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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

I encourage techies to dig into their wifi hardware & software end-to-end. Install smokeping on a raspberry pi (even a $10 zero works). Ping all of your home devices , your gateway, DNS & first hops of your IP.

You will discover all sorts of disruptions affecting your network quality, including interference.

For your primary devices like desktops & laptops, use mtr (my-traceroute) in a terminal window to watch your pings over time.

Your connectivity issues , particularly with VC, terminal emulation & gaming, are due to ping latency , not bandwidth issues.

You will find software issues like this one, the location services bug on MacOS, and others; as well as hardware issues due to transmission interference, noise, physical interference.

Consistent & low pings are critical.

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Good advice, but I'll add that there are many bad things smokeping won't detect.

My favorites are APs/range extenders/meshes that don't do multicast properly (mDNS in particular, breaking lots of LAN-based apps), and also ones that seem to semi-randomly isolate devices (i.e., prevent devices connected to the AP from reaching devices that are not connected to it, except the gateway).

There are a huge number of these devices (I'm looking at you, Netgear). Sometimes ICMP will work, but not TCP. It's nightmarish to debug, because it often seems to be some table-size issue in the AP, so devices will work for a while, and then some new device connects and the old ones break.

you could use nmap or tcpping as the probe . smokeping supports any diagnostic

This is such a pain to do though, because so much of it is seeing braindead behaviors and not being able to do anything about it.

Putting as much as you can on wired ethernet helps a lot. Still have just as much bogus traffic, but on 1g (or even 100m), there's a lot more room for it.

Everyonce in a while, I look at the broadcast traffic on my wifi and cry.

wired is best, but for many it's not possible.

MTR is a good start, and easy to run on a chron job. Graph the results with excel

> wired is best, but for many it's not possible.

For some it's not possible, but in my personal experience a lot of people who "can't" wire really just don't want to wire.

Even if you can't do a full "professional grade" install there are almost always viable options unless you live in an apartment built like a prison.

I have in the past:

* Poked tiny easily-patched holes in the wall just large enough to pass a bare cable through to an adjacent room

* Tuck cables under baseboard molding

* Run cables through vents

* Followed existing television/telco wiring

* (last resort) Just stapled the cable to the wall/ceiling, optionally covering with stick-on covers.

Most of those options can be hidden from view and all are trivially removable/repairable so there's no issue in a rental situation.

Almost everyone can do most if not all of those things if they want to, they just usually don't want to because they've been trained to not like wires, that wireless is better.

I have actually had a person complain about lag on their game console, which was in the shelves under their TV connected via WiFi to their cable modem which was in the same shelves, and they didn't want me to plug in a simple six foot cable between the two because they didn't want more wires. That's just pure stupid.

If it doesn't move, it should be wired unless there is absolutely no practical way to wire it. Desktop computers, game consoles, TVs, etc. Even laptops, if you're working from home and sitting at a desk, have a cable there. Modern laptops with USB-C docking stations make it easier than it's ever been, the same cord that provides power also provides reliable high speed networking.

fair enough. You're right it is possible. To me it's not worth the unsightly cabling and damaging penetration. I'm currently measuring about 1.5 ms / 0.5 ms SD pings on wifi. I could save 1.0ms on that by running cat5 around my house. But it would be unsightly , and add more penetration through my walls.

It's all about tradeoffs. My efforts spent on running great wifi have paid off.

Best case vs. worst case is important.

Best case, yeah WiFi isn't substantially worse than wired, especially if all you care about is getting to the internet. Worst case, it's a fuckton worse. A wired network will never drop out for seconds at a time because something ran a scan (as noted in multiple places in this thread). A wired network doesn't give a shit about your microwave. A wired network doesn't have meaningful interference issues.

The more active users you have on your network, the worse WiFi is going to be, where a wired network can take more users than you can fit in a residential environment.

that's not "best case". that's a 30 day reading.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if you're claiming you are seeing 1-2ms pings consistently over a 30 day period on a WiFi network you're either doing something wrong with your measurement or you have a very unusual network with no other devices active, no meaningful interference, and extremely high signal strength.

It's not technically impossible, but it's so unlikely as to be the sort of thing the marketers who like to use terms like "AC3200" would be embarrassed to claim.

https://imgur.com/a/VdBgwkE

Your chart is showing an average of 20 pings every five minutes, I'm talking about absolute results from a constant ping.

Your data also shows multiple consecutive samples where at least one of those 20 pings were entirely lost. On a wired LAN at home scale any sort of packet loss would be indicative of something being very wrong.

While obviously I don't have the amount of data that you have over a long period of time, I set up smokeping on my own home file server after seeing your graph and what I have so far should emphasize the point. My worst-case 20 ping average over this time is measured in microseconds with absolutely zero loss, testing to my gateway.

https://i.imgur.com/mYkfKQF.png

A couple of milliseconds of extra latency doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent, but packet loss always matters.

Check back with me in a couple of months if you think it'll matter, but I'd be willing to bet lunch that the data won't be substantially different.

every solution is about tradeoffs. Of course you will be getting 500ns pings very low sd with wired ethernet. What matters is about the application and does the solution meet the needs of the application.

What I've been trying to communicate is that with adequate attention to the wifi hardware and configuration you can achieve excellent results that are adequate for VC & gaming .

that's it. Wifi will never reach wired ethernet performance on the junk bands that it is forced to operate on.

For whatever it’s worth, running cables through your vents in the US is an NEC violation (see 300.22). If you’re renting it might be your only feasible option but probably not a great long term solution.

Otherwise, I strongly agree with everything said above, wired networking is worth the investment.

AFAIK low voltage wiring generally doesn't matter from a code perspective, but yea I would only see that as a temporary solution for renters and of course only use plenum-rated cable for it.

I've only done that particular trick in an apartment that had through-wall vents above the bedroom doors so it was literally four inches the cable was inside the vent.

Check the code, low volt is usually not a problem but in the case of air vents, it’s specifically called out. The only wires you can have inside metallic ducting are those needed to control HVAC systems.

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