Mastodawn

Lemmings, please give us your info dump.

Nobody wants my info dump. I know way too much about networking and computers. The topics are massively deep, like iceberg levels of deep. One for each topic.

I would lecture for an entire day on the nuance and considerations of picking a Wi-Fi channel, or you can ignore me and just hit “auto” which may or may not take some, or all, of my considerations into account when selecting a channel.

If anyone is keen to hear some generally good advice about home networking, here’s my elevator speech:

Wire when you can, wireless when you have to. Wi-Fi is shared and half duplex, every wired connection is exclusive to the device and full duplex. If you can’t Ethernet, use MoCA, or powerline (depending on what internal power structures you have, this can be excellent or unusable, keep your receipts). Mesh is best with a dedicated backhaul, better with a wired backhaul. Demand it from any system you consider. The latest and greatest Wi-Fi technology probably won’t fix whatever problem you’re having, it will only temporarily reduce the symptoms and you won’t notice it for a while. Be weary about upgrading and ask yourself why you require the upgrade. Newer wireless won’t fix bad signal, or dropouts.

For everything else, Google. That’s how I find most of the information I know.

Good luck.

I’ll be around in case anyone has questions. No promises on when I’ll be able to reply tho.

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theorangeninja Feb 21

Thanks a lot for sharing you experience! I recently saw some people I follow on youtube talk about fibre as an alternative for ethernet cables, do you have an any experience with that?

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MystikIncarnate

Yes. Fiber is great but extremely nuanced. SMF, MMF, UPC, APC, OM3, OM4, OS2… All different parts of just the cabling… Not to mention the connectors, LC, SC… You get the idea.

Everyone I tend to talk to about it seem to think multi-mode is cheaper, and it can be, but in my experience, single mode is usually the better choice and usually not much of a price uplift if you’re buying from a good company. Look at FS.com and do some comparison shopping against them. They make some high quality stuff, and it’s at pretty incredible pricing for what you get, but the equipment can add up fast.

Multi mode can only really carry one connection per fiber and usually needs to be duplexed (two strands per link) while single mode can leverage WDM to carry multiple independent signals on different wavelengths. This can be leveraged for bi-directional single strand links, multiple links that are aggregated into a single connection in hardware (this is how 40Gbit works, it’s actually 4x10G connections on different wavelengths)…

It’s still more costly and requires more specialized equipment and training to work with, compared to copper Ethernet, so it’s pretty uncommon to see in residential or home networks.

YMMV. Good luck.