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Are most of you wired or using wifi?

Usually, I have everything wired that can be, including the Mac Pro as the hub for iTunes etc., with only one low power Airport for everything else that can be turned off at night or any other time it isn't being used or needed. But currently I am Airbnbing it, so stuck with WiFi only right now. Mac Pro doesn't like it very much but it works.

Cat6a STP all the way, cable wise. I always buy the best (within reason, of course) when upgrading something and that was the best Ethernet standard at the time.
 
I have a recent WiFi mesh system (capable of WiFi 6E but don’t have WiFi 6E device) so I get pretty decent speeds on WiFi (usually ~500Mbps on WiFi 6). But even then I decided to hardwire everything I could, mostly the TVs in the living and game room, the PS4/5 and the Apple TV. Only notable exception is my gaming desktop, since I haven’t yet been bothered to run a cable from the access point in the game room to the PC (plus, it usually gets 700~800Mbps and pretty low latency on WiFi). Everything else (laptops and, obviously, phones and iPads) is on WiFi.
 
The issue is that some qol stuff doesn't readily work over wired - so you need wireless to be enabled on a Mac anyway if you want everything to work. That is understandable in some cases but kinda annoying, which is a part of the reason my Macs aren't touching anything work work since there's a lot of productivity-sapping hoops around MacOS one way or another without burdening it with more space in third party tools than the OS takes up, lol.

It's also the reason I've moved fully to mGig at home for the wireless segment of the network (mGig AP's -> mGig PoE switch dedicated to the AP's -> my main 10G backbone) to so each device can be as fast as possible over wireless.
 
I prefer wired with the Macs.
 

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gilby101 said:
And Cat 5e is what you can actually buy. But it pays to remember the distinction when rummaging through your box of old cables (or buying from dodgy sources).
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Yes, nowadays Cat 5e is the minimum you can usually get, but who knows when OP's landlord installed the cabling in their house. I ran ethernet in both my parents' house and a landlord's house in the late 90s and early 00's respectively, and neither of those would have been 5e. One of those runs is still in place at my parents' house today.
 
Adora said:
What are those 40Gbit Ethernet cables I bought recently? I only bought them because the price was almost the same than 1Gbit.

Edit: Amazon says Cat 8.1. What are those normally for?
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AFAIK Cat 6 through Cat 8 is mainly additional shielding and connectors around the same twisted pair setup in Cat 5e cables (I don't really know the distinction of anything above 6). I think you can use Cat 8 cables and still terminate them with earlier category ports or ends, but you won't get the full advantage of Cat 8 unless you get the appropriate termination hardware. Even if you use Cat 6 terminations, though, you should be able to get 10Gb/s out of Cat 8. This is coming from an armchair networking guy though.
 
My family and I live in an older townhome that we rent. I use Eero 6 WiFi through our house connected to a Verizon 5G gateway. We get 100 mb pretty consistently over WiFi on an M1 Mac Mini, M1 MBA, M4 Mac Mini, and a Dell XPS (work provided) that I work remote on and they’re all running over WiFi without any issue. I only get the 100 mb internet because work gives me 50 for internet. No issues though. Had Spectrum prior with 300 mb but continuously had issues with them messing with our pricing and a few outages mid day.
 
StrollerEd said:
147Mbps 'really slow'? Not for domestic/consumer purposes, surely?


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It’s all relative I guess

I think I took notice because you called it “fast fibre” but seems on the low end of contemporary speeds

I get about 600-700 Mbps throughout most of our home via wifi

others in the thread are wiring everything so they can get 1 Gbps
 
OK, 'fast fibre' was the product-speak. I pay for a floor of 100mbps and almost always get 50% more than that into the house. Then, except the VOIP phone which is wired, I consume everything via wifi which delivers that 147 which is more than sufficient.

I could invest in extra into the house and also use direct ethernet but that would not be vfm for this consumer. Were I running a server, as once upon a time at work, then context & need would be different.

So, yes, all is relative.
 
Typically wired. I can’t even do WiFi in either of my offices but regardless, I prefer it.

WiFi if wired isn’t available/practical, e.g. I’m travelling
 
Unfortunately using Wi-Fi.
Always did since the last almost 25 years, always used the latest and greatest technology, and it never worked well.

If we buy a new house, I'll surely ask for ethernet plugs in every room.
 
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gregorius:
"I started at 300 baud."

Same here, on an Apple //c.

I found a Panasonic phone with a 300bps modem built into it.

It had an RS-232 port on the back, so I had to hand-make a cable to connect it to the back of the //c.

You manually dialed the number, then flipped a switch to enable the modem connection...
 
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At work, wired network via the DELL hub monitor with the MacBook Pro closed lid.
At home, the Mac mini is wired but WiFi on the MacBook Pro since I can't pull the wire that long. Want to upgrade to a 2.5G switch in the closet.
 
We spent some money after we bought our current house to run some Cat6 to key places where there would likely be TV or computers. Would do it again, but there are two places where we ran more cables than we really needed, and could have used a small switch at the outlet instead.

We put a couple wireless access points at specific locations to keep wifi as smooth as possible for the things that rely on it, which both use the ethernet as the backbone. But in general, nothing in the house is really "aware" of the network impact of anything else in the house. Someone can be pulling 1Gbit downloading a game from Steam, I can be pushing a large chunk of data to a work server at the same speed, while someone else is downloading a video from the NAS to watch and the network itself isn't the bottleneck, nor is it slowing down trying to share bandwidth.

Howard2k said:
No, it’s the other way. For higher bandwidths you want wired.
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Exactly. The problem is that Wifi uses half-duplex broadcasts, so those rated speeds are "ideal, best case" speeds, while ethernet with full-duplex and good switches can handle more total traffic over the network, even if a specific link/device is limited to 1Gbps. Not to mention I could put a 10Mbit or 100Mbit device on an ethernet network and the only link impacted is the one between it and the switch it's connected to. It doesn't bring down the speed of the whole network when it talks like wifi does.
 
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