Dude I just bought 4 refurbished Linksys MX4200 (tri-band) access points for $80 (total), put on OpenWRT, and built a mesh system. I’m incredibly happy with the result, especially for the price. And, I’ve got wireless bridges all through the house so I can keep some things off the forwarding channels and only in the back haul.
It’s not wired, but it’s close enough and doesn’t require me drilling through all my walls running cable or carving out a space in the house for all of it to coalesce.
Granted, I’m in an area with not a lot of wireless interference…I work in enterprise networking and I’ve had a lot of issues with remote workers on wireless networks that weren’t capable of handling the volume of data that the users were uploading. Sometimes just because there’s too much interference…but a lot of the time it’s because of misconfiguration (either out of ignorance or because the good features, like multicast-to-unicast, are missing), or printer drivers that spam the wireless with multicast whenever the printer is offline (which I’ve seen a surprising amount of times).
If you’re on wireless…multicast is bad, mmmkay? Only “one” device can talk at a time on wireless (barring MIMO shenanigans), and when it’s multicast traffic…it has to get sent at the lowest compatible rates. A lot of routers set this to 6Mbps or even 1Mbps by default. So your nice fancy “1200Mbps” wireless has to slow down a crawl every time your Roku wants to tell Alexa that it’s there. Which is surprisingly often. Scale up for all the internet-of-crap stuff people have and it’s a miracle their wireless works at all.
Oh and I’ve found people with extenders they don’t know about. Ring Chime? Apparently it functions as an 802.11n (only) extender. Huge bottleneck right there. And then it can only be as good as the signal it gets from the next access point.
Dude I just bought 4 refurbished Linksys MX4200 (tri-band) access points for $80 (total), put on OpenWRT, and built a mesh system. I’m incredibly happy with the result, especially for the price. And, I’ve got wireless bridges all through the house so I can keep some things off the forwarding channels and only in the back haul.
It’s not wired, but it’s close enough and doesn’t require me drilling through all my walls running cable or carving out a space in the house for all of it to coalesce.
Granted, I’m in an area with not a lot of wireless interference…I work in enterprise networking and I’ve had a lot of issues with remote workers on wireless networks that weren’t capable of handling the volume of data that the users were uploading. Sometimes just because there’s too much interference…but a lot of the time it’s because of misconfiguration (either out of ignorance or because the good features, like multicast-to-unicast, are missing), or printer drivers that spam the wireless with multicast whenever the printer is offline (which I’ve seen a surprising amount of times).
If you’re on wireless…multicast is bad, mmmkay? Only “one” device can talk at a time on wireless (barring MIMO shenanigans), and when it’s multicast traffic…it has to get sent at the lowest compatible rates. A lot of routers set this to 6Mbps or even 1Mbps by default. So your nice fancy “1200Mbps” wireless has to slow down a crawl every time your Roku wants to tell Alexa that it’s there. Which is surprisingly often. Scale up for all the internet-of-crap stuff people have and it’s a miracle their wireless works at all.
Oh and I’ve found people with extenders they don’t know about. Ring Chime? Apparently it functions as an 802.11n (only) extender. Huge bottleneck right there. And then it can only be as good as the signal it gets from the next access point.
I’m a nice fellow who provides free internet to all of my neighbors.
It’s a pain sometimes.
I worry about the teenager upstairs, but all the others are old ladies and it doesn’t bother me a bit…until I want to do something serious.
I’m about to (tax time) invest in a router that allows me to control their bandwidth. It’s free, so if 20mbps don’t work for them they can pay for it.
I will open up the kid’s PS5 so he can game. His laptop is getting 10mbps though.
Old ladies rocking 4k to sleep is too much.
They don’t pay for internet so they get the good good on their services. I’m too sorry and antisocial to go deal with it.
Legit would’ve commit crimes for 20mbps growing up. And I was one of the lucky ones too