Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Ethernet is becoming a niche like physical media. It’s just not practical to connect a bunch of wires from one router to multiple rooms on multiple floors.
It really is. Even today, many homes are not wired for home networking. I’ve done it in the last two houses I’ve owned, but it’s been too cost-prohibitive in my current home. I’ve worked around it for some critical things by using ethernet-over-powerline modules, but a lot of streaming is done via wifi in my house.
It’s the same reason 5G cell providers are getting into home internet. Of course, wires are always going to be better than radio waves, but holy moly are radio waves cheaper to produce! I’m lucky enough that my home already had CAT6 cables everywhere but if I was starting fresh a mesh wifi system would be far more economical.
At work, we are 100% cabled. At home, as much as possible is cabled.
I do have wireless APs on each floor, but they are cabled to the router in the cellar. At some point, we will have to re-wire the house and then we will put CAT 7 in all rooms.
My daughter and her husband are in the middle of rebuilding a house at the moment and they are laying CAT 7 to every room.
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The only time I’ve resorted to cable was when Stadia (RIP) wouldn’t run reliably on a Samsung TV with HDR10 enabled. But WiFi and a Panasonic TV worked fine. Never got to the bottom of that one.
Very limited what I can do here with solid stone walls, no ceiling voids and flagstone floors. I don’t want surface-mount wire everywhere.
But it all seems to work great. My mesh QoS can be optimised for streaming, you can prioritise streaming boxes. Never have issues.
There’s a famous (I believe) quote, maybe attributed to Marshall McLuhan (unsure where it originated):
Everything wired is becoming wireless and everything wireless is becoming wired.
Telephones: once wired (POTS), now all wireless (LTE)
TV: once wireless (antenna), now wired (cable)
Internet: once wired (CAT5), now [frequently] wireless (WiFi)
Never the less, you really should wire most rooms in your home if that is at all an option. You can always plug a wireless AP into the wired jack in the room and remain wireless, but you will still have much better experience (less buffering and drops) than if you have to deal with just one central wired AP.
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Less and less of my devices have an ethernet port (without some kind of adapter or dongle). Personally, I don’t see the value in installing it anymore. Have had very few quality issues with my wifi mesh streaming two 4k AppleTVs and multiple computers/phones/tablets/speakers etc. on the same network in multiple rooms. Mostly the problems I do see is on Xfinity’s end which would affect ethernet too.
Well you are an exception, and not the norm, I’m afraid. Everyone is always complaining about the issues with WiFi. If you ever experience a guest on any TWiT show who is on WiFi they are always the one who sound bad, with drops, cuts and robotic voice episodes. In my own house, I have wireless mesh and I still have problems with my neighbours who have poorly configured their WiFi to be “louder” than mine and causing issues.
All I can say is enjoy your lucky situation, and hope it always stays great for you. For anyone complaining about their situation, try wireless mesh with wired backhaul.
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With regard to QR codes, they are just barcodes and can contain any information, the German post office replaced franking machines with QR codes over a decade ago, likewise rail tickets etc are all QR codes.
I’d guess, a very small percentage of codes contain URLs.
I’m an exception too. My mesh just works.
Being on one of TWiTs panels is worst-case I guess. But hasn’t @Leo said some of the issues (delay) is due to their configuration? It’s multiple video calls being combined in real time?
My wife spends hours on Zoom calls with participants worldwide. Has no issues.
The delays are one thing, but having the feed stutter or drop out is another matter entirely.
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Yeah. We don’t get those though. She’s even done music lessons over Zoom. Worked well once we’d found the ‘original sound’ option.
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We won’t let guests use Wi-fi. Even the best wireless network steup will pause from time to time to let other signals through.
This is mostly a problem for real-time communications like Zoom/Skype but I’m very happy we spent some bucks on wiring all the desks and media centers in the house during quarantine. That and the Ubiquiti wi-fi access points have mostly eliminated the “honey, the Internet’s down” issues.
That’s unrelated to the overtalking issues on the show. We’re in the process of moving to ZoomISO (per Alex Lindsay’s reccomendation) which should significantly reduce the latency and overtalking on our shows. (Fingers crossed.)
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I was hoping the new iPad would be an update to the existing $329 iPad. My kids are at age where I think they’ll get their first ‘real’ device for X-mas this year. They previously had kiddie Kindles that are on their last legs. And while the $329 iPad will still be just fine, and my kids won’t care, that still means the lightning cables will stick around my house for many years to come.
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