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Comment by FloatArtifact | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a wire connection (ethernet/fiber) will have limited use in residential. Speed isn't so much concern although a wired connection still better in terms of reliability and backwards compatibility.

I say this as somebody that's about to do Ethernet runs and fiber in the house.

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Behind every good wireless network, there is a fantastic wired backbone. I have access points in every room that comes out of a wired ethernet network. My daughter stopped complaining about latency with her games the day she learned that it is better to stay wired with her computer.

Wireless is a convenience, but I’d always prefer wired connections wherever I can.

https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

My house is wired for ethernet, and I don't use all the jacks. Best practice is probably run two lines to two opposite walls to most rooms. But you'd expect to only really use one of those for most rooms. It's just nice to have options for placing wired devices (which is why you want wired to opposite walls) and to have a spare in case it fails.

1gbps at low latency and low jitter is table stakes for wired networking, but pretty difficult for wifi (regardless of the sticker bandwidths). Wifi 7 will likely do a lot better than wifi 6 on well equiped clients and access points because of aggregation across frequencies, but it's still going to be not entirely consistent, and it still won't hold a candle to 10g-baseT which isn't too expensive if you only need a few ports and you shop well on ebay.

If you do fiber runs, there's lots of used stuff much faster than 10g for not much more. 40gbe seems to have had a short lifetime in enterprise so there's a lot of decommisioned hardware out there, if you've got fiber to run it on.

Why would anyone pay to run Ethernet in their home in this day and age?

Reliability and speed, especially if the airwaves are congested around you, plus simplicity in that there's less configuration than Wifi, and for some IoT-y devices like cameras you can use PoE and not have to worry about powering them either

speed, stability, reliability

In addition to the other answers, to drive multiple APs.

Stabile, high bandwidth connections for wireless APs, Home A/V, IP cameras (wireless is typically junk in this category) & other PoE IoT devices. Wired connections are still incredibly useful.

- anyone that works from home and wants a 100% stable connection.

- someone that lives in a large building with many adjacent access points all blasting on the wifi spectrum, causing interference.

- latency sensitive applications. for example video chat works better. Gaming works better.

Gaming? Maybe, since some gamers are apparently willing to spend extra money on 5000hz mouse to shave <1ms of latency over a "normal" 1000hz gaming mouse. WFH? Probably not. Wifi adds maybe 5ms of avg latency with occasional 100ms spikes. Most video conferencing software introduce enough of a lag (through buffering, encoding, echo cancellation, noise suppression) that you won't notice the difference. Same goes for bandwidth. Video calls with screen sharing barely goes over 5Mb/s for me. You don't need fancy 10Gbe hardwired connection for that.

It’s 5ms of average latency - under optimal conditions! Wifi latency can range anywhere from 5-50ms. Not everyone’s in a single family home, where there’s little interference. :)

Wifi 7 is nice in that regard because the 6ghz band is barely used these days.

I think ethernet is a nice to have, certainly not required.

I joke that I prefer Ethernet because I know how WiFi works.

Generally, WiFi is fine if you have line of sight or close to it. And you don't have strong demands on total bandwidth (not doing large local file transfers).

It’s hard to see the value of a wired network, but there are about a million. As other commenters have pointed out, most of the scenarios are more than one access point and thicker walls / building materials.

You don't even necessarily need to run Ethernet. For example, my parents house was built without Ethernet cable runs to every floor, but they ran coax cables to basically every room for TV.

Thanks to MoCA (Media over Coax Alliance) you can route your Ethernet over Coax, and thus we have a really stable and performant (> 1GbE) Ethernet connection to every room.

Wireless repeaters/mesh doesn't really work well when you have reinforced steel-concrete floors and walls.

I had my house wired and it's one of the best things I've done. Just straight up no issues.

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