Wireless Is a Trap
benkuhn.net
benkuhn.net
It performs much better than wireless alternatives.
If I hide enamel coated filament just beneath my lawn is that going to be good for a one wire bus to work? Does it even need to be insulated?
This is the implementation: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/tree/master/src/strategies/So...
This is the source code: https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/blob/master/src/strategies/So...
It is extremely rugged, it works much better than any alternative I have ever tried. Ah, it is free and open-source ;)
In case of wireless all you need is ESP32, relay and a power supply. And all of that together will cost less than 10$.
Can you easily (cheaply) use the already existing power cables for PJDL? I know there are network repeaters that use power cables to transfer data, but I have no idea how much it would cost in IoT scenario. Do you have some examples?
Does it have anything in common with 'single-wire earth return', in power-distribution?
Though, I don't know if insulation helps in the case of lightning. Apparently with Ethernet, special grounding thingies help.
In general even the most rugged lightning/surge protection only decrease the likelihood of protected equipment being vaporized.
it can be a nightmare.
A twisted pair seems nice to me because you can use differential signaling and not have to ground your devices e.g. 2 wire RS485.
What if you just connect the antenna wires of all the devices together?
That's what a single wire protocol does.
When you have an object with static electricity and put it in contact with a different object, there will be a transient current, even if the circuit is not closed. The objects basically work as poor-man's capacitors.
Even though the name is "static electricity", when the objects come into contact, it's actually more dynamic than normal, because there is no current between two objects of fixed and different voltage. The more current that flows, the lesser the voltage difference becomes, in an exponential fashion.
This kind of single wire protocol operates solely based on these kind of transient currents. Because the frequency is so high, very little current flows during one period of the waveform, so the receiver will maintain constant potential, as if it was grounded.
That it isn't actually grounded means the signal becomes high-pass filtered. In particular, the DC-component must be completely blocked as it would lead to charge buildup with nowhere to go.
I've never seen this before. Is the author mistaking proprietary 2.4 GHz receivers (that do not use Bluetooth) for OEMs' "own Bluetooth implementation"?
They refer to swapping between built-in Bluetooth and the dongle, which sounds like Logitech's line of dual-mode keyboards that can use either Bluetooth or Logitech's proprietary "unifying receiver," which is based on Nordic Semiconductor's nRF24L, not Bluetooth.
This is why manufacturers build their own 2.4GHz proprietary dongles using proprietary protocols - it ensures consistency for the users.
It's a bunch of hacks all hacking around the other hacks.
As someone not familiar at the low level, can somebody explain how this can still be happening today? Are there not libraries that help ensure proper implementation? I really don't understand.
Thirdly, hardware companies are generally not great at software. A lot of effort goes into physical testing and validation but the base level of quality of the code isn't great. Also the quality of a given bluetooth device often depends on the quality of the custom code for it: there's a generaly trend of running application code on the same CPU as the bluetooth code, and in an embedded context there isn't generally great seperation between the two (nordic's approach is probably the best here). A third-party making a cheap pair of bluetooth headphones is not likely to make a quality result, even if using a library which is relatively bug-free.
Finally, there's a vicous sprial effect: because you need to interact with a wide variety of other implementations, which may all be buggy or quirky in their own ways, you wind up needing to test with a wide array of other devices (expensive and may not always happen) and play whack-a-mole with the remaining issues which appear, which in turn creates more quirks and more opportunity for bugs.
Interoperability is tested, but not in an organized way and not repeatably - AFAIK 3 different teams are supposed to check that a new protocol works against each other. The different vendors verify their BT implementations but not against each other. That would be expensive, I guess.
The firmware in BT devices can also use a number of hacks which are not breaking the spirit of the specs as such .. and this is not being tested. On top of this often BT and WiFi has to work together (shared antenna) and this means that BT will not get all the time it needs but a percentage based on what Wi-Fi is doing at the time.
I try to use Ethernet every time I get the chance.
Fitbit won't pair with my phone, but works OK with my wife's and my tablet. Garmin fitness tracker syncs with all 3 devices, but will stop syncing with my wife's phone within 2-3 days and will need to be paired again.. My bluetooth headphones work with my phone and my wife's phone, but not my tablet. Every 6 months or so I still have to use a paperclip to reset the headphones to be able to re-pair them with my phone after they stop working for no reason.
I've seen similar problems with phones I've owned before.
[1] There's much debate about what 'first gen', 'second gen' actually mean in terms of VR, I just mean it's Samsung's second WMR model after the Odyssey HMD.
Make AirPods 3 APAN & BT compatible, with the same latency characteristics of theatre wireless mics (really low). Same with the mice & keyboards.
I use a Logitech MX Master, and while I do enjoy its Bluetooth capability (for laptops), I use a dongle with my desktop, which results in zero latency, no stuttering, and perfect synchronization.
I still have nightmares about those things failing to pair constantly.
I have an MX Master and a K380. The MX Master has a noticeable lag in Bluetooth and both will have a noticable delay when first used after a period of inactivity before springing to life. The K380 seems to have a key buffer to mitigate the delay.
If however I have my Bluetooth headphones powered on and active to the host, keeping the bt radio active, most of the issues go away.
Fortunately, the mouse works just as well without the crappy software, once you get it configured.
And then there are the bufferbloat people who finally tracked down the fact that in various common situations, the normal Wi-Fi protocol has a nasty interaction where it self-degrades to ridiculously slow speeds, and will take 2-5 MINUTES to recover.
We just don't have enough people doing serious whole-stack hardware+software analysis on our wireless stuff. At least outside of cellular telephony - probably because the money is more concentrated there.
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/What_can_I_d...
P.S. SFQ is enabled part of QoS (on my asus86u). There are enough people working on WiFi, you just have to invest money/time to buy/configure proper AP hardware.
In cellular, AP is managed by a team of engineers, and in consumer WiFi space, it is a race to the bottom.
and jim gettys blog https://gettys.wordpress.com/ are good places to start
There's discussions about codecs elsewhere on here - quality, latency etc. There is a lowest common denominator so that everything works for everyone but the information as to whether you're getting something else is hidden, both at purchase time and run time.
Two things that would help:
Manufacturers actually putting supported codecs somewhere in the purchase information. Why does tech specs on my Bose QuietComfort not have that information anywhere? If you Google you can eventually find a support question and answer.
Exposing runtime negotiation results to the user. In Windows when I'm connected to Wifi it shows signal strength and other basic info via the icon in the taskbar. When I'm connected to Bluetooth why is there not a display listing the profiles and codecs in use ("High Quality Audio mode via Aptx Low Latency", "Headset mode" etc.).
We actually need something similar for USB now as it has the same problem as Bluetooth - one transmission medium for a whole lot of different things all of which have to be able to negotiate to a common denominator. It happens a little bit with just the charging component (phone lets you know it's charging slowly if the charger can't negotiate up enough) - why isn't similar information provided somewhere for the rest of the USB features ("Connected to device X, can't enable feature Y as cable doesn't do Z").
As an example, Windows partially exposes that with my current setup and it's a right pain, when some apps (e.g. Zoom) decide they preferentially want to use some other bluetooth codec than the one I actually chose.
Most people really just want one thing which says "headphones" and for the software/hardware to Just Work.
There's all this talk of ethics and of logical fallacies that's making the rounds, and then you have this failure to realize that non-techies are conditioned to see technology as some sort of black magic that you have to be a special kind of not-quite-person in order to be able to make sense of.
No matter what spin you put on it, life in our society is not simple. Any kind of tool tends to work better if you're using it with some degree of understanding how it works.
If only our industry would somehow magically stop enabling entitlement and complacency (and make it easier for users to "do their homework")... then maybe things would actually "just work" much more often.
I also believe we haven't yet explored all options to make certain "specialist" topics more accessible to the general public. E.g., I'm continually surprised how much the actual network traffic between apps/devices and their corresponding servers is hidden. I believe a simple visualisation about what apps/devices are talking with who would do a lot to at least get some basic understanding of what's going on.
People seems to be very capable of learning concepts if they see personal relevance - e.g. teens know very well what the battery, wifi and signal strength indicators on their phones mean.
I will disagree with this whole-heartedly. Full bars are meaningless, and dBm is hidden (on Android at least). What we see is whatever the OEM chooses, with actual signal strength hidden away.
Consider we're not just already failing to build products that "just work", we're making it hard for users to make things work at all. There is obviously an incentive for that - Sinclair's law. However, imagine developers were actually incentivized to design beautiful, internally consistent systems, and expose their inner workings in an accessible way. How do you go from this proposition to the conclusion that everyone would have to become an expert in everything to do anything?
If everyone had access to the information needed to fix their problem using basic reasoning, but wanted to do other things, they could be able to find a nearby person who knows a little more and can help - as opposed to wasting time posting in support forums, waiting for customer support's non-answers, having to learn Google-fu to find if someone had the same issue, and eventually throwing the goddamn thing in the trash.
As an aside, I do have an axe to grind here; I did buy a pair of Bluetooth headphones the other day and, and do like chucking them in the bin even though they just work, just because I'm sick of being locked into yet another half-arsed wireless technology. I'll probably just give them to someone less demanding, because I don't want some landfill dwellers on the other side of the world inhaling my headphones. I've also reached the point when if anyone asks me for help with computers I recommend trying pen and paper instead.
Anyway, the fundamental distinction I'm trying to make is ternary: - having to learn things that make sense (competency and proficiency are enjoyable), vs. - having to learn things that pretend to make sense but don't (being good at those also feels good but I suspect is devastating to mental health), vs. - outsourcing all of your learning and going on with your life (until the Morlocks eat you)
History in general feels very much like one of those over-engineered legacy systems where every change is slow and painful, and the current maintainers can only guess why things have ended up being in a certain way, and hope trying to fix them doesn't suddenly make them worse. If you only have pure human universals to deal with in your life, I envy you. Otherwise, you might need to acknowledge that a lot of the "demands of life" are simply arbitrary constructs that beg to be challenged, renegotiated, optimized.
Maybe everyone becoming an expert in Bluetooth configuration or whatever is not pleasant or desirable, but in my book it beats destroying our economy, species or ecosystem by a thousand small cuts.
TL;DR: "Specialization is for insects," anyone?
If you need the person to understand Less need for specialized skills/info is good. Less availability of that info when needed, I just can't see how that can be good.
An hour of coherent explanation by a friend is worth more than an hour of pointless frustration at a company, no?
Correct me if I'm wrong (oh no, needing specialized info to make a general argument!) but modern cars don't have carburetors anymore, because it turned out to be an evolutionary dead end of sorts?
Maybe the same thing is bound to happen to Bluetooth anyway; and I believe that the better its workings are exposed to those who want to know it, the sooner people would be able to replace it with something that works better, thus generating less waste - of both resources and time
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Do you think people would be happy if the wifi status icon just became a boolean "on/off"? Of course not. They are able to make differential decisions in light of the (limited) information presented.
Empower users with information!
I like the idea and hope some MS engineers are taking note.
Sadly apple removed that option from phones, and other companies followed suit
General peeve engineers hide this stuff from the user because they think they won't know what to do with it, it'll just confuse them, or it's ugly. My experience is this is completely wrong.
Also I think a problem with USB and Bluetooth is mixing up the device profiles with the communication protocol. That's always a bad idea yet people keep doing it. Half these problems would go away if USB and Bluetooth were like Wifi/Ethernet. Just a packet level protocol.
Also making Bluetooth a low power/datarate frequency hopper was a terrible mistake. The people responsible should have spent the rest of their lives shoveling hot asphalt.
Every few years I have this thought:
If, instead of <X> on <Y>, we had just put more effort into Ethernet (and just Ethernet), we'd probably have reached <Z> by now.
Fiber Channel. USB. Thunderbolt. HDMI/DVI. SCSI/SATA. Bluetooth. BLE. Make wifi be ethernet over radio not the monster it is today.
Of the above, only Ethernet has the good grace to be driven by (relatively) simple software. It's also the only one that isn't getting obsoleted by the next complex thing coming along.
Source: Worked Radio Verification at a mobile company that developed it's own bluetooth stack. RIP Blackberry.
The minimalism point doesn't really cut it: you still need a wire to charge batteries inside things, so it's one more item. And batteries go bad in a matter of years, so you need to buy a soldering iron and a LiPo cell from shady sources unless you're into replacing >$100 devices every three years or so. Or buy external AAA batteries and a wall charger like 90s toy cars.
I don't mind the aesthetics of wires. I love the mess behind my desk and the thought that electrons are being pushed at 40 Gb/s to form an image. Mix and match different colors and braid types for a free steampunk look.
I can try to run-down her thought process for you:
1) Wires look untidy
This doesn't have to be true necessarily, but making wires neat is an art form, having a wire that goes behind the sofa from the TV for example is something that will never easily be hidden.
2) Wires are hard to clean/collect dust
Wires that don't have that fancy plastic routing plates seem to accumulate dust, and are hard to clean around generally. Loose wires that spiral are the worst but even single cables running across the edges of the room seem to be harder to clean.
3) Wires dont "add any benefit".
For her, if it works it works, and when it doesn't (and I explain that it's because the signal is poor or there is interference) then her reaction is: "You're smart, you work with computers, make it work."- so I do ugly things like run powerline over ethernet which has it's own cons.
--
There is a generalised ignorance about how wireless communication systems work in the non-tech populace, nobody thinks about a 'shared segment of space', they think in terms of themselves, their router, and principally "their connection at the time" to the wifi router.
4) Wires make the physical environment much more shaky.
I have a cat. Like all cats, he occasionally gets rambunctious. When he goes zooming around the desk, the more things that are connected with wires, the more likely that something gets yanked by something else into a catastrophic (as it were) orgy of destruction.
Of course, one could just unplug everything that isn't in use, in which case one runs into:
5) Wires create complicated organizational challenges in practical use
For example, many of us have more devices than one has things to plug them into (whether that is outlets to plug into the wall or USB ports on the computer or whatever); changing devices means rooting through a pile of cords to figure out which one happens to go into which thing that needs plugging in. Wires also impose location limitations on the things they're attached to, as extra-extra long wires sometimes degrade data quality too, or are spec-violative because of some kind of safety consideration[1], or impose other ancillary safety considerations such as the risk of tripping, of putting furniture on some power wire and fraying it like crazy, further cat dangers, etc. etc.
Maybe in an industrial environment, where the entire physical plant can be adapted to the needs of the equipment, it makes sense to wire everything. But in a home, where people have needs independent of servicing their devices and don't have the money to, for example, hire someone to cut holes into the wall to run all the cables through there, wires can seriously degrade a bunch of realistic practical considerations.
Source: myself, a person who has recently moved to a building that provides free cable, and hence has cable TV for the first time in his life; has now discovered that in order to make a basic cable tv + internet setup work, one needs 3 wires into the TV, 4 wires into the modem and a splitter on the cable jack, 3 wires into the cable box which apparently is also a TV, and, since modern TVs have shit speakers so a sound bar with 2 or 3, I forget which and can't tell in the wire forest, wires into that. The cable wire is run entirely across the living room, since apparently the only place to connect to the cable company is on the opposite side of the living room from where any rational person would put a TV, all resulting in this horror; [2] all of which is powered buy a single duplex outlet with multiple surge protectors in it, which, at least if you believe the Yale fire marshal, is a no-no[3], but other random places on the internet disagree and, any way, what choice do we have in the Land of Endless Wires?
[1] For example, USB-C PD apparently has a limitation of 6 feet in the spec? https://superuser.com/questions/961176/usb-type-c-power-deli...
[3] https://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/bsas/safetymeeting...
You're completely correct, but I'd go even further: if you actually understood how wired and wireless work, you'd realize that the wired solution was truly much more minimal: less complexity, less cost, more reliability.
Wired is only more minimalist if you're looking at the wires and not thinking about the technology.
Same goes for sockets - recently I bought a certain laptop because, among other things, it can be charged also via USB-C (albeit slowly), giving me a fallback socket should the primary fail - had this happen to my previous device.
If you still feel guilty about the extra 25 cents of electricity you'll waste per year, go buy a $5 carbon offset and donate $5 to an environmental charity.
Aside from Apple brand cables, which lack strain relief, I don’t think I’ve ever killed a single USB or Ethernet cable. If it weren’t for the transition from USB 2 to 3, I’d probably keep the same cables for my entire life at this rate.
Anyway the USB-C I got with my phone lasted two years, but I've used it everywhere, my 1/4s broke because I've made the mistake of buying "by Klotz" cables, RJ-45 are mostly Chinese crap so no surprise here.
The more I think about it, I’d probably destroy lighting cables regularly if it weren’t for the fact that I only use wireless charging. You have to unplug that cable a lot, which is pretty hard on the cable and connector.
I got wireless only when I'm doing manual work like chores. In every other instance it's just not worth it.
If you think wires always work, you've never dealt with the vagaries of SCSI or FibreChannel or even 10gigabit ethernet. Hell Benson Leung became net famous for reviewing all the problems with USB cables (https://kirkville.com/google-employee-reviews-usb-c-cables-o...) let alone the insanity between USB devices (and this was before the whole USB 3, USB 3.1, USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 fiasco).
WiFi is fine if you’re gonna meander around, but I’ve had enough nonsense with the signal cutting out while I’m sitting still. I’ve also had enough with my speeds degrading 90% from one end of my tiny apartment to another. Give me my copper cables back please.
My wireless Samsung printer user to work very well, but lately, various devices keep claiming it'a not connected. Turning it on manually doesn't fix it. Since I'm near the printer anyway, it's usually easiest to just hook up by USB. (This is hardly the only problem with it; sometimes it's just in a "paper jam" mood and I need to "fix" a non-existent paper jam after every single printed page. The fact that support is now by HP doesn't exactly endear me to the machine either.)
It’s just worse in every respect and the headsets cost three times as much for the equivalent sound quality.
people with a desktop computer are a minority thou.
The problem is trying to use and app like GarageBand where you need instant response to instrument control. In fact, first time you open GarageBand and it detects you’re using Bluetooth it’ll give you that warning.
What do you mean by "playing"? I play the digital piano with wired headphones, and with bluetooth sound it is absolutely unplayable due to the latency.
Compared to Wired Headphone of 5ms latency.
At least Apple continues the R&D to lower latency. Hopefully someday it will reach sub 50ms.
A normal old school ISM band headphone with transmitter base is better for TV but the dongles travel better.
However there are some people who are more sensitive to this than others.
50ms would be two frames at 25fps, which is already quite much indeed. Anything beyond that is just a crime against anybody who worked hard to sync sound and image.
https://www.aptx.com/product-listing?product_category=7&aptx...
That being said, waiting multiple frames for video playback to start while audio buffers fill and transmit is a shitty experience - so it’s always good to reduce it.
1us = 300m
1ms = 300km
The weird thing is, low latency wireless audio transmission is quite common. Like those used for in-ear monitoring on stage, or wireless guitar cables, that just broadcast over rf frequencies. I don’t understand why no one sells headphones using technologies like this, even if it meant a dongle that needs to be plugged into your computer as well.
Interference would probably be an issue if a full train car of people were trying to use this or something, so I get why Bluetooth is a better, more standardized default. But I would love to have the option of an alternative. I would definitely buy low latency wireless headphones to use while playing music.
The new Qualcomm aptX adaptive standard supports lowish latency - ~80ms.
list of official supported devices: https://www.aptx.com/product-listing?aptx_type=336
It might also work in general , with android 10 devices, but this need verifying.
Maybe this would be ok?
And from what I've seen in the best case scenario a usb audio interface is going to have a roundtrip latency of 4-5ms (thunderbolt can be much better, there are some that claim 1 or 1.5 ms).
So IMO that means ideally wireless headphones need to stay < 3-5ms to be an unnoticeable replacement for wired ones.
More niche, but close to my heart, it also basically kills rhythm video games. Those can mostly compensate for display latency, but compensating for audio latency is more troublesome--particularly if the exact amount of latency isn't constant.
Top level players can stay in the +/-33ms window for thousands of notes without making a single mistake, and "full marvelous combos" where you stay in the +/-16ms window for an entire song are not unheard of.
That's the kind of timing we are talking about.
And it indeed comes with a USB "dongle"/base-station, with a cable and about the size of a watch, so not really usable on a train etc. (I use wired headphones when working away from my desk).
Also the custom dongle has an 3.5mm output plug for speakers, which will automatically turn off when you switch on your headset.
If only Steelseries would make noise-cancelling headphones...
But on the minus side, I have a chirp in my headset (obviously some interference from the motherboard) when connecting with a wire that isn’t there over Bluetooth.
Sometimes wires fail too.
Also, placement of router is very important. Most people have their wifi in the basement, where their cable/phone line comes in, spending some time, and running a physical wire somewhere to the center of the living space, setting up router on a shelf or a table will go a long way in propagation. I have mine setup in the center of my bungalow, and I have 5Ghz WiFI reaching from my driveway to the backyard, no issues, and never any hickups.
Also, if you pick a high end router (Like ASUS 86U with merlin) -> you get some proper Wifi diagnostic tools built in, like number of packet retransmits, bad FCS, etc, which will help you diagnose your issues.
Multiple people on the same band is not as big of an issue as many claim it is. 5Ghz (no B/G legacy frames), and 80MHz bandwidth ensures that most traffic is very short in actual airtime. Not perfect, but, it is orders of magnitude better than 2.4Ghz, despite there being really only 2 80MHz channels available. There is also, channel 165, which is 20Mhz only, but rarely occupied.
Just so long as you don't mind giving Trend Micro access to all your information.
ASUS-merlin has DNS-over-TLS support, which, combined with NextDNS, will help you block trendmicro off if you really dont trust it.
With the Dream Machine built-in AP I get 400-500mbps down, compared to the xFi which got nearly full gigabit speeds. This is with direct line of sight to the access point, maybe 8 feet away.
At a previous house, I was equally impressed with the WiFi speed and propagation with the stock AT&T router (a different manufacturer), which performed at nearly the theoretical max.
Perhaps ISPs are learning to provide higher end equipment? Of course, gigabit fiber already necessitates better than average equipment, lest you expect complaints from customers.
I tried things like "roaming assistant", to forcibly disconnect clients below a certain signal strength, but that interrupted ongoing WiFi phone calls and such.
It's possible that 802.11k and r help, but at the time I investigated, many clients didn't handle that properly.
Instead, I mounted one access point on the ceiling in the middle of my apartment, and WiFi is much better.
One solution that I hope more monitor manufacturers would follow is the recent Dell “hub” monitors with built-in Ethernet (RJ-45), USB-C, downstream power, USB-A, etc.
https://www.dell.com/lt/business/p/dell-u2421he-monitor/pd
Only one cable to connect.
With MiniDP and MagSafe it was nice but clunky; with USB-C and USB PD it’s great. I know some people miss the old clicky docks, but I agree with you that the monitor + single cable is a really good solution.
Personally I prefer modular components that I can swap out and upgrade separately, but I can see the appeal.
A good monitor can last through generations of computer hardware, it doesn't make sense to combine directly with other components that have much shorter lifespans.
> HDBaseT, promoted and advanced by the HDBaseT Alliance, is a consumer electronic (CE) and commercial connectivity standard for transmission of uncompressed high-definition video (HD), audio, power, home networking, Ethernet, USB, and some control signals, over a common category cable (Cat5e or above) using the same 8P8C modular connectors used by Ethernet.
Also, the 8P8C connector is just godawful. I mean, it's fine for the first 3 days until the clip breaks off.
Hasn't this been largely fixed by connectors that have a cover over the exposed clip?
You could take that even further by adding in a custom SPICE-like display protocol and only send rectangular regions of changed pixels and translation commands to shift a region of pixels around (scrolling, moving a window, etc). Given it's all virtualized instead of traditional ip phones you could go with dumb USB desk phones and route that USB device to a single PBX and build something akin to an old school PBX where the phones are more or less just dumb terminals. Rather than dealing with the headaches of setting up BLFs, dial plans on the phone vs. PBX, call forwarding and DND on PBX and phones, VM access, Hotdesking setups, etc it's all just a bunch of specialized HIDs hooked up to a VM. Need HA? Move the USB devices on failover to a separate VM.
It'd have all the benefits of thin clients with significantly less drawbacks. Need dual monitors? No need to replace your bargain basement thin client with one that supports dual monitors, just pull up another monitor, hookup to the same seat on the servers and done. You could sell a deluxe version with dual inputs so that each display is connected to two independent switches so if one bites the dust it doesn't take down 48 employees at a time.
I currently use a Dell WD15 with my Dell laptop and I love it. Only single cable to plug in which drives my wired lan, 2 screens, power, mouse and keyboard.
This monitor with it essentially built in looks great, would remove all the following from my desk: - the dock - the power brick for the dock - One of the DP cables - one of the screen USB cables
The only bad thing is that because the LG is USB-C and not TB3, I only get USB 2.0 speeds out of it. I have a pair of USB-C to USB-A adapters that let me connect ethernet and my phone or other device to charge.
An E-GPU enclosure, which is also the power supply, has an ethernet port, and provides some USB ports for any devices you always leave at the desk.
You connect it to the laptop with a single thunderbolt power-delivery type-c cable.
The monitor(s) are connected to the enclosure with type-c displayport with power delivery.
Thus you have only a max of two cables connected to the wall: power cable for E-GPU dock and ethernet. This is fairly similar to that monitor concept except that the monitors docking station is broken out as a separate component.
It doesn't help that many people are on laptops, and the war on ports (in general, and ethernet ports in particular) has made wired options exceptionally inconvenient. Not only you have to go out of your way to buy extra hubs and adapters that are not included with the laptop, you then have to carry a bag full of dongles everywhere.
Apple: okay here is a laptop that has standard USB-C ports.
Geeks: we have to use dongles to support the standard.
USB C made my life easier. Now I only have to plug one cable into my laptop from my monitor and have everything(wired network, external display, speaker, webcam, microphone, keyboard and mouse).
I don't see a reason to carry a dock with me. A lot of people carrying a Micro USB A to USB A cable and a dock instead buying a Micro USB A to USB C cable which makes no sense
As far as I can tell, phones are the #1 thing people are plugging in and out these days.
It'd be nice for me too. I wouldn't have to keep an entire drawer full of various cables...
What you described can be caused by lint inside your USB-C port. I had this problem only with my phone. Try to get it out with a toothpick.
> Wifi (and bluetooth, etc.) sucker you in by making it seem like they “just work.” But if you investigate, you’ll often find that the wireless link is operating in a degraded state that performs much worse than a wired equivalent.
Wireless technologies are founded on exchanging the convenience of wirelessness for reduced performance and reliability. There's no "gotcha." That's the whole idea. Maybe that trade isn't for you, but it's not a secret. If you take any course on physical networks, they go over the advantages of not sharing the medium.
As for the hellishly complicated tech stack that is bluetooth...sure. I don't think it's because bluetooth is wireless. We've had regular articles here on the total mess that is UBC-C[1]. Wired standards are not free from complex protocols and error-filled implementations. All things being equal I imagine that wireless protocols will tend to be worse - but all things are frequently not equal.
There are no free lunches and wireless technology trades performance for convenience. I myself have some wired devices and some wireless devices and am quite happy with the result.
Edit: This feels like saying "Phones sucker into making you think they're a computer. But if you investigate, you'll often find that they have less processing power than many other computers!"
[1] From 15 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435805
Sure, but once you figure it out for the set of devices you are using, that's it! It just works until it breaks for good. Wireless stuff... not so much. One day it works, the next it doesn't.
...or until you move furniture around and then need a connection over here instead of over there.
Strange. I have closely inspected the box my wifi router came in, and I so far have failed to find "This is worse than wired ethernet" printed anywhere on it.
Perhaps you could show me a single wifi AP, anywhere, where the ad copy says anything even remotely close to that.
But, for example, the Netgear Nighthawk[1] page spends a lot of ink advertising that it offers 1300+600 mb networking (whatever that means) and also notes that it offers 5 1000mb ethernet ports. Even without an understanding of the details of a common medium, 5000mb wired capacity is greater than 1900mb wireless.
[1]https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/wifi-router...
Understanding that ethernet is entirely different from wifi requires... domain expertise! The exact thing a Best Buy customer won't have.
>5000mb wired capacity
A suspicious man might note that switching capacity isn't stated on that page, is not mentioned at all in the manual, and is the exact thing a manufacturer would be tempted to cut corners on, since vanishingly few customers will attempt multiple simultaneous network transfers in a home LAN. A normal consumer would never notice a switch capacity higher than 1 gigabit.
I mean, yes, if you think the OP is addressing the article to people who have taken courses on networking, then maybe the article isn't saying anything interesting.
If you read it as trying to make people who don't know this more aware of the tradeoff they're making, it makes a lot of sense.
My guess is that very few people understand how much better wired is over wireless, or in which situations (I know that I don't always think of it, and I have lots of experience in networking).
The trick is to treat it as a cellular system, and use the same methodology used to build cellular networks:
(1) Use only 5GHz for Wi-Fi. Turn off 2.4GHz WiFi - it's an overloaded, noisy spectrum band.
(2) One router per room, alternating channels between rooms.
(3) Use MU-MIMO (802.11ac gen2) or 802.11ax. The efficient MTU for Wi-Fi is much much larger than the MTU used for real time communication. MU-MIMO lets you send multiple small packets destined for multiple users inside one big wifi frame.
(4) Don't use mesh devices. They multiply the "airtime" of each packet by x2-x4 depending on number of hops and number of packet retries.
(5) Leave 2.4GHz for Bluetooth, and "junk" ISM devices (microwave oven, very-low bandwidth devices, etc).
People push wireless to the breaking point, then complain it's broken...
5GHz propagation across walls is much worse than 2.4GHz propagation, therefore only nearby neighbors may interfere with your access point, and on 5GHz there are enough non-overlapping channels to choose an alternate channel avoiding this interference completely.
Much more common is 80MHz channel, and even then, there is a distinction between the "main" 40MHz and the "secondary" 40MHz sub-channel. If you monitor the packets over the air, you'll notice that the secondary channel is much less occupied - all mobile devices switch to 40MHz to save considerable power, unless downloading a big file.
In the US, there are 6 available 80MHz channels, which is more than needed (think 4-color graph coloring).
I agree it should be much better than 2.4 GHz -- only 2 of my neighbors are stronger than -70 dBm -- but more channels would be nice.
(I guess 6 GHz could help, but then I'll have to upgrade all my clients, too.)
That isn't realistic for most people, though.
This is where the mesh units might come in handy - they are managed and configured in a single place, and can work together nicely - but of course you have to set them up with wire backhaul instead of in the "mesh mode".
I understand your rationale, and I also like the convenience of wifi when it works. That being said, if you can wire "that thing" (whatever it is), just do it. One afternoon of wiring and it will work great for the rest of time. The trade-off is definitely worth it in my experience.
Even recent low-end phones sometimes have just 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Even if all you devices support 5 GHz, running 5GHz-only wi-Fi may cause problems to your guests.
This is an extremely bad idea in some countries, or if you’re not careful which channel you select. In nearly all countries some of the 5ghz channels are shared with RADAR and require DFS. In some countries (eg Germany) all of the channels do.
The idea behind DFS is to detect radar pulses and then shut down the network for a period of time, this can be triggered by radar or interference.
My rules of thumb for DFS:
(1) If you can use a DFS channel - use it. it's usually less congested than the regular channels
(2) If you're unlucky and DFS is triggered once per month or more, try repositioning the AP or changing the AP model to one less sensitive to radar pulses
(3) If no luck - use one of the non-DFS channels. Every country has those. In Germany, that would be channels 32-48 or 149+
Note that DFS (5.4GHz) is for weather radar. In some countries it's operated only in winter season. You may want to use different channels in summer and in winter :)
Especially in the current work from home era, I've seen a resurgent enthusiasm for desktop computing. The simple rationale is: if you're going to be stuck at home and have a decent home work environment, why suffer the downsides of portable devices? Why not leverage the upsides that come from fixed-location workstations (large displays, faster higher-wattage CPUs and GPUs, wired full-size input devices, wired networking, and so on).
It's been amusing to see how many people have had their eyes re-opened to the advantages of high-end desktop computing thanks to environmental circumstances.
High wattage machines make rooms uncomfortably hot and expensive to cool.
So basically the only things on WiFi are laptops, phones, and devices which don't support Ethernet. For the most part I don't notice issues with my WiFi. I do use the Ubiquiti Unifi access points for providing WiFi in the house.
Haha, honestly people could probably use more radiation, i.e. sustained daily sunshine, to live healthier.
I guess if you built a ridiculously high powered WiFi antenna (which would be illegal) and stood next to it for a while, you would cook yourself. But BT/WiFi ain't gonna do shit to you.
Also higher melanin skin blocks?/absorbs? radiation.
I also prefer the security barrier wiring provides: My wireless network is a completely separate firewall zone than my wired one.
The lack of a cable saves a bunch of space and avoids the floppy cable. Probably irrelevant if you don’t game, but definitely quite convenient for FPSes.
I have to agree, specifically mice have been the least painful Bluetooth experience for me, with a Microsoft. Annoying part is that it changes MAC address when pairing, so regularly using it for more than one computer is a frustration but that's nothing compared to the constant interruptions I've had with keyboards and codec issues with headsets.
Like you, I have a "gaming" mouse (G700s), in my case I bought it for the high resolution. I used to have g9x, but it developed an unbearable whine. Battery life is downright atrocious, I basically have to recharge it everyday. It's also comically heavy.
I often have to move things around my desk, and having papers getting caught up in the wires is aggravating. Also, apart from gaming mice with very supple cables, I always found wired mice to be a pain because of the wire that's never quite in the right position and pulling and / or getting caught on things.
The same happens with keyboards, but to a lesser degree. I often use a trackball, which is like a keyboard in that it doesn't move around and I still prefer having those wireless.
I will never use a bluetooth headset, the technology is not there yet. Latency and battery usage of bluetooth audio devices are inconvenient and I don't understand people can bear with it.
1. Ditching notebooks for fast desktops
2. Replacing wireless connectivity (esp. networking) wherever possible.
* Macbook wifi -> wired Ethernet
* Apple Bluetooth trackpad -> wired mouse
* Apple Bluetooth keyboard -> wired
* Bluetooth / Logitech 2.4Ghz mouse -> wired
The one problem this hasn’t fixed is keyboard connection to the MacBook. I still have to unplug the USB cable from the (Anker) hub and plug it back in again whenever the MacBook has been asleep. It’s better than forcing a re-pairing of Apple’s own keyboards (yes I’ve had two) with their laptop every day or two though.
Also its dongle seemed to interfere with my wireless Apple keyboard. Not sure but it seemed to correlate a few times.
It's much better with its own dongle, yes, but ... I got sick of the occasional issues. No issues with a wired mouse.
Perhaps the next product I buy from them in an Apple Store I’ll pay for by wafting my card around the contactless terminal a little before walking out the store saying “if it didn’t go through, try turning off any nearby devices!”
It also drops out when I touch my head or my face.
I have tried reorienting the laptop to no avail. No matter where the laptop is (or, in fact, any components of the system, including the couch between 1m and 2.5m distance from the laptop) it always finds the same comfort spot to drop out completely.
If I move my neck about 15 degrees to an uncomfortable angle, the signal is perfect.
An anecdote, yes, but a relevant one.
The headphones have clear line-of-sight to the laptop in both the "off" (comfortable) position and the "on" (infinite set of uncomfortable) positions.
The absorption of the radio signals by my large capacitance, I would think, doesn't change much with position. Also, it turns off when I scratch the back of my head.
"Low quality. Related to the codec issue, many bluetooth devices will play high-quality audio when the microphone is turned off, but degrade to much lower-quality audio when it’s turned on. You can test this for yourself if you have a bluetooth headset: play music on it, then open your microphone settings to the page where it shows the mic input volume. You’ll probably hear the audio cut out for a second, then return at lower quality. (This happens even with devices you might expect to be high-end, like my Airpods Pro + 2018 Macbook Air.)"
I have need trying to find any, but have failed till now, and do not have unlimited budget to buy and try many options.
Perhaps using something like Apple proprietary headphones or headsets with non-BT radio receivers would work.
That doesn't exist
This works for me on two different bluetooth headsets, but I've never tried AirPods so YMMV.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles#Han...
[1] https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/duplex-high-quality-audi...
This is why the wireless ModMic [2] talks about Bluetooth codecs but actually requires a custom USB wireless receiver.
[2] https://antlionaudio.com/blogs/news/introducing-modmic-wirel...
If you're into listening to music, you may be interested in AutoEQ [1]. Those guys have done some measurements and provide info on how to equalize the sound. For this particular headset, it's somewhat less boomy. You can use PulseEffects [2] to control equalization.
[0] pa-modules-bt: https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt/wiki/Package...
[1] AutoEQ: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq
[2] PulseEffects: https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects
I have the latest Sennheiser Momentum Wireless and it disconnects itself many times from my Mac which is only less than 1 meter away...
I don't even really care about the degradation of sound quality now because the disconnection is so tormenting.
I was having an Okayish connection experience with Beats years ago, and I guess it's because it's been tested and may be optimized for Mac.
Rumor says Apple would release a headphone in the upcoming WWDC tomorrow. I hope I would eventually have a headphone with a stable connection...
I'm not inclined to buy another pair of Bluetooth headphones with the microphone quality currently available.
So, 2 routers in my sms house, hooked together wired. All my priority devices have new dual-band hardware and are on the 5ghz network. Old devices are relegated to the 2.4ghz network, which is quite spotty owing to that.
Unexpected things can do real damage too. I had an older PC that had its wifi dongle plugged into a USB 2 port and it would frequently get multi-second ping spikes. The same wifi dongle worked fine on a USB3 port. I ended up wiring that one in.
Personally I've abandoned all wifi hardware companies other than Asus - every other one has let me down at least once, if not repeatedly.
In every other respect, Asus seems to be incapable of making devices that rate higher than a B plus, but in the lowered expectations of the world of wifi hardware companies where "occasionally functional" seems to be considered good enough, Asus' spotty quality is a huge step up.
Doesn't need to be on your network, just in your vicinity like from a neighbor.
Switching to a Unifi router and picking an empty DFS channel also improved my wifi experience significantly since I live in a NYC high rise. For those that don't know, many routers allow you to use a set of 5GHz "DFS" channels that are normally reserved for aircraft radar. By regulation, any router broadcasting on a DFS channel must be able to detect radar interference and switch to a non DFS channel immediately for a period of 30 minutes or so. If you live in an area that aircraft regularly hit with radar this be very disruptive, but if not, these channels often perform better than the dedicated 5GHz channels since most routers don't use DFS channels by default.
I wonder if 5G is going to feel like Ethernet gigabit instantaneous levels of speed?
You'll just have to try, it depends a lot on your home wiring and can be interfered by so many things. But if it works it's definitely nicer and more stable than WiFi.
1. It works terribly if you use more than 2. There's just some bug in the L2 switching where it will get confused about the destination; broadcast packets get through, but some packets to specific hosts don't go through. Rebooting the adapter fixes it temporarily. I ended up moving one device to WiFi and as a pair it works reliably
2. The firmware it ships with is a bit limited, but they provided me with something more configurable when I contacted support about issue #1
Anything that converts long runs of unshielded cable into an incoherent broadband transmitting antenna should fail FCC certification, yet they're still on sale.
In most other cases, quality WiFi equipment performed better and was more stable.
Last year I moved to a new place and faced the same issue of wanting internet in a different room and tried the Devolos again. Same experience except worse speed. Again I had to fall back to WiFi, which at least gets me ~150Mbps here.
Powerline is much less faf than using wifi even more so for non networking types.
I also tried using a mesh wifi network, and was able to bounce a signal around the dead zone and get a WiFi signal with a higher bandwidth than the powerline ethernet, but I still found I got a lot of glitches in video calls, so went back to the powerline ethernet.
I've not noticed the problems other commenters here had with their adapters with the AV2000.
I initially tried a cheaper powerline ethernet, and it was worse than WiFi, so I'd recommend you buy the most expensive/best one that you can afford.
So I've settled on using rubber cable floor covers. They don't look very good, but they're perfectly practical: cheap, much reduced trip risk, no need to open up the walls or tape/nail anything to them to get everything arranged.
(Not sure how I'd feel about this on a permanent basis, though. Once it's back to just me, my laptop, my iPad, and my phone, the internet connection will be the bottleneck again, and I'll be switching back to nothing but wifi...)
The cabling runs through the ceiling and dropped down to port height via electrical conduit on the external side of the wall. It was expensive but I would have paid more considering the quality of life improvement.
I have Devolo Magic2 G.hn powerline adapters. In my rental UK apartment (1990 or so vintage), I can barely get 100 Mbps for the 10 meters or so from my office to the living room. The same units with mesh-wifi sync at around 300 Mbps in my parents' much larger 1980 vintage house in France. Perhaps the difference is due to the UK's crackpot ring electrical standard.
I wish someone would make laser free-space optics for in-home use (they are available for company campus networks).
WiFi 6E adds a full GHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz band and should dramatically improve congestion, but you will still need multiple access points with some form of wired backhaul to get reliable WiFi.
So yes there are adapters that are decent, but you need to aim for the fastest ones because real-world performance seems to be 1/10th of the advertised performance.
Every once in a while they lose connection (maybe once a month).
The speed is not great (~300Mbps) but I don't care because my inet connection is only 100Mbps. The latency is better than wifi, and really consistent (unlike wifi):
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
18 packets transmitted, 18 received, 0% packet loss, time 48ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.975/2.669/4.884/0.617 ms
(Incidentally, the "lightspeed" dongles Logitech uses do work at 2.4GHz, but with a proprietary protocol -- which I think someone has already gone to the trouble of documenting, since IIRC it uses only the frame sizes and types it really needs to.)
Headsets, mics, laptops, are all wired (you can get pretty decent USB-to-Ethernet adapters for cheap these days), and give me zero trouble, but I could never go back to wired keyboards and mice because of the freedom and flexibility you get (I'm trying to wean myself off the Apple keyboard/trackpad combo into a Logitech K380/M720 combo to be able to switch devices more easily).
Unless you're a gamer (and really need a wired mouse to shave off those milliseconds), there's really no contest in terms of input devices. Audio, that's another matter entirely (I only use Bluetooth on the go).
OTOH, I have an Airport Extreme base station (set to 5GHz) underneath my desk for those times when I do need wireless (like bringing in a laptop for checking things, or my iOS devices).
Here are some tips I collected along the way:
1. 2.4GHz sucks, use Bluetooth when possible. But Bluetooth sucks, too.
2. You want to have fewer Bluetooth devices when possible, reduce the number of simultaneous connections. For example, I only use my Bluetooth mouse for gaming, and trackpad for the rest, so I would disconnect mouse when I'm not playing video games.
3. You want to use some categories of Bluetooth devices first. For example, Bluetooth keyboards usually have great experiences so you may want to make your keyboard wireless first. Bluetooth mice and trackpads are Okayish, but not as great. Bluetooth headphones and speakers are usually bad. If you really want to use Bluetooth for Audio, sometimes devices from the same company may have better connections: Beats Studio seems to have a much better connection than Sennheiser and B&O on Mac.
After all, I still love the idea of wireless because it is nice on paper. It is mostly the de facto protocols and implementations that are terrible.
Huh? Bluetooth is 2.4GHz.
The lag made it unplayable. We plugged in some ethernet cables and it ran fine after that.
What does bother me is having to use a dongle with my Pixel 3; the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is thankfully better (and smaller!) than what Google shipped with the Pixel 2, which suffered from really annoying echo problems.
But the real most important point: I want to bet on the wireless future because I hate wires. I love seeing my table clean when I had a wireless Mac keyboard. And if Apple can make a keyboard that works reliably over BT for several months, then that should be our target...
Lately I keep running into these sort of weird, stupid problems in OS design, and it's making me want to write my own OS (which I won't do, because I lack the skill and knowledge).
I agree with much of the rest of the article too. I've always been annoyed that Apple doesn't sell a wired touch mouse. I love the touch mouse, I just don't love running out of battery while working. And I certainly don't like the way their more recent mice need to be charged with a wire inserted at the bottom! Who ever thought that was a good idea?!
In some situations, wireless can be very convenient, but when you're not walking around, wired is usually better in many ways.
This is not my experience. I’d estimate wifi to have been the problem only 20–40% of the time. I’ve found a poor ISP to be the problem much more commonly. And then the last few percent of cases is other miscellaneous network topology problems typically from failing wired hardware, buggy router or dying dumb switch.
(I’m excluding “too far away from the router” from my reckoning, because in such cases that’s been known to be the problem, and it feels unfair to criticise wifi for that unless you’re going to criticise ethernet cables for not being where you want them. Notwithstanding this exclusion, I have found that being near the edge of a wireless network’s reach is great at messing with both the router and computers; where I am at present, if I go a few metres further away from the router, my Surface Book’s wifi connectivity stands a decent chance of kinda breaking after a while, so that it starts losing 5–30% of packets and getting average round-trip times to the router of 150ms—which together make it very close to completely unusable—until I next restart the computer (restarting the wifi adapter isn’t enough). I haven’t determined who’s at fault, the router, the adapter, or Windows 10.)
I'm constantly having problems with my mac laptops and after many hours (10+) of internet searching I still have no idea why the wifi doesn't always work reliably. Some days or weeks (months?) it is great. Other days every hour it is disconnecting. Sometimes resetting the router helps, sometimes it doesn't. The whole situation is extremely frustrating.
Some issues: Why am I getting a DNS issue when my wired desktop never has a wireless issue?
Sometime I swear that the laptops becomes much less reliable at the opposite end of my house as my router but the signal strength is generally still excellent (4 bars).
Anyway, I'm not asking to have my particular issues solved (although that would be much appreciated!!!!). The real issue just seems to be that debugging these issues is extremely difficult and not based on principles but just random things that people can try (e.g., delete your plist files).
Not necessarily. I just bought a Triband wifi6/ax router for like 150 quid.
5GHz band A -->> Main computer
5Ghz band B -->> iPhones & tablets & laptop
2.4ghz band -->> Everything else that is potentially noisy (ahem sketchy IoTs)
I like wireless but I hope there's a better interface than Bluetooth at some point.
On my laptop (which is 9 years newer and has similar benchmark results) I use a wireless mouse which has 125 polls/sec and latency of 20 ms.
Yes, one can tell the difference. It is possible to buy low-latency wireless mice. Next time, I will.
Bluetooth is a trash fire. I was hoping wireless USB would take off, but that's dead now.
On 60Hz my wired and wireless mouse feel exactly the same.
On 240Hz, yeah, there is a lot of difference.
Now I have a Logitech G900 with a Logitech PowerPlay. So its always charged. Obviously, it has less buttons/keybinds than a Naga.
On Macs, I like the Apple Magic Touchpad. It can do wired and wireless, and the battery works for ages.
Any of these would also work with a magnetic cable. You'd plug it only when you'd have to charge it.
The important thing to remember is that wifi always performs as the worst device on your network. A dead-zone device hurts every device on your network. A G-only device hurts every device on your network.
So, 2 routers in my sms house, hooked together wired. All my priority devices have new dual-band hardware and are on the 5ghz network. Old devices are relegated to the 2.4ghz network, which is quite spotty owing to that.
Unexpected things can do real damage too. I had an older PC that had its wifi dongle plugged into a USB 2 port and it would frequently get multi-second ping spikes. The same wifi dongle worked fine on a USB3 port. I ended up wiring that one in.
Personally I've abandoned all wifi hardware companies other than Asus - every other one has let me down at least once, if not repeatedly.
In every other respect, Asus seems to be incapable of making devices that rate higher than a B plus, but in the lowered expectations of the world of wifi hardware companies where "occasionally functional" seems to be considered good enough, Asus' spotty quality is a huge step up.
Wifi on the other hand I find pretty stable. As long as you're on 5ghz. Haven't gotten the new ax/wifi6 to work yet though despite buying relevant tech
I've used thunderbolt cables to connect laptops together for fast data transfer. I think in order to get decent performance I had to get disable the software ethernet bridge.
Might have something to do with the fact that 8P8C is as thick as the entire laptop.
Looks really bad for longetivity.
Just as a data point, it's not expensive to add 10GbE (or higher) to a desktop or server/NAS if you're ok with getting 2nd hand gear from Ebay.
Gear from Mellanox (specifically) is pretty robust (eg rarely bad), and the ConnectX-3 and above series are dirt cheap. eg:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/MCX353A-FCBS-MELLANOX-CONNECTX-3-40...
Note, I don't know that seller at all. It was just one of the first items in the Ebay search results. :)
This device looks to be target for network engineers, who can use it for testing and benchmarking infrastructure, or for installations that will most likely be in or next to racks rather than on desktops.
You could just pop a transceiver module that will convert the port to RJ45. The price of those is peanuts compared to the 2k list price of this device, and the reverse isn't viable.
I have had a very good experience with 802.11ac for all applications, and Bluetooth 5.0 (iphone 11 pro), and Bluetooth 4.2 with apple keyboard and mouse. Wireless headset to a macbook is pretty bad, pretty awesome to the iphone. I do not have dongles.
Knowledge of interference and the wireless devices you use is important.
I spend a non-negligible amount of time when choosing a wireless router, and will immediate benchmark it. The routers from the ISPs are still pretty bad in comparison to the ones you can buy for $70 - $120.
If I am using a desktop I will also benchmark the dongle.
You also have to acknowledge proximity to power cords and transformers, which will degrade your experience.
It always requires a holistic solution to optimize and I don't know if the writer's problems can be fixed. Even two years ago I kept one or two devices on Ethernet if they were close to the router. But I have since removed them.
Bluetooth is definitely a disaster though. Apple has made great strides with their AirPods and the (It Just Works)™ philosophy behind their products, but even the AirPods aren't perfect. Once every month or so, my AirPods just refuse to connect for whatever reason and I have to restart the device outputting sound to get the connection working again.
But in most cases, for most people, wires suck even more.
Seriously. I can't walk around my apartment to tidy it up while on an audio call on my computer if I'm wired. When I walked around the city with wired headphones to my phone, the wires would constantly snag or something or other. Wires are constantly getting tangled, or I have to spend time carefully rolling and clipping them and unclipping them and unrolling.
Wires suuuck. They suck baaad.
If I'm doing something professional with audio or AV where quality/latency are paramount, then sure I'll use wires and dongles as necessary. They're a "pro" thing.
But for everyday use? Wireless is still generally good enough, and the pros waaay outweight the cons. Which is why the world has been switching en masse.
I was a Bluetooth headphone holdout, but getting a set completely changed my working life. With wired headphones I'd forget they were in and pull half the stuff off my desk when I got up. The wires frequently broke. The absolute convenience of a pair of good Bluetooth headphones is totally worth the latency. It's not even that bad on my plantronics over ear headphones - certainly usable for calls and TV. They've been an absolute life saver for video calls when there's background noise.
In the same timeframe my girlfriend went through roundabout 400 Euros of cheapass (or just cheaply manufactured but overpriced) headphones and earplugs, both wired or bluetooth. Some lost, many broken etc.
And I nearly used my headphones everyday, in the subway, when jogging, as a DJ on the stage, for sound recording on film sets standing outside in winter during rain. I stepped on them more often than I am comfortable with.
Wired headphones aren't bad — shitty wired headphones are.
I'm not wiring up my house for ethernet any time soon, I found a 5g band that performs well and can call it good.
But I've all but given up on wireless headphones. If I had a dollar for every time my airpods died or disconnected and refused to reconnect during a video call, I'd have enough dollars to buy new airpods now that their batteries are nearly shot. There's still a time and a place for them, but it mostly involves walking the dog.
For example, my AirPods Pro worked flawlessly, except for about one month where they'd have a hard time switching between devices. But then it fixed itself.
Separately, AirDrop had always worked flawlessly between my Mac and iPhone and iPad, for years. Except two weeks ago it stopped working entirely between any of them. Tried rebooting everything, no help. Still won't work.
I've never gotten Sidecar to work, even though I meet all the requirements. On the other hand, my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse have always worked flawlessly every day I've ever used them.
It's all so random and luck of the draw... and you can never tell if the problem is because of Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth, or device software settings, or device hardware configuration, or settings on your Apple ID, or what.
Even though it's been fixed since 2017 I can confirm that there's still lots of network-using software out there that isn't using the most recent Qt library. Installing any of it will destroy your ability to have lag-free video chats or do any other real-time streaming.
I've always been in the "wires wherever possible" camp and it's things like this that are keeping me there. Hopefully headphone jacks don't go totally extinct anytime soon...
[0] https://cmetcalfe.ca/blog/diagnosing-periodic-high-ping-time...
Timothy Schoechle of the National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy in Washington, DC recently wrote a paper called "Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks" on this subject. It's available as a PDF download from https://gettingsmarteraboutthesmartgrid.org/pdf/Wires.pdf
This reminded me to this article I read a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unif...
I could get a faster Speedtest transfer from 4G on my iPhone 11 then standing next to my WiFi 6 router. And my WiFi 5Ghz actually has more Spectrum ( but slightly more noisy as I live in apartment ). And in terms of reliability 4G works better than even the best "Enterprise" WiFi network. And these Enterprise WiFI network gear ( Ruckus , Aruba etc ) are already zillions times better than consumer grade WiFi.
You then have ISP wanting to sell you Wireless Router combined with their ONT / Modem. If they actually provide something better then I would be happier. But they dont. The only good thing is that you now only have to restart one devices rather than two to test or "reset" your network. I think I recently learned in Germany the law mandate consumer to have the right to buy their own ONT / Modem. So you dont have the crap that most ISP give you due to Cost reason.
There is no reason why we cant have standalone 4G / 5G in the Unlicensed Spectrum. Qualcomm actually made a case with MultiFire [1], unfortunately due to politics and interest it may never actually take off.
WiFi 6 / 802.11ax was suppose to incorporate lots of learning from 4G/LTE/3GPP Rel into it. But as is typical of design by committees and vendor's interest we now have WiFI 6 that doesn't support most of the original promised features. That is why you start seeing marketing push as WiFi 6+, which is different to WiFi 6E. If all these mess sounds familiar, yes it was called USB.
That is one reason why I really like Apple's MiFi programme and standards. Stop giving options and choices to vendors. Stop giving them margins of error in the name of cost reduction. If you are going to make 100 Million unit a year, stop trying to cut the cost down by pennies, up the BOM by a dollar. Make something better. I will paid. Lots of people will paid. And one billion of iPhone user will paid.
I want quality, not crap.
( Ok I have gone off topic )
No, in most cases where you see dongles (keyboards, mice, gamepads) it’s because the dongle is not speaking Bluetooth to the device, but rather a “raw” pre-paired fixed-frequency RF wire protocol. Devices connected by such dongles (usually marketed as just being “wireless” rather than being “Bluetooth” devices) are basically electrically connected to your computer—just with an RF-modulated bridge stage for the electrical signal path. There’s no “wireless controller” or “modem” in these peripherals; they’re just letting the signal path flow out the antenna.
The disadvantage of these (besides the inconveniences of a dongle) is that these “raw” RF protocols provide no consideration for interference with one-another, besides maybe being e-fused to each operate on a different randomized sub-channel of the commercial-use 2.4GHz band. This means that you can’t have very many of these devices operating in the same “shared medium” (e.g. the same open office); and in fact, a channel collision for these devices won’t just interfere with one-another; they’ll often—lacking any device-ID header or per-device encryption key—just plain interoperate with one-another, with your “wireless” keyboard dongle picking up the typing of some coworker’s “wireless” keyboard! (They’re a lot like RF TV remotes in this regard.)
Note that devices that market themselves as Bluetooth but also come with a dongle are either 1. lying, and don’t actually use Bluetooth; or 2. have Bluetooth and “wireless” as separate modes. There are good reasons to offer both as separate modes:
• Compatibility. “Wireless” devices just look like USB devices, so you can use them to e.g. config your BIOS; or talk to any machine that can speak USB1.0, e.g. some old Win98 beige box. And plugging the dongle into a KVM is just like plugging a USB-connected device into a KVM; you can switch your keyboard’s “focus” between hosts using the KVM, without the host itself needing to re-pair with the peripheral. Switching Bluetooth peripherals around by having the Bluetooth controller on the KVM is much more fraught process.
• Battery life. Bluetooth, at least before BTLE, burned energy to a far greater extent than the “wireless” protocols—mainly because the “wireless” protocols aren’t spending any energy on background activities like identity announcement for re-pairing, or frequency-hopping for better SNR. (This is why you see “wireless” peripherals that last months on AAAs, but all Bluetooth devices shipping with Lithium cells: the Bluetooth peripherals need charging frequently-enough that the number of AAAs they consume would be untenable.)
• Latency. No e-sport player would ever use a Bluetooth peripheral, since the Bluetooth input path often adds one or more in-game frames of latency (relative to the USB input path), before the input hits the game’s physics engine. “Wireless” peripherals have no such problem.
Obviously the radios wouldn't interfere with each other if we could prevent the radio waves from leaking into other apartments. If only we had something that could be added to the router that would guide the radio waves directly to the wireless devices instead of indiscriminately radiating in every direction. Some sort of wave guild.
/lol
but yeah, I don't see myself using wireless headphones which would not be perfectly in sync with video and I am using wifi only because installing cable through whole apartment would be too troublesome and not sure if network over powerline would be faster and more reliable than wifi
Furthermore I generally don't have batteries on hand. (Right now the complete list of things I own that use batteries is the TV remote and the thermostat) So when I get the low battery warning I need to go and buy some.
On the other hand I completely get the case for Bluetooth headphones. I love being able to run to the kitchen without losing my music or still being able to hear someone else speaking. Also when using them with a phone the cable running down to my pocket does actually get in the way. Synchronization shouldn't be an issue because any not-terrible Bluetooth speakers will report their delay to the computer so that everything remains syncronized. I do have one set of cheep earbuds that don't report it to my phone correctly but this is rare (and I probably should have sent them back).
Even when using ethernet, the PC connects through an Orbi mesh router, two hops away from the base station. A round trip to local IP addresses is between 9-10ms. Switching to wi-fi adds 2-3ms to that.
Is windows affected by this? Because I've never noticed it have an impact on video calls.
When a WiFi device does a 'scan' (which it needs to do to know if there might be a better AP to connect to, amongst other things), it has to retune the radio to another frequency. That means it can't listen on the original frequency, and packets get lost. Depending on the network design, they might be retransmitted from the access point (layer 2 retransmit, a few milliseconds), or by TCP after a timeout (1 network round trip, hundreds of milliseconds often).
A third option is your laptop tells the AP that it is going into a power saving mode and won't be listening. Packets are then queued for it while it retunes and does a scan.
Best would be to have multiple radios, one whose only job is scanning. Then there would be no latency impact at all.
If you're getting lag and dropouts with a wired connection, the problem is most likely bufferbloat.
However, I find that I prefer everything else wireless.
I wish there were more solutions for mechanical wireless keyboards, in fact.
It’s not just video calls. My backup is done to a Synology NAS, upstairs. That’s all wired.
My VPN was acting up and my video calls as well.
High end access points use a time slicing algorithm (tdma-ish) and 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) mandates something along those lines. So Wi-Fi will eventually improve a little.
But for all the household all-in-one modem-router-switch-accesspoint boxes, one device with a poor connection can hog most of the access point's time, doing re-transmits of corrupted data.
If you're video calling over wi-fi, turn off every other device that uses the wi-fi.
If you still have problems after switching to wired, it's almost certainly bufferbloat. (Avery Penwarr has a nice writeup about this, getting usable video calling with his parent's low-end ADSL connection.)
You will be surprised to learn not every WiFi 6 has support of OFDMA turned on.
Any decent electrician is France knows how to install ethernet, and they can get install this kind of equipment, equivalent of a distribution cabinet, instead of the regular "phone line" box:
https://www.tableau-de-communication.fr/coffret-hager/13-cof...
https://www.tableau-de-communication.fr/coffret-hager/14-cof...
those are cables and sockets, standardized to the point of beeing a commodity. no magic involved at all.
Problem now is that most electricians think that because "it is just low voltage wiring" you do not need to worry about interference and can just run it anywhere.
The blank stare was that I asked for conduit and pull-string everywhere, and they weren't willing to do that. Or to do any variants beyond the standard 2 cables to each place, so my office has 4 ethernet ports (adding another "2 cable jack" was something that they could do) and needs its own switching.
Some would say you're harming your wife's understanding of reality, but that's a private matter for you and her.
However, by sharing it on the Internet, you are potentially spreading this bullshit, and you must expect reasonable voices to counter your claim.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323998588_Wi-Fi_is_...
Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305691437_Electroma...
Electromagnetic Fields Act Similarly in Plants as in Animals: Probable Activation of Calcium Channels via Their Voltage Sensor
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283017154_How_to_Ap...
How to Approach the Challenge of Minimizing Non-Thermal Health Effects of Microwave Radiation from Electrical Devices
Pall's methodology and understanding of EM has been critized broadly and repeatedly. Here's an "official" rebuttal to the paper you cite: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328436881_Response_...
The rest of the papers you cite are by the same highly controversial biochemist.
At any rate, the discussion at hand is whether "EMF sensitivity" is a real condition. It patently is not. Anyone with such a condition would easily be able to collect the large monetary rewards that have been made available, and simultaneously immediately lift the social stigma they must feel. The fact that they do not speaks volumes.
However, I guess people usually turn to unproven treatments once medicine failed several times to treat their symptoms, so they likely already went to a regular doctor several times beforehand, ruling out any easily discoverable disease.
That's not scientific.
That's not a double-blind experiment. Your may be more attentive to her mentions when you've secretely switched on the wifi. You may behaving differently and she may be picking up clues from your behavior. etc.
If you really want to be scientific, you need to do at least n=100 experiments to detect a 10% bias at 95% confidence level. (Z=2 E=0.1) [0]
If you detect such bias, your wife may be able to earn $1M prize for her supernatural abilities. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...
This snark seems unnecessary, given that magnetoception by bats and birds is unlikely to win said prize.
If she can reliably demonstrate sensitivity to -60dBm RF signals (nanoWatts - the typical received signal strength of a Wi-Fi signal), that's the equivalent of having discovered a new human sense on top of the 5 known senses.
This discovery, or the explanation of mechanism underlying this sense, is worthy of a Nobel prize.