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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

My day to day happiness quotient shot up the day I ditched my wireless wifi and ran Ethernet cables through my spaces. I'd realized I was constantly noticing wifi issues, and an apple mbp I use for email seems to drop wifi every half hour. But no longer, with them all wired up! Realizing there are USB3 to Ethernet gadgets really hits home how our modern technology is market-driven-dumb and anti-consumer: all modern laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore!

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I think a lot of this is the 2004 model of plopping an integrated router/access point/modem in a single location in their house simply doesn't work any longer. At least for any sort of Urban deployment. You are seeing many large companies also realizing this and trying to bring products to market.

You can get very solid wireless in your house if you are willing to spend some money on it, and of course the time on the infrastructure. This means a network drop to each room, and very dense access points.

If you try to play games and avoid the "running wires to a room" part - you're just going to have a bad time. I don't see the "mesh wireless" stuff working long-term, they are simple stop-gaps. Once in the room though you can get away with wireless.

I recently just "made it rain" access points (ubiquity in this case) more or less so anywhere in the house you have or are very close to having line of sight to an AP. Since that transition wireless is as good as wired for me.

It's a bit more expensive, but also makes my quality of life far better. Everything just works. I also took the opportunity to get a quality PoE switch for the telco closet, a solid UPS, etc. Now my network survives power outages for 5-6 hours from a single UPS and switch, powering half a dozen APs throughout the house. Bonus is the PoE IP cameras also stay working during an outage.

I splurged on one of the expensive tri-band routers and honestly now the wireless is good enough that I don't care.

I used to live about 1/4 mile away from any other houses, and I never got why people always complained about wifi.

In my experience it always worked well, was fairly fullproof, and had fast enough speeds that it was never an issue.

2 years ago I moved into a condo that has 25 wifi APs within range of me right now. Now I get it.

Getting one of the high-end tri-band routers as you said did help, but it's still a difficult experience.

I never heard of a tri-band router before. It's a misnomer because there is no third band, it just means it can handle 2.4GHz but will use two channels of 5GHz at once. There have been other routers in the past that used more than one channel but it sounds very selfish to use in a dense apartment/condo living situation.

Well luckily there is a massive chunk of 5ghz channels that nobody is using right now so i'm okay, and the routers that use the 2 bands of 5ghz actually will step down to only 1 if they see someone else stepping on either of them.

But just the fact that the higher end routers handle the extra congestion much better was more the point.

It's worse than that. There is a third band, 802.11ad running at 60GHz. But as you say "tri-band" actually means tri-channel.

Good point, they should be called simultaneous tri channel.

'Power Line' or similar adapters can work quite well in apartments. You can use it for a wired connection where practical, and otherwise have a couple 5GHz routers for a good wireless access.

Hm, I'm not quite that isolated, but I do live in a single-family home, so that might explain it.

If they haven't done so already, maybe we'll see copper-clad drywall or flooring for such environments ? Guess that would take down cellular service too though.

I'm just waiting for a standard which smartly reduces transmit power so they all don't need to shout over each other.

Reducing transmit power reduces interference, but it also reduces capacity since the received power (and hence the SNR at the receiver) is reduced! The Shannon limit on channel capacity dictates exactly how much bit rate (C=B*log2(1+SNR)) is achievable over a channel. SNR is a fundamental ingredient of this equation.

Also, copper is pretty expensive. A mesh of cheaper metal should do the job; might even be possible to tune it to the right frequency so you don't block cellphones, but I don't know

My wifi is fine between one wireless device and a wired device, but if I'm say, using my laptop to beam a video off my NAS onto my TV, it all breaks down.

What is triband. Can you recommend one?

I had to google it, it sounds selfish when the trouble is caused by many neighbors having their own APs nearby.

Doesn't it enhance to the problem further though? (if yes, then yes, wifi kinda sucks)

not really, as I believe any router that uses more than one channel at once must disable that feature if there are any other APs that are trying to use any of those channels.

Can't speak for anyone else, but that was not my problem.

It uses 2 5Ghz channels and 1 2.4ghz channel.

I bought this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6

All of my WiFi problems were solved with a UniFi AP - dropouts, connections randomly slowing down, etc all completely disappeared once I got that AP up and running.

When I need raw speed (e.g, browsing/editing raw photos that are stored on a NAS) I still plug in. Even though the WiFi is rock solid, it's not as fast as wired.

> all modern laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore!

Surely things haven't gotten this insane outside the iFruitbasket? If so I'm going to have to stock up on upgradeable refurbished laptops...

Usually it's just a factor of the thin-ness of a laptop. Ethernet is not a small port and laptops that aren't heavy duty ultrabooks are regularly thinner than one, even at their thickest point.

You can get USB->Ethernet adapters.

Exactly. They're very cheap, anywhere beteween $5 and $15. Cheap enough to basically add them to every ethernet drop where you regularly sit.

For simple things, I actually love my HP Stream 11 laptop. Basically a ChromeBook sold with Windows. No Ethernet.

My kids' ChromeBooks don't have an Ethernet port. Good little Acer machines. School-issued CB, I have not been allowed to examine yet.

That's simply not the experience of the vast, vast majority of users. That the market doesn't bend over backwards so you won't have to spend $10 on a USB ethernet adapter is neither dumb nor anti-consumer, it's perfectly rational. Especially on recent generations of laptops that are literally thinner than an ethernet socket.

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