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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I enjoyed the justification for the glorious amounts of over-engineering involved at nearly every step.

I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals (so not pro gamers, not folks running some automated trading from their home or whatever corner case there is) that can't be covered by latest wifi. Even with all the interference everybody talks about yet I struggle to see it happening for us. And there is always next version just behind the corner, ie v7 looks very nice on paper.

I go the opposite direction, will eventually rip out/cover all the network cable outlets previous owner put in in various rooms.

> I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals (so not pro gamers, not folks running some automated trading from their home or whatever corner case there is) that can't be covered by latest wifi.

Wired 10G connections are vastly superior for file transfer. It's not even close.

Even 1G wired connections feel substantially snappier for remote desktop use than a high-speed WiFi connection 10ft away, in my experience.

But for browsing the internet and gaming? WiFi is great.

WiFi is terrible for any game that is latency sensitive

Any real-time game can break badly over WiFi. No one wants packet loss because the microwave is on.

We have 2.5 gig Ethernet, and even 5 gig - that’s probably close enough

Depends what you're accessing. A top of the line SSD can easily reach speeds of 5 GB/s in the real world, for which you'd need 50GbE for full saturation.

I had bad latency issues on WiFi with wireless. It made video calls bad. The problem went away completely with a MoCA wired connection.

The fact that the computer in question is an ancient PC running Windows 10 on some old WiFi standard surely does not help. Probably a new computer would fare better on WiFi.

But going wired allowed me to keep using ancient hardware that is practically free. A better PC would have cost hundreds of dollars more.

WiFi is fundamentally shared media. If you're in a relatively populated area and competing with a ton of neighbors all streaming 4k and playing CoD, there comes a point where no amount of new computer will make it faster.

I've been surprised by how many random devices experience terrible wifi interference. I just bought a new Mac Mini that experiences a ton of interference, sometimes going offline completely. I can browse the web fine but I can't screen share on Zoom or even speak in Discord without noticeable lag multiple times a minute. It's not in some Faraday cage or anything, it's just sitting on my desk not 3 feet from my Ubiquiti access point. But I do have a USB dongle plugged into it which I have heard can cause a lot of interference. My phone, even when sitting on top of the Mac, gets a solid 800 mbits down. It's silly to need an ethernet cable for 3 feet of distance from my switch but here we are.

On my 2017 macbook pro, the wifi drops completely when I plug in a usb3 external hard disk. The connection is still up but data doesn’t get through. And because the connection remains I have to manually switch to 5.5GHz

Accessing a NAS at decent speeds. Even for a single 7.2k rpm drive that's rated at 120 MB/s, a gigabit link speed is a bottleneck (120 MB/s = 960 Mbit, add protocol overhead and you're over 1 Gigabit). If you have any kind of array (zfs, raid ...) of drives you need more speed again. If you have an SSD cache (an option even in Consumer NAS now) not having a multi-Gbit/s link is essentially a waste.

Of course you can send 10GbE over copper, but the needed amplification is a major heat source. So if you're running cables anyway you might as well run fiber and be prepared for 100GbE.

Here is a use case that almost any office worker encounters, and measurements to show that a wired connection is better : https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-call...

Got any measurements to the contrary?

In places where homes are built from brick, stone or concrete it can be good to have a wired connection.

I don't see much benefit to fibre though. Copper cables and connectors are more durable.

If you already have cables, isn't it best to keep them? Connecting the TV to a network socket beats fiddling with the WiFi.

Mainstream copper connections can't really go above 10Gbps. Also 10GBASE-T runs hot. If you think you will ever need more speed then just running some fibre makes sense - just a transceiver upgrade required in the future for higher speeds.

I remember when it was "mainstream copper connections can't really go above 100Mbps" and we ran fiber. Not that there isn't some physical limit to how much data you can reliably push down 4 pairs of copper (that sort of physics isn't my bag), I just wouldn't bet against running 100G over Cat13++ or whatever standard emerges down the road.

But, yeah, fiber is always gonna be more 'future proof' and damn my 10G gbics do get annoyingly hot.

You can get a good idea of the current state of the art in pushing bits over copper in internal PCIe cables. Those are short, thick, and pricy and the connections even within a single chassis often needs a retimer / redriver chip [0] to recover signal integrity.

[0]: https://www.asteralabs.com/smart-retimers/pci-express-retime...

That's some pretty cool tech, but 'State of the art' wasn't really what I was talking about. I mean at some point, there's likely a physical limit to how many bits per second that can be pushed down an 4-pair copper networking cable of current girth no matter how clever we get. My bet is that it's north of 100G; a beer to the winner.

> I am thinking hard about any use case for mortals … that can't be covered by latest wifi.

My home WiFi network is running Enterprise grade Aruba hardware using latest WiFi spec gear, where I did intelligent zone planning with no rooms not near max RSSI for devices, proper handoffs between APs, and 2.5GbE or faster backhauls to the controller, yet can still get SIGNIFICANTLY faster access to my NAS over even gigabit Ethernet. Hell, I can’t even consistently have my internet connection be the bottleneck over WiFi.

So yes, “mere mortals” can saturate a consumer grade wifi ap quite easily, using latest specs or not.

If you have a home built out of proper materials, it'll need a wifi AP in every other room for coverage, and those still need uplinks.

No it doesn't. Concrete floor and structural walls, rest is some form of bricks, typical European modern building (Switzerland), absolutely good enough wifi signal in all rooms, on 2 storeys, no repeater or anyhow enhancing the reach. Router is in a far corner of whole structure, as far as possible from being in the center.

This is just basic phone company wifi router provided to us. It works well with all laptops, at least 20 different phones based on various visitors, desktop with some basic external wifi antenna (this one is farthest, 11m and 1 wall).

But we don't have any 'smart' crap in our house, no zigby stuff, no fridges with tablets in front or similar.

Interesting how many downvotes this triggered on all of my comments on HN that could still be downvoted.

Maybe something like a k8s cluster? Those seem to be more stable with reliable low latency links

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