I understand the pros and cons of using Ethernet, but I've never once felt that it would make much of a difference, unless I were to start gaming online again.
I switched to Ethernet when I started working remotely for my work machine, I found it makes remote meetings have less lag then over wireless. It's possible I could have tuned my wireless network to behave better but it was easier to have an electrician run ethernet when they were already out for some other work.
Anything that can reasonably be wired should be wired. Anything where consistent performance matters should be wired.
Wireless networks are for convenience, not as a default. They're for things that need to be mobile more than they need a perfect network, things that get installed in weird places where wiring is impractical or impossible, etc.
anything that is not moving around and has possibility to be connected via wire should be wired.
Both my and wife laptops while we are working at our home office are connected via wired connection. All the smart TVs in the house are wired, video games are wired.
The only things using wifi here are phones, tablets, the kids nintendo switch when it is out of the dock, laptops when out the office and iot stuff that does not have wired options to begin with..
USB-C docks allow a single, thin, unobtrusive cable to provide power, speakers, microphone, ethernet and storage, to tablets, phones, mini PCs and desktops.
In the same vein as others have stated, the airwaves are just getting too blasted crowded. In all but the most rural areas, even the 5GHz band in the United States is starting to get quite noisy, and I find the constant frequency hopping and "ghost in the machine" network behaviors on WiFi to be much more vexing than simply running a Cat 5e cable- even if I'm terminating it myself.
Edit: directly to OP's observation, bandwidth is not so much of a concern to me as are things like wildly-fluctuating bandwidth and sporadic dissociations.
I think you mean wired Ethernet vs 802.11 wireless Ethernet though.
Wired networking generally gives much more consistent latency, bandwidth, and delivery. For things that are consistently used in a single place, it's worth some effort to have a better experience.
Next they are going to ditch TCP/UDP for IPX/SPX XD
Give it a couple of more years and "Hacker News" has become consumer electronics & SAAS central.
But more on topic; using any radio while you don't have to often is at the expense of other people using radio. It's a shared resource and not infinite.
Don't be a dick, use a wire where you can.
I work from home, in a home office with no sane way to route an Ethernet cable to, and I've been feeling the crunch during video calls. We have a wifi-enabled baby video monitor in a corner bedroom, and from my experience it's been proving "Rule 10: Your Wi-Fi network is only as fast as its slowest connected device" (see source [1]). My best-practice workflow has been to unplug the camera before an important video call.
It's worth trying a good powerline networking adapter if you haven't tried already! I've used a bunch of them and they are much much faster and more reliable than wifi.
That (realistically) requires you to have coax cabling in the walls already, or be willing to snake them through, right? Whereas powerline is where you're working already
I had my "Ethernet whenever possible" phase, but when I moved my office because the kids got old enough to need their own rooms I was dreading rewiring This Old House. And then I figured out that I could reliably stream Blu-ray movies at their original on-disc bitrate from my Plex server to my Apple TV while everybody else was FaceTime-ing, playing Roblox, etc., and just sort of didn't worry about it again. (Implementation notes: I do have one direct 10GbE connection between my workstation and my NAS, and I did move to a mesh Wi-Fi system to solve a coverage issue in a far corner of the house.)
I use it for reliability of things and the fact that Wi-Fi in my place can be hit or miss, even with 3 APs. As you get higher in the frequency, the smaller the range is before it starts getting unusable or requiring a bunch of retransmission. It’s also dedicated bandwidth to each device rather than shared across multiple systems.
I use Borg for photo and document backups to a remote server.
To my surprise, I found that my ethernet is about 25x faster than my Wifi network on the same router. 400MB takes just 50s compared to 21 minutes.
Though the theoretical mbps of both are comparable (100 vs. 150), wireless technologies always seem to be less consistent and vary a lot. I've noticed it with both Wifi and 4G.
It's ethernet all the way now whenever I'm backing up MBs or GBs, which is every week.
I prefer it. I find that ethernet is much better than smoke signals for reaching the other side of the world.
Seriously though, sometimes it's difficult to use a network cable. You could look at Ethernet-over-power-line adapters. I use all of the following in our house: ethernet cables, wifi, and ethernet-over-powerline. I have even used E-over-P to carry an ethernet 'cable' to a far-flung wireless access point in our last house.
I use the Ethernet on a mesh router so only the backhaul channel. Why not leave the wifi bandwidth for other devices that stream etc. It's also good for the times I do game on the net. Other computers in the same room as the base station are also connected by switch.
I might be old-fashioned but 1080P video is perfectly fine for my eyes, and 4K seems like a waste of bandwidth. Perhaps as a result I haven't had an Ethernet capable device in 11 years.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadWireless networks are for convenience, not as a default. They're for things that need to be mobile more than they need a perfect network, things that get installed in weird places where wiring is impractical or impossible, etc.
anything that is not moving around and has possibility to be connected via wire should be wired.
Both my and wife laptops while we are working at our home office are connected via wired connection. All the smart TVs in the house are wired, video games are wired.
The only things using wifi here are phones, tablets, the kids nintendo switch when it is out of the dock, laptops when out the office and iot stuff that does not have wired options to begin with..
First, it’s faster and more reliable, so if you can why not?
And second, the more things you wire the less congestion for things that are wireless.
You can even Ethernet an iPad which is useful in some cases.
In the same vein as others have stated, the airwaves are just getting too blasted crowded. In all but the most rural areas, even the 5GHz band in the United States is starting to get quite noisy, and I find the constant frequency hopping and "ghost in the machine" network behaviors on WiFi to be much more vexing than simply running a Cat 5e cable- even if I'm terminating it myself.
Edit: directly to OP's observation, bandwidth is not so much of a concern to me as are things like wildly-fluctuating bandwidth and sporadic dissociations.
I think you mean wired Ethernet vs 802.11 wireless Ethernet though.
Wired networking generally gives much more consistent latency, bandwidth, and delivery. For things that are consistently used in a single place, it's worth some effort to have a better experience.
I always have more issues with WiFi than with Ethernet, so I go Ethernet when possible.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/the-ars-technica-sem...
Ethernet is just so much better that I just ssh into the mini I'm using as a server to download files.
I had my "Ethernet whenever possible" phase, but when I moved my office because the kids got old enough to need their own rooms I was dreading rewiring This Old House. And then I figured out that I could reliably stream Blu-ray movies at their original on-disc bitrate from my Plex server to my Apple TV while everybody else was FaceTime-ing, playing Roblox, etc., and just sort of didn't worry about it again. (Implementation notes: I do have one direct 10GbE connection between my workstation and my NAS, and I did move to a mesh Wi-Fi system to solve a coverage issue in a far corner of the house.)
To my surprise, I found that my ethernet is about 25x faster than my Wifi network on the same router. 400MB takes just 50s compared to 21 minutes.
Though the theoretical mbps of both are comparable (100 vs. 150), wireless technologies always seem to be less consistent and vary a lot. I've noticed it with both Wifi and 4G.
It's ethernet all the way now whenever I'm backing up MBs or GBs, which is every week.
Seriously though, sometimes it's difficult to use a network cable. You could look at Ethernet-over-power-line adapters. I use all of the following in our house: ethernet cables, wifi, and ethernet-over-powerline. I have even used E-over-P to carry an ethernet 'cable' to a far-flung wireless access point in our last house.
You could get perhaps something like this: https://www.techreviewer.com/tech-answers/powerline-adapters...
And 4k is only helpful if you have a big TV or projector.