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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

The thing which proved life changing for me was ditching WiFi for Ethernet in the home office. I wasn't able to lay cables but I did buy an ethernet over power adapter (you can also get them for coaxial). Speed took a hit but I didn't have the same issues I previously had with packet loss, even after manual tweaks to avoid interference with neighbours.

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I think this ship has sailed, especially with people adding an extra dose of latency in the form of Bluetooth headsets.

you are stationary, there is no need for wireless as tfa emphasises

Worst case extra latency added by a Bluetooth headset is less of an issue, you are close and congestion is less of a problem.

Home WiFi generally has really bad worst case latency and variability (jitter), removing it from the path is one of the best things you can do to improve realtime communication performance.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi use the same frequency bands. Bluetooth radios are much weaker than wifi radios. Bluetooth devices frequently give up much faster than wifi devices. Bluetooth devices are also much more latency sensitive than wifi.

When it's a fight between Bluetooth and wifi, Bluetooth almost always loses -- big time.

This is oversimplifying things. Bluetooth devices are typically much closer than WiFi devices, and need less bandwidth. The protocol has less overhead (on modern BT devices). It's true that implementation quality of BT devices is typically severely lacking, but with a good quality implementation (e.g. Apple AirPods with a Mac or iOS device), the WiFi is far more likely to be the weak link in a home videoconferencing setup.

I frequently hear this sentiment, yet in my country I struggle to find evidence of more than a few ms of wifi vs cabled connections. Whereabout do you live that this is such a huge issue? Is it a large, dense metropolis like Beijing or Singapore?

yes, it's mosty density.

once you have to scroll in the ap-list there is a very good chance that you are contested on air-time because some neighbour is active on any given channel. [0]

add to that interference from non-wifi or other unclean rf-equipment like babymonitors, wireless doorbells or bluetooth ... 2.4ghz is quite crowded, 5ghz is crippled by a wall...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem

I'm in the UK and live in a student area and it's a huge issue. There are some times of day where the Wifi speeds drop massively (I assume interference and madly swapping channels) - but wired stays constant.

Usually it's not the average latency but the random spikes that kill your responsiveness. My wifi ping is usually within a couple ms of wired ping, but packet loss / latency spikes are a daily occurence

https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-call...

I have read articles like this. I comment specifically on this subject because I used to believe them without testing them myself. When I did start testing it myself I quickly discovered these rules just do not hold true where I am (Europe), so I am wondering where these claims come from.

It looks like no one has mentioned the #1 cause of jitter (not latency per se which is an average value), which is WiFi scans.

Due to bad engineering, a WiFi chip can either be scanning or transmitting, and background location tasks can request a WiFi scan at any time. Depending on your OS and what else you run, this can cause stutters in the 250ms-1second range.

What I'm hearing is we need two WiFi chips: One for transmitting and one entirely for scanning. /s

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