in some areas, but mesh range boosters take care of that pretty easily.
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Wireless data links should be the exclusive domain of temporary, nomadic and/or sacrificial applications.
If the channel is permanent, static, or critical; as much of the path as practicable should be provisioned with constrained energy transmission.
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Would be cool if building code standards included Cat5 (or even better, USB) along with the standard power and phone connections of new builds.
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But that cable can't summon Kel'Tuzad unlike the router.
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6.99 is just one cost though. If you're needing ethernet actually done in walls then you're going to be paying a lot more than an access point.
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Unless you need 6ft of cable or you just run wires on the floor it's more like $200 of plenium rated cable, and keystone jacks and the labor involved with the run.
My house with a half finished basement (easy access) took probably 16-20 hours running to 5 rooms.
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Yeah when i did my house i was quoted $100-200 a drop and that was years ago. I bought materials for 20 drops for about 1k (cables, keystones, plates, cable tester, ethernet cutter, puncher, drywall knife, flex drill bit, wall fishing tape, network switch, and a bunch of other stuff im probably forgetting). It took me 1 hour per drop on average. Some were easy, some were a pain in the ass. Now you can save on materials slightly by doing 1 drop per room whereas i did individual drops for each jack (because i wanted full bandwidth on each line), but either way it is going to end up more costly than an access point or mesh system unless you're just running one line within the same room.
Definitely worth it if you care about the speed or reliability of your connection but i think for most people these days it's probably overkill.
If you do go wiring everything then now you're mostly already set up to do some Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) devices for cameras, access points etc. And next thing you know you're an amateur home networker!
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Honestly, my place isn't that big, but I can cover the whole place with a single wireless access point, and get fast, reliable, stable connection everywhere.
In the room with the AP (my home office and gaming PC) I have zero jitter, zero packet loss, and 2ms ping.
Wire hasn't been needed for a good connection for a long time
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I spend a lot more money on good Ethernet switches. But at least that works and is easier to manage than Wifi.
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Yeah this kinda overlooks a lot of the issues with like… getting a cable somewhere
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My house is relatively new (built 2005), and they pulled cat5 for all the telephone lines and just didn't hook up the extra pairs of wires. Since nobody uses landlines anymore, I rewired most of the outlets for RJ45.
Have pulled a few more wires, including fiber to my main office PC (so I can have a very fast connection to my NAS). Once you learn a few techniques and the way your building is laid out, it's not that hard.
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I have about 6 or 8 ethernet cables in use plus more in my spare cables box, and I don't remember ever paying for one. Where do they come from? I never seem to run out.
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Phased arrays are not a joke. You can get ridiculous dynamic range with those
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I got a used 10Gbe switch and a thunderbolt 10Gbe adapter for my computer and now I can transfer my videos and photos from my NAS like it's my internal hard drives.
It can also do 2.5Gbe which pretty much future proofs me.
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Wait, what does the bomb from Halo 2 have to do with an ethernet cable?
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That one in the picture is $599 isn't it?
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Who buys a $300 home wifi box? They're $50-100
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Depends on usage. If you don't need super fast speeds or low latency, go for cheaper model.
If you need low latency and high speeds (ex. Wireless VR with PC), you need to pay more to get good and stable connection (+ multiple routers as mesh if needed). And more expensive devices have different CPU/RAM which will help you if you have large network + extra security features on.
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Nah, wifi is pretty good today. I just dont like the consumer devices like the router shown here. Recently redid my wireless and went with a non wifi router, a poe switch and a few access points, connected through ethernet. I wouldnt dream of going back to the conventional one wifi router. Still use wired for stationary devices I can reach with a cable though.. TV, AV, consoles, PC are all wired.
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To be honest, I think a lot of Lemmy users are old and yearn for the older technologies simply because they have been more familiar with them than newer ones. They would have used the first gen of a technology, which may not be efficient, and dismiss it altogether, without realising that subsequent generations of that technology improves over time.
I have had that realisation of cognitive bias when I had Bluetooth headphones back in early 2010s. The wireless connection isn't great and gets cut off every now and then. I dismissed the technology as less efficient than wired earphones. It was over the years with the popularity of airpods that I gave wireless earphones another chance. And honestly, the Bluetooth connectivity vastly improved than I expected and I would not go back to using wired earphones again on regular basis because I don't have to deal with the wires getting tangled or yanked. I only use wired ones as backup if my wireless earphones went missing or broke.
Sorry to say this to OP, but it seems that you're being an old man yelling at the clouds. Look, I'm also old and I admit I have had that moment of yelling at the clouds too. We will have that more moments as we age.
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I have a similar setup to @PieMePlenty@lemmy.world in regards to my home network and I wouldn't dream of removing my wifi network. I still consider wired to be superior though it rarely matters at those latencies.
My Windows laptop on wifi:
My Fedora on wired network:
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Just use something shielded and at least cat 5
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I have a cat 5 cable running to a wireless access port that is connected to my wireless router. Online I show as having a physical connection, because the last connection to the PC is a plug.
The connection is also pretty solid compared to when I try to use wifi on the same PC to connect to the same wireless access point, which is just over 6 foot away with no obstructions (just checked), or the main router which is in another room.
Seems weird, but it works.
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Your PC probably has poor antennas and/or WiFi chipset. The pc might also be located in a worse place
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The pc might also be located in a worse place
Like, mentally?
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I set up a mesh router pair a while back - super easy setup, and the speed is good enough to have multiple TVs streaming at once, and without needing to run cables between rooms... Worth it.
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The problem with wireless isn't speed anymore, its stability. For a lot of applications that's fine since buffering and whatnot hides any hiccups. but gaming for example is a nightmare on wireless still.
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I've been playing FPS exclusively on wireless for almost 15 years (802.11n 5ghz) and stability has been fine unless you set up your access point far away from your gaming PC for some reason.
Back then you had to get a pretty nice wireless router to do it, but it still worked fine.
\ Now days even relatively cheap routers will let you game just fine unless you set up far away from the AP and you're in a pro tournament.
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Wifi 7 is insanely fast to the point where it can easily be just as good as wired ethernet and can even beat a lot of the wired standards except the few latest ones. It's a good choice for devices where running a cable wouldn't be very practical, but you need wired level speed and reliability.
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wired level speed and
reliability.While WiFi is a lot better nowadays I've never seen it reach the reliability of wired networks.
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I remember watching a video from Linus demonstrating a WiFi router. I don't remember if it was WiFi 6 or 7, but any obstacle could cause connection drops.
I don't know if things have improved since then, but I usually bond WiFi and PowerLine for rooms that Ethernet cannot reach.
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wired will always be better, faster, more reliable, and cheaper
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Until the clip breaks off...
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You could have 30 clips break and it would still be cheaper.
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if that's the latest one that's a great deal. it's usually $800.
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Given the choice, I'd definitely choose a cable for anything I know will require high internet usage. Wireless is just too slow, even on a 5G connection.
I still remember I once broke my Windows installation (young me had tried dual-booting the Windows 10 beta and my Windows 7 installation). I had to get system restored discs from the manufacturer. It wasn't particularly tricky to fix, but it took a long time to download those Windows updates after it finished. I noticed an immediate change once I remembered I had an old 30 ft. ethernet cable lying around and plugged it in. (This was maybe 8-10 years ago.)
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I'm a cable guy too; it's just better. But you can't get quality CAT6 or better cables for $6.99 anymore.
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156 comments