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Tbf this is the universes way of punishing you for using your computer and console on wifi
My rule is if the device doesn’t move much (or at all), it should have a wired connection.
Basically my phone and my watch are the only devices in the house on WiFi.
Yeah, anything sensitive to latency will have a wired connection in my home. It’s non-negotiable.
I’ve got my watch on ethernet. The connection is rock solid, but it’s a bugger to get around.
Remember those curly telephone cords that stretched out to like 40ft when your mom walked around the house while on the phone and you had to dodge the cord like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment? And then the cord shrunk back to like 8ft when she hung the phone back on the cradle on the wall. And the next time your mom hung up the phone, the cord was like 10ft long with a bunch of kinks and twists. And the next time she hung the cord was like 12ft long and starting to bunch on the floor. And eventually there was like 30ft of telephone cord on the floor under the cradle that just gets kicked out of the way into the nearest corner and collects dust bunnies until the next time the phone rings and your mom answers and walks all around the house like she always does. (I could keep going but I don’t know where it will end.) Remember those curly telephone cords?
You need a curly ethernet cord like that for your watch. It could help to get around.
Also, what model watch do you have that has an ethernet port? My watch works fine but my gf is always complaining about a rock solid connection so I’m thinking about getting a new one.
Oh to have possible cable access
Gotta make it happen it’s a huge improvement, even if that means running a big cable taped to the wall
Run it down the hall and throw a runner rug over it!
just make sure if you do that, its an armoured cable (not the flat ones!), so crushing it doesn’t hurt the cable.
you can get extra wide duct tape and make a channel in the corner of your ceiling and wall to run lots of cables as well
Powerline ethernet to the rescue!
Also possible to do if you have multiple coax outlets in your building.
Why is the neighbor living in the Harry Potter closet?
For the free WiFi of course
Where is the red spot on the toilet?
I’m literally studying this for my next exam…
… this is a cry for help
Perhaps it would help if you studied the actual exam material instead?
Ahahah, I meant this as in “this subject”
You have an exam about why my neighbor’s WiFi connection is better than my own?
You can do a degree in anything these days
Oh cool, where can I get a degree in shitposting?
It’s called viral marketing.
Your neighbor is on an older router that does 2.4ghz, lower frequencies penetrate walls better
That’s a rough approximation but yeah, pretty much
This diagram is only missing that one super speed zone into another dimensions high speed internet that is hidden up in the attic during the season just before Christmas as you dig through your stored belongings and wonder why you have so many dumb yard inflatables.
Wired + Mesh Wifi is the best combo. House not wired? Try powerline Ethernet. It does degrade the more you have so I only have it for my computer and PS5.
That’s what I have. My house is quite long, so I’m guessing my landlord ran a cable from the front wall in the lounge through to the office/bedroom at the back upstairs. As a result, we have two mesh nodes hardwired to the router, then a wireless one in the middle to just fill in any gaps. I’ve never had better wifi.
Sounds like you might have lead paint or thick cement in the walls.
I would just add another node using a powerline near your most popular spots. I would limit it to 2 max.
I have one AP on the west side of the house pointing east, and one of the east side pointing west… great signal everywhere. Don’t have ethernet in the walls? Run it. I took 4 hours out of a Saturday to buy cable, fish tape, a crimp tool, some ends and some wall outlets and wired up my whole house with the help of youtube. No, I don’t do that for work. Oh, and I had to get a 12 inch drill bit, apparently I have 3 2by4s in a row up in the ceiling.
This requires not renting. A luxury not all of us have.
Eh, just sell one of your vacation homes (not the cabin obviously) and buy a quick house just to see if it works. Better than not knowing!
Eh, just rip it all out when the lease is up. /s
Honestly, just don’t settle for the shitty router that your service came with, get that damn thing out from behind the TV or wherever it shouldn’t be, get it up close to the ceiling somehow, and you’ll probably never want to use a fishtape even if you can.
Mesh networks are probably the solution for apartment dwellers. The routers all act as one router but are separate smaller routers that talk to each other so you can put them all around the house, and you just need to plug them into power. No mods to the apartment are required, it’s all wireless. The catch is expense, but if you buy once, and cry once, then it becomes like a piece of nice furniture that moves with you.
But again, one $40 modern router that isn’t the shitty combo unit from the ISP, keep it up high and unblocked, get enough extra Cat cable to reach where you put it, and you might be happy enough with that.
Hell, get the router out from behind the TV if that’s where you put it (everyone tries putting it there to hide it) and you might get all the signal you need.
Look into powerline, it uses your electrical lines to transfer ethernet. it doesn’t work in every house but when it does its pretty great!
Powerline is alright if you have literally no other option but I’d take wifi instead 10/10 times unless my PC was trapped inside a Faraday cage.
Powerline has much better latency (and much more consistent latency) than wifi, so it’ll give you a better experience for stuff like gaming. Depending on how exactly your house is wired and what else you have on the circuit it can have reliability problems (although if you live in a dense area wifi isn’t exactly reliable), but if your house is suitable it works very well, I used it about 5 years with no problems.
I’m currently using powerline because running an ethernet cable across the apartment seemed gaudy at best. The suggestion of a flat white cable stuck to the wall seems interesting.
I have the modem and router on a UPS because power flickers semi-regularly here. Sadly, powerline cannot go on a UPS.
I’ve been renting for the past 7 years. You can buy flat, white Ethernet cables that can be fixed to the walls with sticky clips. It’s less ugly than the round cables and while obviously not earthquake proof, the clips do a fairly good job at keeping the cable in the corner.
Oh, perhaps I have a project.
Powerline ethernet uses your existing electrical cables as the network cables, but on a different frequency. Beware when using in shared units such as apartments.
How you run it through walls?
If you live somewhere that’ll let you then access to a crawlspace like an attic will let you do this
For example at my place getting into the above house crawlspace lets me access the insides of my walls from above. Simply run Ethernet from above where you’ll want each end of a plug to be, then drop it down and put it in place through a cheap (like .45c) Ethernet wall adapter. Hardest part is cutting the hole into your wall for said wall plug
I’m simplifying a bit but honestly it’s incredibly easy to buy a length of Ethernet wiring and some rj-45s, Google how to wire them, and run it yourself. I ran a short wire across a room once and it only took like an hour. Would be less in future now that I have experience
I wish I knew more about networking.
Today is the day to wish no longer
A list of advice and solutions I’ve had to come up with in the past:
Use ethernet where possible for the best results.
Put the router in a better spot for better reception. Use better insulation so the neighbour’s AliExpress baby monitor doesn’t wipe out your WiFi signal. Use 5GHz WiFi when possible for better speeds, sometimes even at lower signal to noise ratios.
Do not place WiFi routers behind metal objects or reinforced concrete if possible. Same for plants, not because WiFi causes some kind of cancer, but because plants contain water and water absorbs a lot of radiation.
Don’t buy WiFi hardware that sells itself as “high power” because WiFi that reaches four houses over is useless if your energy efficient phone doesn’t have enough power to actually send data back.
Look for WiFi 6, 6E, or 7 labels on boxes. MIMO is also very useful; it helps with network throughput. Higher AxB numbers are better (i.e. 3x3 is better than 2x1) but beyond 2x2 you’ll need multiple devices at the same time to make use of all that bandwidth. Do not use range extenders wirelessly, plug them into an ethernet cable. If you do use range extenders or mesh networks, don’t place them somewhere where you don’t get any signal, place them at the furthest point where the WiFi is still usable.
Never trust anything measuring in bars. Phones will overestimate the number of bars, WiFi drivers will lie about them to make it sound like their reception is better, and there is no standard indicator for “how well reception is” that translates into the bars in your status icon. Measure dBm if you have to measure something (a negative number, closer to 0 is better).
Disable software that spams your entire WiFi network, such as the software for certain Logitech mice. These things will interrupt WiFi streams to push packets through, waking up the WiFi chip in all of your device’s, draining the battery faster.
If your internet connection is slow, no amount of WiFi improvements will speed it up. Make sure your incoming connection and the cables to your WiFi equipment are good before you try to fix the WiFi signal.
For the best signal, buy decent WiFi access points and don’t rely on a router in a closet somewhere. If you’re somewhat technical, Ubiquity is a decent balance between user friendliness versus WiFi performance. Attach them to your ceiling and hook them up with ethernet for the best results.
Mesh WiFi can help, but if you get it, don’t mix brands. Like with range extenders, put up mesh devices where they can still reach each other well. Mesh WiFi is much better than range extenders, even if the technology seems to be the same, because of differences in how well they’re integrated and how many WiFi antennae are contained within devices.
If you get multiple routers, try to configure the as access points and hook them up with ethernet. Make sure you don’t chain routers behind each other in standard router mode, unless you know what the downsides of double NAT are, or you’ll have all kinds of stupid issues (“only some computers can see the printer”, “my game only works on this WiFi network”, “why does the PlayStation report different”).
Sometimes people blame IPv6 for their issues. IPv6 is very very rarely the cause and disabling it will hide the problem from you but cause issues in the background. If you disable IPv6 on your device, you’ll run into very weird errors (the “my photos app doesn’t start on Tuesdays” kind of weird, because apps don’t expect it to be off), so only do so on the network level. If you disable IPv6 on your network, make sure you (know how to) use an IPv4-only capable DNS server or you’ll get tons of error messages.
Another IPv6 thing: don’t disable IPv6 privacy extensions on your devices, and never disable the IPv6 firewall on your router entirely (you may want to disable it for specific devices, but that’s optional). I highly recommend learning about IPv6 if you haven’t already, because it’s inevitable but there’s still a huge lack of understanding even among the supposed experts.
Question because you seem knowledgeable on mesh. I’ve got a network that spans a large area. I connected 3 mesh network aps to one switch which connects to my main router. Should the aps still be close together, or I’m good to spread them a bit since they’re all hard wired?
If they’re all hard wired, I don’t think you need to worry much about the mesh functionality at all. Wired networks can effectively be placed wherever they’re necessary, the only thing mesh will solve for you is wireless extensibility in the future and automatic switching between access points. I don’t know for sure how the wired backplane of different brands work (and if they all even come with wired interoperability at all) and if the devices can run without being in range of each other at all.
I haven’t needed to deal with this myself, but you may need to create some minor overlap for automatic hand-off to work well, so movable devices like phones automatically connect to the closest access point. You wouldn’t want two networks with equal, bad reception, because there’s a chance devices may flip-flop between access points constantly. I believe manufacturers should have documentation for this stuff if it’s important, though as long as the routers can “see” each other this should be dealt with automatically.
Close vicinity is only important if the routers use a wireless network to connect to each other. Even then the antennae and bands used for the interconnection are likely much more powerful than those of your phone or laptop. You’ll likely have some kind of app or web interface that’ll tell you how well connected the wireless devices are, and that’s probably the best guide to finding the boundaries of the signal.
That said, “close vicinity” can mean anywhere from 5 meters to 50 meters. The exact requirements depend on the interference you get and the obstacles between the different devices. Sometimes moving a mesh router 15 centimeters to the left can be the difference between spotty WiFi and perfect speeds.
Thank you for the response! I’ll look to see if the proprietary app has tips on this. Thanks!
i mean this isn’t really a networking thing, it’s just waves being blocked or reflected such that different areas have different coverage.
it’s like trying to read an optician’s letter poster in a house made of glass of varying opacity.
Really good analogy.
It just goes to show ya that you don’t need your router when you’re stealing the neighbor’s wifi.
Don’t use the isp’s router/modem, it’s terrible in general.
Use it as an access point for better coverage if you don’t have to pay for it separately, but not as the primary router
Based on this image, the router is unidirectional and is simply pointing the wrong way. This is why you shouldn’t use something like a Ubiquiti Nano as a router. :p
Dude am typing this on my neighbors wifi XD. Btw they left the 5ghz band public so have been using it for the past 1 year or so. Lol its quite fast too!
I’ve been doing that for 6 years when I didn’t have internet connection. I was 8 when I got a first smart device, Android tablet. One of the first things I tried was connecting to Wi-Fi of all neighbors. 2 of them had the ultra-secure password “12345678”. I remember the first website I visited was Wikipedia.
However, I have tried to not spend too much data. I only watched videos in low quality (240p) and browsed the web. For downloading large files (which I considered anything above 50MB at the time) I’ve used public networks. Usually at the bus station or a nearby pub.
Sometime later I got access to even more Wi-Fi networks using the convenient “WPS WPA Tester” app. Like a third of all networks used one of the default PINs.
This will seem counterintuitive, but if this is your actual layout, move your wireless AP to either where the bed is or where the xbox is, assuming there’s power and wiring in either spot for it.
It’s not, it’s just a stupid meme I stole from somewhere else.
