What’s the criteria?
Speed and reliability? Snakeboi.
Ability to move around unimpeded and/or taking a dump while being on Lemmy? $350 router with spikes.
And if prison rules, I’m going router with spikes…
Idk… I’ve got some pretty long snakey bois
SAME…ladies?
Reliability 100% the snakeboi
But for speed, WiFi can actually out-perform those particular snakebois in many scenarios.
In perfect conditions for Wi-Fi. I live in a high rise and the 2.4 Ghz band is hardly usable. My previous phone didn’t have dual band Wi-Fi and it was much faster on 4G than WiFi.
Plus, modern routers and APs often rely on band aggregation and so even with devices that have dual band, crowded airwaves will have a negative effect on speed.
Wi-Fi is very fast when I’m in my cabin in the countryside. But when I get home with the same devices, it’s barely usable.
You could argue that I need a better router with the newest protocol and gizmos but so far, even with new bands and protocols, Wi-Fi is still a competition of which router and devices will shout louder than their neighbors.
I would argue that the public needs to be better educated or at least saved from themselves with WiFi, however, nobody will be doing that. Having multiple lower-powered APs in a space can dramatically reduce how far outside of your premise the signal travels, and provide fast speeds indoors, however, it only takes one dummy to pick up a long-range AP, and put it in their apartment to ruin the wifi for everyone else around them.
Unless we start EM isolating apartments, or get everyone to start using modern lower-powered WiFi with multiple access points for coverage, things won’t change. I largely consider it to be impossible to fix WiFi in large buildings; especially established apartment buildings. No company is going to spend on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz isolation insulation to be installed between units just for their renters to have better WiFi, and the general public as a whole… well, it’s basically a fool’s errand to convince everyone to do anything without government regulation, and bluntly, the government, made of the same idiots that make up the general public, isn’t any better and won’t be forcing everyone to “do it correctly”… so we get this dystopian landscape of WiFi for any high-density area.
IMO, new builds don’t really have an excuse not to, it’s a trivial additional cost to install while things are being built, putting AP hookups in the ceilings, and WiFi blocking measures in the walls between units, but they still don’t, because cost. They want to spend nothing and collect huge rent payments for basically squatting on a plot of land.
Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.
Have that router. Snakey boy wins.
You must have forgotten to sharpen the spikes 😹
How do you find it? Do you manage the scary spikes?
If you flip it upside down it’s a Halloween spider decoration.
Cables are fine until that stupid clip breaks off and every nudge unplugs the fucking cable ever so slightly that it doesn’t work but you can’t see it.
I have a collection of 3d prints on thingiverse that reattach that part. Highly recommend.
It’s pretty easy to crimp a new one back on, and even easier with a 30 dollar tool.
This is why Pro level is to terminate all of your permanent cabling with punch down jacks and patch panels, then use throw-away patch cables from jacks to devices.
Easy fix with a tight layer of electrical tape to act as a wedge. You can also shove a toothpick in the top for extra staying power.
Get a crimp tool and a 50-pack of connectors. If one breaks, it takes all of 60 seconds to re-crimp the end and you’ll only lose about an inch of cable length.
I re-cabled my entire apartment when I first moved in. Best decision I ever made. I just used the existing Cat5 lines to pull my Cat6a instead. Apartment got a free upgrade to Cat6a (which they never even knew about, because I wasn’t going to lose a deposit over something stupid like “unapproved upgrades”) and I got my tasty gigabit.
I was trying to download Red Dead Redemption 2. It was like 120GB, and was going to take hours at 10Mbps on the existing Cat5. I quickly said “fuck that, I can run new lines in 45 minutes and have the download done in 20 minutes with gigabit.” Sure enough, about an hour later, I was playing my game.
I have zero experience with networking hardware. How hard is it to recable an apartment for a newb like me? How does that even work, do I gotta pull wires out of the walls?
Replacing connectors is east, but won’t solve your problem if the issue is bad cables in the walls. Pulling new cables entirely depends on how well they were installed. A lazy install will actually be much easier to replace, because a lazy installer won’t bother stapling cables in place. They’ll just run the cables across the attic/crawl space and leave it where it lands.
If you’re lucky and got a lazy installer, then you can be equally lazy; The old cable in the wall is going to be your pull line for your new cable. Step 1 is figuring out which lines are which. This is easier with something like a cable sniffer, but there are a few ways to do it. But assuming you know which cables are which, the rest is fairly straightforward.
Use electrical tape to affix the old cable to the new one. Just make a bend on each cable, hook the resulting bends together, then wrap them tightly with electrical tape. The bends hooked together allow the cable to hold the strain, rather than the adhesive on the tape. And you want to use electrical tape because it stretches. Pulling it tight when you wrap ensures that the tape will compress the cables with every wrap. You also want to try to make the connection as “smooth” as possible, so it won’t snag on anything when you pull it.
Now that the old cable is attached to the new, just grab the other end of the old cable and start pulling. It’ll drag the new cable through the wall for you as you pull it out of the wall. Fair warning this is much easier if you have someone feeding the new cable in as you pull, to ensure it doesn’t snag on anything as it enters the wall. It also only reliably works on installs without a lot of bends and corners; Every corner you have to pull around is another potential corner to get snagged on. If you get snagged, sometimes pulling it backwards (tugging on the new cable entering the wall) can help you reset to try again. But sometimes there’s no replacement for good old fashioned legwork; If you get really stuck, or your tape comes undone, or your cable breaks from the strain, you may need to go crawling around your attic to fix it. This is a fast method, but it’s not 100% reliable.
No pulling wires from walls, just cutting the ends off and installing new connectors. Might not be enough in every case though.
Crimping took me like 5 attempts to get right when I learned it in school.
Well until you have to guide that snaky boy through the whole apartment and through door frames.
If you connect both ends of that snakey boi into the router then you’ll find out who wins real quick
That shouldn’t be a problem for a thing built in the last decade for sure.
My router handles that just fine?
It’s a newer version of Spike, too.
I ran mine through the ceiling vents when I rented in college lol
Depends, am i routing data or cosplaying the lich king?
Fucking millennials. Learn to multitask.
Wrong generation
I’m pretty sure the love for Warcraft III evenly splits X and Y.
Indeed, i’m genx
deleted by creator
We ran snakey boys throughout the house using command hooks on the ceiling when my wife and I had to go WFH 3 years ago.
The temporary fix is still going strong. At this point, the place would look weird without hastily strung up CAT5 all over the place.
I’ve had a line across my hall since early 2020 like some college apartment…😣
That’s 3+ years of stable internet, friend! Who cares how it’s run?
This is quality
Image Transcription:
An image titled “who would win?”
On the left side is an image of an Asus RT-AC5300 Tri-Band Wireless Gigabit Router, a square, black router with a red line around the side near the upper edge, and 8 antennas coming up from the bottom. The text beneath the image reads “A $350 router with scary spikes”
On the right side is a blue Cat6 ethernet cable. The text beneath this image reads “A $3 snakey boi”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes@lemmy.world!]
I’m guessing snakey boy is copper clad aluminum though.
Wait, are CCA ethernet cables actually a thing?
Yes, all over Amazon.
My favourite thing is to hear people talk about having ‘great WiFi’ as if that is an internet connection.
I used to work for spectrum. I’d say around 60% of people legit do not know the difference between wifi and Internet. No wifi means no Internet, to them. Makes some trouble shooting harder
Them: “The WiFi is down.”
Me: ‘… No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.’
Them: “I can’t connect to Flipboard.”
Me: ‘Ohhh, the internet is down. It’s probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.’
Them: “Yep, now the WiFi is back.”
