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…
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.
Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.
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.
There are some pretty long snakebois in prison, there usually in the shower areas
Idk… I’ve got some pretty long snakey bois
SAME…ladies?
What communitys do you browse that dont load satisfactorily with a normal wifi router?
Have that router. Snakey boy wins.
You must have forgotten to sharpen the spikes 😹
How do you find it? Do you manage the scary spikes?
If you flip it upside down it’s a Halloween spider decoration.
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.
It’s pretty easy to crimp a new one back on, and even easier with a 30 dollar tool.
Easy fix with a tight layer of electrical tape to act as a wedge. You can also shove a toothpick in the top for extra staying power.
I have a collection of 3d prints on thingiverse that reattach that part. Highly recommend.
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.
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?
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.
No pulling wires from walls, just cutting the ends off and installing new connectors. Might not be enough in every case though.
Crimping took me like 5 attempts to get right when I learned it in school.
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
I’m just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the biggest cost of crimping your own cables is finding a place to store the remaining spool.
Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP
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.
Well until you have to guide that snaky boy through the whole apartment and through door frames.
If you connect both ends of that snakey boi into the router then you’ll find out who wins real quick
My router handles that just fine?
It’s a newer version of Spike, too.
If your TV vendor decides to only put 100Mb cards in their TV then unfortunately spikey boy wins and you lose unless you’re willing to downrez your AV catalog.
Venn diagram of people who understand this specific technicality and people who don’t want to deal with the shitty TV software is almost a circle though.
I’d rather get a Android box at the very least…, or just HTPC.
I’m in that Venn diagram but I’m married with kids and the UX of anything but the TV remote and Plex software is a bit much for me to convince the family to learn. And potentially relearn when I find the next great app like jellyfin 😅
I think there’s another circle with at least significant overlap between those two of family techies who just can’t convince the rest of the family to care.
My wife and kids found Jellyfin easier to use because it more closely resembles Netflix. Your mileage may vary but I get it, and it's why I even use a media server over just plugging in a laptop with Kodi.
Sometimes the best solution is whatever you can get the users to actually use.
I set up an hdmi-Ethernet converter and run Ethernet between my TV and main desktop. It solves problems.
That’s one solution… unless someone wants to use the computer while you’re watching something, it’s fine. For any shared access TV/computer set up, this falls apart quickly.
I want my SO to be able to watch something on the TV while I’m playing a game though (and vice versa). Personally all of my stuff is independent, we each have a gaming computer, and the TV ruins separately of all of it. We have a Samsung smart TV and it has a Chromecast attached, so we have options there… but not everyone is set up like me.
They do that shit on purpose. Use a shield or an htpc. Only input your TV should be getting is HDMI.
Is that why my shit keeps buffering any time I try to stream a movie larger than 50-60 GB, despite the fact that I have a gigabit connection and a 2.5Gb router? TIL. BRB, running some speed tests on my TV…
It’s been 9 hours, how did it go?
Depends, am i routing data or cosplaying the lich king?
Fucking millennials. Learn to multitask.
Wrong generation
I’m pretty sure the love for Warcraft III evenly splits X and Y.
Indeed, i’m genx
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.
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.
No shit?
I mean copper runs at 2/3 the speed of light.
Wireless is pretty much the speed of light.
I thought they used dedicated fiber for their links.
But can snakey boi summon daedra?
Depends on the challenge. Snakey boiy loses if the challenge is to move around the house and go into the backyard.
Nay, with long enough cable you’ll get consistently good performance. With wifi it’s a hit and miss due to interference and walls.
We ran snakey boys throughout the house using command hooks on the ceiling when my wife and I had to go WFH 3 years ago.
The temporary fix is still going strong. At this point, the place would look weird without hastily strung up CAT5 all over the place.
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix
Why is this my top post? What joke am I missing? So confused.
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…
$400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support
I think I need to bold this up. Custom firmware support, especially OpenWRYT, means that your router will live for years to come.
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.
What’s the speed? Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you’re easily saturating that line either way.
Do you have gigabit? Then Ethernet, but then again getting like 600mbps wirelessly is good enough.
Biggest thing is having GOOD coverage. My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere. People with a shitty ISP router shoved in the cupboard in their basement make no sense lol.
