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"So literally last weekend I cabled my house with 5 runs of 100 meg ethernet and a couple of long patch leads in the living room and stuffed in a cheap 8 port netgear switch from ebay. Plugged the whole thing into my router and turned off the WiFi entirely just using it as a switch + NAT combo."

Exactly. I don't give out a lot of tech-guy advice to folks these days, and most people don't even think of me as "the computer guy" in their social circle ... but any chance I have I implore people to hardwire their networking connections.

No matter how good your AP is or how nice your Sonos mesh algorithm is or how clear your airspace is ... you will deal with random, annoying, difficult to diagnose wireless comms issues. It's very easy to make that entire class of problem disappear from your life. It's also a lot faster.

EDIT: actually, this post will seem a bit disingenuous when we (rsync.net) officially announce the drive-up feature at our datacenter locations. We're stacking the deck in our favor by using Ubiquiti long-range APs ...

Yup. When we built our home I had them run two CAT-5 cables to the center of every wall in every room in the house. Yes, lots of cable. Cable is cheap. They did this before insulating and closing the walls, which made it super easy. All cables go to the garage. The garage itself has four cables per wall (hint: never in my life have I parked a car in my garage).

The cables are not brought out to connectors at all. When a need for connectivity appears it is easy to tone a cable through the wall, find the wires, cut through and install a box with connectors.

Thanks to this setup wifi use is kept to a minimum and security is enhanced greatly. It's always fun to watch the reaction of phone company technicians the few times we've changed internet connectivity when they walk into a garage full of computers, lab and cnc equipment and an EIA rack with servers, a large switch, hardware firewall and patch panels. They usually say something like "OK, here's the cable, it might be better if you wire it."

I just don't understand this wireless craze. I get that normal consumers buy into it, but for anyone mildly technically inclined, nobody should be using wireless anywhere they can avoid it. Wireless is just a messy solution. The only wireless devices I use at home are my phones.

The last two places I've worked have gone completely wireless - and gotten mixed results.

The first place was a small business and their network guys were nails. They had the whole system set up in three days, and we were screaming (close to a 100MB both ways) and since we didn't have a ton of users, it was rock solid and really dependable.

Just landed a few months ago at a huge corporation who did the same thing and it's horrible. The connection drops in and out, the speeds are anemic (around 2-5MB during the day, both ways) and in out project room, we've had so many problems, they're going to turn the LAN outlets back on so the service will be at least reliable.

The crazy thing is I've spoken to other people on my floor and they've told me before they went wireless, the network was far more reliable and much faster (closer to 40-50MB) both up and down.

was bigcorp using enterprise AP (aruba?) and little guy using off-the-shelf stuff (asus?)

Ironically that's the first thing I thought...

Sometimes I'm amazed how much better consumer hardware seems to perform over enterprise wireless hardware. I just haven't seen an enterprise wireless device I was impressed with.

Mind you, I assume enterprise hardware prioritizes security over performance, whereas consumer devices prioritize performance over security.

IDK, that sounds like a false dichotomy. Enterprise security just has you look up the credentials in LDAP on initial connect rather than having everyone use the same credentials last time I checked.

It's not meant to indicate it's impossible to have both fast and secure, but in terms of where a company's focus is on improving their product. Many more resources are invested in improving security in an enterprise product than performance.

bigcorp was Cisco and the little guy was using off-the-shelf stuff, though I can't remember the manufacturer.

Do you use laptops on couches at home? Cables seem hasslesome there.

That's what I'm now doing. I duct taped a couple of ethernet cables to the back of the couch and you just stick your hand down and grab one if you need it. I terminated the cables slightly earlier and used an inline coupler so you can replace the last 1m when the plastic clip inevitably breaks off after a couple of months without having to rerun 25m of cable.

I mostly use a desktop so this is primarily for the wife and kids.

This is crazy. Duct taping cables to the couch? Too funny.

What about tablets/iPads for wife and kids?

I don't know why you were getting so many dropouts but it's not because "wifi is bad". I live in a house with lots of noise from neighbours wifi, but no problems here. Wifi will be solid for months at a time.

I must have a good wifi router (Billion 7800NL). Not all routers are created equal, I've gone through a couple of duds before the Billion. Some deal with interference better than others. Let the router choose the channel automatically too, very important.

My house is old, quite large, thick walls and so on. But everyone uses wi-fi here from different rooms without any issues. A lot of simultaneous connections going on too.

I have a couple loose Ethernet lines running about for laptops. Sometimes I use them on Wi-Fi, but only if it's momentary.

"...turned off the WiFi entirely just using it as a switch + NAT combo."

I took this angle early on and have never had second thoughts. As they say, "It just works."

Glad you are seeing the benefits.

However, I think "WiFi" is a strong marketing signal. Even if it does not work as well as Ethernet at transferring data, it appears to work well to sell products and services.

"I really don't know how this tech is going to work..."

It may not have to work. Consumers of computing devices have developed a high tolerance for stuff that is either ridiculously slow or does not work. Many do not know any different: when none of the devices people use have an Ethernet port, they will never know the speeds they are missing. The choice of using Ethernet has been removed.