Forum menu
Before you make any holes in the building beg/borrow a long enough - in and out of windows, whatever - ethernet cable to connect router and pc directly.
Does it make any difference?
EDIT: arse, as Johnners puts it
It’s interesting lots of IT professionals & gifted amateurs alike, like to talk about WiFi as if it was a single defined thing.
They don’t always acknowledge that different radio frequencies have different properties, speed, distance & penetration among others. They often omit to point out that the higher the frq the greater the throughput but the lower the distance & ability to penetrate solid objects.
It’s very infrequent that they acknowledge that WiFi was until relatively recently a one device broadcasts at a time protocol that meant throughput & latancy were always factors of the volume of clients on the network.
This is still a factor despite the improvements made in wifi 5, 6 & 6e around multiple client support with the introduction of mimo functionality. You need to understand a bit around mimo 1*1, 2*2, 4*4, etc what configuration your accesspoint has & the volume of wireless clients connected to it, if they also have mimo antennas to understand how your theoretical maximums are being skewed by real world interactions.
In other words you can have a healthy speed test result but in real use see sub optimal performance because you have multiple wireless clients all competing for the same ‘slots’ on the wireless channel.
Very rarely is the impact of channel saturation discussed.
Don’t get me wrong WiFi is great for many situations, most domestic situations included but it is not (in general use) as stable or fast as a wired connection, because let’s face it, if it was then the majority of data centres & corporate offices would have ditched ethernet & fibre for WiFi to save in installation, management, support & hardware costs involved in deploying copper &/or fibre cabling quite some time ago.
So if you have an application where latency & stability are desired & the ability to install structured cabling why would you not???
I'm a total amateur on this, but currently putting cat6 cabling around our house while we're in the middle of a complete rewire. Floors are open and the electrician's routing the new power cables into the solid brick/plaster/lathe walls anyway, so might as well. Installing runs from router location to my office upstairs plus cable runs to the two TVs we have, plus another for the CCTV HD.
Only despire is more reliable signal for working in the office where the wifi struggles to reach reliably - I guess due to wall thickness and/or cast iron staircase railings, house is mid/late 1800s with crazy thick walls. Currently using a network cable trailing down the stairs to the router, plugged into my work laptop, for reliable connection.
Cost is minimal so thought I might as well while the house is in bits.
Thanks @captmorgan. So you're saying that the more devices on the LAN the more contention there could be? It is true that when I get stuttering sometimes the client doesn't report actual packet drops, which did make me wonder.
Last night it was smooth as silk though for hours... smirk..
@molgrips slightly more nuanced than just volume of clients, they need to be actively using bandwidth so other folk streaming video, devices downloading data / apps / games, devices backing up to a nas drive, etc
Though often the issue is when you’re performing task A you have limited control over the usage of the rest of the household.
@a11y an eminently reasonable approach, worse case you have unused cables & spent a few quid, best case you don’t have devices stuttering due to poor wifi.
One piece of advice, run a couple of network drops & power to the loft. It opens up the option to place some devices out of the way & also allows you to put wifi accesspoints up there, if you have poor wifi currently this can help as wifi is (generally with traditional U.K. building techniques) able to penetrate through floor much easier than walls.
Suspended in a loft allows it to fire down & through the home rather than across the home & walls.
If it's low latency you want then do it properly - Infiniband EDR will get you 0.5us latency and 25Gbit/s from a single connection.
Probably only cost you 20-25k all in...
Thanks @captmorgan. Electrian's yet to do route the cabling from downstairs to upstairs so I can add in a couple of extra runs of cabling - Got a rather large amount of cable leftover on a reel at the moment. Like you say, even if it goes unused it's worth doing now.
My problem may be having to buy a whole drum when I only need a bit.
How much do you need
5m at most even with contingency.
Make it 10m
Pm me your address and I will get some in the post external black cat 5e
If you're not an expert, I'd just use a single cable poking out of brush boxes on the wall rather than trying to fix sockets.
The electricians who did the ethernet sockets when we had a rewire did it very poorly and the transmission speeds were crap.
It's a lot easier to fix a plug on the end of a cable than to fit two sockets.
It is easer to terminate with the correct idc punch down tool, easier than crimp on plugs.
Also solid copper core cable is not designed to be used as a patch cable with plugs. It can lead to fatigue & premature failures.
Lack of skill does not mean the correct process shouldn’t be followed.
Well rap my knuckles and send me to bed with no pudding...
I charge extra for that Jim… 😉