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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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