I use a fiber optic internet connection. The speed is 2.5 Gbps.
The speed in your case may be cut by an old wi-fi router. Or if the router is modern, it would be a good idea to upgrade it
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Are most of you wired or using wifi?
- Thread starter Kargo
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The speed in your case may be cut by an old wi-fi router. Or if the router is modern, it would be a good idea to upgrade it
Biggest issue I see with people's wifi is too many access points that are too close together.
This has become a huge thing now that Eero and others range extender/ mesh solutions.
As a pro-network engineer, the way seamless roaming works is all the APs have the same SSID, the wifi name that shows in your list, so you computer or whatever device relies on how good or bad the signal is to determine if it should hop to another Access Point with the same name.
If you have 2 APs that are similar distance away from your computer, the computer has a difficult time choosing which one to stay connected to vs One with terrible signal to noise ratio and Two with great signal.
So just be sure if you have a larger home or a home with dense walls, don't fall down the rabbit hole of having APs all over the place, just place them at the theoretical edge of the signal of your main base station or turn down the transmit power if you need to artificially reduce the radius in order to accommodate 2+ wifi access points in your home layout.
This has become a huge thing now that Eero and others range extender/ mesh solutions.
As a pro-network engineer, the way seamless roaming works is all the APs have the same SSID, the wifi name that shows in your list, so you computer or whatever device relies on how good or bad the signal is to determine if it should hop to another Access Point with the same name.
If you have 2 APs that are similar distance away from your computer, the computer has a difficult time choosing which one to stay connected to vs One with terrible signal to noise ratio and Two with great signal.
So just be sure if you have a larger home or a home with dense walls, don't fall down the rabbit hole of having APs all over the place, just place them at the theoretical edge of the signal of your main base station or turn down the transmit power if you need to artificially reduce the radius in order to accommodate 2+ wifi access points in your home layout.
Both wired and wireless, but mostly wireless. My Mac Studio is my work machine, so it’s the one wired exception as it gets the max benefit of my fiber connection.
The only downside is that my house was originally wired for cable and not Ethernet, so there’s a MoCA 2.5 adapter that connects my mac to the main router connected to the fiber, so on average it gets about 850 up and down. Maybe one day I’ll wire for Ethernet to all rooms but at this time it’s not necessary.
The only downside is that my house was originally wired for cable and not Ethernet, so there’s a MoCA 2.5 adapter that connects my mac to the main router connected to the fiber, so on average it gets about 850 up and down. Maybe one day I’ll wire for Ethernet to all rooms but at this time it’s not necessary.
Thanks for this. I just switched over to a set of Eero 6+'s. How can you tell if they are too close together? I have one in the upstairs, two on the main floor, one in the basement & one in the garage. Not sure if I am creating issues for myself or not. (Prior to this, I just used an Airport router, but had bad reception in the kitchen, so I put a second one in there & then a third in the basement. )
Edited to add: When I set up the eeros, the app said the placement was good, but I think that had more to do with being within range of another eero, rather than optimal placement)
$89/month for 2G up and down, though only using half that due to using 1G Ethernet.
My main workstation gets 800Mbps up and down, 6ms ping over WiFi 6e. 2Gbps symmetrical for the house via FTTP. $99 includes equipment and all taxes/fees.
Wired, as much as possible. Ethernet is full duplex, not shared as long as you are using a switch (and not UDP but that's not controllable).
WiFi is a shared, simplex (one direction at a time) environment with a lot of interference and contention for resources. Neighbors, smart home items, TVs next door, so on and so forth. It's "hostile" in engineering terms.
I have 2.2 Gbps+ down 300 Mbps down for internet. I'm using 2.5 Gbe USB adapters and no issues at all. I'll be going to 10Gbe soon. I find Apple's screen sharing in "High Performance" mode to be excellent as it also now includes audio (like RDP on Windows) and being wired really makes it work well.
While the new band for WiFi is of interest, few devices have it yet so right now it's not a factor, but I suspect I'll go that route in the next couple of years - but keeping wired for almost everything.
WiFi is a shared, simplex (one direction at a time) environment with a lot of interference and contention for resources. Neighbors, smart home items, TVs next door, so on and so forth. It's "hostile" in engineering terms.
I have 2.2 Gbps+ down 300 Mbps down for internet. I'm using 2.5 Gbe USB adapters and no issues at all. I'll be going to 10Gbe soon. I find Apple's screen sharing in "High Performance" mode to be excellent as it also now includes audio (like RDP on Windows) and being wired really makes it work well.
While the new band for WiFi is of interest, few devices have it yet so right now it's not a factor, but I suspect I'll go that route in the next couple of years - but keeping wired for almost everything.
For me, it's a mix of wifi and wired. Where I can, I wire my devices. But when MLO WiFi 7 comes to MacBook Pros, that'll be enough for me to replace the MacBook Pro I have now.
I've got 10 GbE for my SAN and 10 GbE in the Mac mini in my server rack.
I don't totally agree with the recommendation of putting the meshed AP at the theoretical edge of the signal from the uplink node. I've seen quite a few people put them far enough away that the uplink is questionable with cascading impacts on devices connected to the meshed AP.
I can generally get real world speeds of 1.1Gbps up or down from a TPLink EAP772 or Unifi U7 Pro from the MacBook Pro. It'll peak higher than that, but sustained is in the 1.1 - 1.2 range. Latency is still noticeably limiting SMB performance vs gigabit ethernet though. So my dreams of multi-gig wifi are on hold for now and I'll likely go the USB 2.5GbE adapter route and splurge on a TL-SG3428XPP-M2 or USW-Pro-Max-24-PoE.
I've got 10 GbE for my SAN and 10 GbE in the Mac mini in my server rack.
I'm at $79 CAD for 1000/1000 with the Nokia GPON directly into my routers SFP+ NIC. I've had 99.996% uptime since March 15, 2020. I have zero complaints.
Exactly. And if you've got a few APs in your house though, the first thing I'd try would be reducing the radio power on them. Further tuning can help, but I don't think Eero and similar even expose those options.
I don't totally agree with the recommendation of putting the meshed AP at the theoretical edge of the signal from the uplink node. I've seen quite a few people put them far enough away that the uplink is questionable with cascading impacts on devices connected to the meshed AP.
With all my switching being 10GbE, moving to 2.5GbE was actually going to be fairly expensive. So before moving to 2.5GbE, I tested new APs to see what I could do with wireless.
I can generally get real world speeds of 1.1Gbps up or down from a TPLink EAP772 or Unifi U7 Pro from the MacBook Pro. It'll peak higher than that, but sustained is in the 1.1 - 1.2 range. Latency is still noticeably limiting SMB performance vs gigabit ethernet though. So my dreams of multi-gig wifi are on hold for now and I'll likely go the USB 2.5GbE adapter route and splurge on a TL-SG3428XPP-M2 or USW-Pro-Max-24-PoE.
Re-terminate the cat 5. If it's legacy there's a solid chance that not all the pairs were used.
Cat 5 should (out of spec) carry gigabit over residential distances.
Since I got my M4, I moved my office to another room. There, I started using WiFi, due to my router being on the previous room. It wasn’t bad, it didn’t give me much trouble, although the connection wasn’t always stable. And the speeds weren’t the same, as my company’s router is just WiFi n.
I have 1Gbps of upload and download, so I really missed having my fast ethernet connection. What I did, was buying a 15m Cat 7 cable (I know, I know, a bit too much for a symmetrical 1Gbps connection), and I installed it from my previous room to my current office room.
Needles to say that running a speedtest now is quite satisfying, as I reach almost the theoretical speed I have on my router, and connection is super stable again.
I have 1Gbps of upload and download, so I really missed having my fast ethernet connection. What I did, was buying a 15m Cat 7 cable (I know, I know, a bit too much for a symmetrical 1Gbps connection), and I installed it from my previous room to my current office room.
Needles to say that running a speedtest now is quite satisfying, as I reach almost the theoretical speed I have on my router, and connection is super stable again.
I use everything wifi but my xbox or gaming pc. Other things i use such as browsing and content consumption I do no need or feel the difference,
It depends on the provider, from 50 CHF/month in Switzerland for 10 Gb symmetric fiber connection, including tv services and an Apple TV.
my first experience with computers as a student was Fortran IV with punchcards - not a pleasant memory
also the process was so tedious it can’t have been educational
only a few years later I saw kids in rooms full of terminals
After taking that ALGOL class, I visited my friend from high school, a genius, attending Harvard as a CS major on a full scholarship. He showed me their time sharing system with teletype terminals scattered around the campus. That completely blew me away. Of course, he had also hacked into all kinds of stuff he shouldn't have. 🤣
Soon, my own school (UVA) rolled out a similar system. I was no longer taking CS courses, but spent a LOT of time on those terminals, taught myself BASIC. And I've never stopped applying computers to my own field(s) of interest.
Exactly this…no real way to know about placement, number, or optimization on the eero network. I have eight eeroPros scattered throughout our 1905 home with its plaster/lath walls that are WiFi assassins. Possibly/probably eight is too many but I have no easy way to know. At least I get some WiFi everywhere in the home and detached garage so there’s that. I’ve had the eeroPros for a few years now and had been thinking about taking advantage of some aggressive Amazon sales on the 6e’s. But even with sales pricing, eight of those is more than I’d want to spend. And running Cat6 or 7 Ethernet is just not possible beyond the two places I already have it.
Wifi on my 2023 M2Pro, as my connection is in another room, and this is an apartment, so I can't drill holes in the walls.
Ethernet would be my choice for everything, but not practical in a large rental condo with lots of steel and concrete in the walls.
So doing a hybrid approach. The broadband connection enters in the living room, so we have the modem and WiFi router there in the entertainment center with Ethernet connections to the TV and all the other devices including Apple TV box.
WiFi coverage throughout the condo is surprisingly robust with over 500 Mbps to all rooms to support our two phones and two iMacs.
So doing a hybrid approach. The broadband connection enters in the living room, so we have the modem and WiFi router there in the entertainment center with Ethernet connections to the TV and all the other devices including Apple TV box.
WiFi coverage throughout the condo is surprisingly robust with over 500 Mbps to all rooms to support our two phones and two iMacs.
Cat 7 cable gains you nothing but thicker more annoying cables.
5A is plenty for home use.
Meant 6A.. still find it amusing when people are using Cat 7 or 8 for no gain and more annoying cables as they are thicker and less flexible.