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Comment by WXLCKNO | Hacker News Reader

I'm moving into my first house this summer, I'll buy a couple of the new unifi 7 access points since I was just running a dream machine for now.

Paired with 3 gigabit internet I think it makes sense but overall I might as well go for the latest.

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WiFi is nice for people in apartments but if you own the house, you can just do wired connections.

Counterpoint: WiFi is nice for people in detached houses, but in apartments the spectrum is so crowded that you really want wired connections.

>in apartments the spectrum is so crowded

“Hear, hear!”

Definitely :)

I'm doing major renovations and will be wiring the whole place up. But for the few things that are gonna remain wireless I'll still have the fastest WiFi possible.

Two things I'm most excited about are building an amazing dedicated sound proofed and optimized home theater and having a real centralized server rack for everything in the house. It's gonna be great

FYI, I've been looking into this a bit, myself.

I'm thinking of going with single mode fiber, potentially armored. Copper has an upper limit, but SMF doesn't seem to have that same limits.

The problem is there is one is terminating the fiber to a connector. Also you're not going to have PoE. But this maybe okay for my use case.

Wifi is also nice for smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. No one is going to “just do wired” with their phone.

Phones, I agree, but who cares about phone bandwidth? Phones are junk anyway.

Game consoles, not sure. A console is a pretty stationary device. You can even wire up a Switch, you just need a USB adapter.

WiFi is substantially faster than wired Ethernet which has stagnated in consumer applications at 1gbps for decades. For example the last time I did a macos migration it chose WiFi despite the wired path being available, and proceeded at greater than gigabit speeds. That's on top of all the convenience.

For me consistency and reliability are more important than (peak) throughput. I'll take 1Gbps wired over any WiFi standard, since the former is not affected by someone running the microwave or the random gremlins that tend to cause WiFi to misbehave when you need it most.

I'm not sure that's a fair blanket statement to make. I don't think I've bought any new devices with only 1gig ports in quite some time. My work laptop has 2.5GbE, my 5 year old desktop has 2.5GbE, my NAS has 10GbE, etc. 2.5GbE switches have also gotten quite cheap.

My WiFi 6 router only has gigabit LAN ports, but that's because I didn't personally need to go any higher than that. Faster options were available at the time I bought it.

My point is that consumer electronics are generally available with >1GbE if the application suits it. If you only buy the cheaper models then 1GbE is more common. There are plenty of applications where even 1GbE is overkill and spending any more money on a faster link would be throwing away money.

I think stagnation is a fitting description. Gigabit came out in the 1990s. It is still the mainstream speed. For example, a base mac mini, despite being one of the fastest machines you can buy, has a gigabit port or optional $100 10-gig port. There is no option for a 2.5 gigabit port. An iMac comes either without ethernet, or with gigabit. NUCs come with 2.5g, I grant you that, and I attribute that to Intel's push for the standard. But their 2.5g chipset notoriously doesn't work.

2.5g is on the higher end of devices a consumer would buy today, and lacks support among even slightly older devices. Wifi 7 is similar: it exists, but just barely. There is a Wifi 7 device in my hand right now, but few people own one. Under ideal conditions WiFi 7 whoops 2.5gbps ethernet, though. Even 6E which came out years ago, gives comparable throughput to 2.5g ethernet.

$100 is a little pricey I guess for an adapter but how much is it to get a wifi router that actually does 10Gbps in actual tests? For example I found this review for a “9.5Gbps” device that costs $1400 and actually hits like 1.5Gbps when measured.

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/wi-fi-6e-th...

If they were actually hitting the speeds they market these things at, wifi probably would have “stagnated” 10 years ago.

The RealTek 2.5gb ethernet on my Asus motherboard hits maybe 400mbps with a tailwind, because it only supports a single receive queue. Not hitting the advertised base rates is common to wired and wireless alike.

This is a valid point for sure.

The router Bell provides in Canada now has a 10 gig ethernet port but I'm plugging that into my dream machine which only has 1 gig.

I'll need to upgrade to the dream machine pro and then add 10 gig switches through the SFP+ port I believe. The new unifi 7 pro access points have 2.5 gig ports which will definitely be close enough to the 3 gig fiber internet.

Then I'll need to upgrade my desktop PC and nas to 10 gig ports :)

Will it change much for my daily usage? I doubt it. But it will feel good lol.

My favourite wifi vs ethernet finding is that my modern LG OLED TV is capped to 100Mbps through the ethernet port, but has no such limit on wifi and can therefore run much faster. I wonder how much LG saved by not adding gigabit ethernet ports?

100Mbps isn't even that much - I can push that if I'm streaming an uncompressed Blu Ray HD rip.

Gigabit ethernet is extremely different from fast ethernet. At this point, I would expect a fast ethernet port to cost more because of relative scarcity of suppliers, but there might have been an SoC at the time with an integrated one.

I just bought a house that doesn't have wired connections. How hard would it be to update the house to have ethernet? Seems daunting.

There are a lot of variables. Pier and beam or slab? It can often be easy to run wires under the house in pier and beam, not really an option for slab. Single story? It is usually pretty easy to run wires in the attic, but dropping down from the second to first story could be tricky without opening up a wall.

I paid a cabling company to wire up my old house. Cost a few grand and they figured out the path (attic, crawlspace, and in some cases the exterior of the house). I have a UniFi system so I got PoE WiFi access points and PoE 4K cameras installed at the same time.

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