Cables or WiFi..?

[Nic Chase (NICO) - Shropshire & Mid-Wales AO]

The level of knowledge on this forum never ceases to amaze me   

Every day is a school day!!

[Peter (Monty)]

I'm not able to add network cables to my house so I use power line adapters, not quite as good, but a huge improvement over WiFi, especially due to the thick walls this house has.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

It's not just thick walls either, in some cases. The amount of steel used in some larger properties and apartments etc can be a problem, but one of the killer issues for wifi is the use of foil backed plasterboard and insulation boards, (like Kingspan).

I've got one customer in particular who's walls are so "bad" they have to have access points for the various RF based systems within every room you want to work them from, as there's little chance of seeing a workable signal a room away or so.

[Blatman]

I haven't been to a new build recently that doesn't have foil backed plasterboard in every room. Some also have cavity insulation as well. As Dave says these can be challenging for wifi, with the biggest challenge being trying to convince the owner of the dwelling that he needs an access point in every room to get wifi/internet. And for those without wifi calling the question of mobile phone signal crops up as well. We've discussed the various repeaters on here previously. 

[Blatman]

8 hours ago, Monty said:

I'm not able to add network cables to my house so I use power line adapters, not quite as good, but a huge improvement over WiFi, especially due to the thick walls this house has.

Powerline adapters work really well. For any area that can't be cabled these are perfectly acceptable. I see these things get frowned upon by some but in my experience they work plenty good enough, especially in a domestic environment. I tend to use TP-Link plugs that also have a couple of ethernet ports in them. This way I can cable devices like TV's etc as well as having wifi. Great for bedrooms/workshops/spare rooms where wifi is needed but where there are other things that would benefit from a reliable network connection.

Of course if the ultimate is required then a cupboard with a bunch of power, a patch panel and a small rack with shielded CAT6 or CAT7 is the gold standard although I doubt many of us would see the benefit especially when the slowest part of the vast majority of networks is the internet connection itself

[Man On The Clapham Omnibus]

My CCTV camera set-up comprises a 4 camera NVR on a TP-Link adapter via ethernet cable, and two IP cameras wirelessly reporting to powerline adapters local to each. Up until recently adding the two IP cameras caused the system to freeze in short order. My router (Netgear) seemed to be the cause after I'd eliminated the three powerling adapters, and I saw no solution. Until, that is, I saw a TP-Link Archer D2 router in a local charity shop for £3. In short, it has cured the freeze problem and it all works smoothly and correctly! Aren't charity shops brilliant!

[John K]

The foil backed plaster board is usually used in kitchens or bathrooms. I used it in the kitchen and effectively built a faraday cage. Wi-Fi disappears as soon as I walk in there...

Agree that for most folk the speed of your internet in does limit what you need.

But I tend to rip physical media to the NAS and then stream it about using a media server. So I do appreciate decent through put.

I get about 90MBps from the NAS to the media PC which is 720Mbps at approx x8.

It moved a 5gb media file across the LAN in 1min, quick enough for me

[Stuart]

What NAS do you use John?

[John K]

3 hours ago, Stuart said:

What NAS do you use John?

Its a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 quite old now, but has never missed a beat.

It has a proprietary RAID called RAID X, which I've never had to bother about. I initially fitted 2 x 4tb drives and added two more when required. Easy as you like to extend the storage 

I now run four Western Digital Red 2tb hdd giving 6tb of usable storage and single disk resilience.

Its been the backup for three laptops and hosted my media collection very happily.

At some point I will go to a new NAS cage with 4 x 4tb or 4 x 8tb Red's. It will be a Netgear again, just the latest model.

[corsechris]

Had bad experiences with small Netgear NAS boxes in the past. All fine until a drive fails, at which point you find there is no way to recover your data.

used a few QNAP 12 bay NAS crates back when I was employed, worked pretty well and handled drive failures gracefully when sensibly configured. Some peculiar behaviour with Windows domain security but the data was always safe. Best system I ever installed was an Isilon some years back, but that cost £36k and was proper enterprise level storage, probably a bit of overkill for a few choons......

[Stuart]

Thanks John.  I'm using a Netgear Readynas Ultra 2 which I think is the generation after yours.  Also uses RAID X and I've installed 2 x 3Tb WD Reds.  But my transfer speeds to/from the NAS are a fraction of yours even when cabled.  I'm not techy enough to even begin to figure out why

Chris I have had a drive fail on it and had no trouble whatsoever with it syncing a new one.  Took a while though.....

[johngill]

wifi is getting better I can transfer from laptop to qnap NAS at 70MB/sec admittedly live in timber frame bungalow.

[Blatman]

Quote

But my transfer speeds to/from the NAS are a fraction of yours even when cabled.  I'm not techy enough to even begin to figure out why

Anything from poor cable quality through to a slow NIC on the PC or maybe something like TCP windowing is slowing it down. Figuring it out would be a medium difficulty task for a PC/network engineer.

Quote

wifi is getting better I can transfer from laptop to qnap NAS at 70MB/sec admittedly live in timber frame bungalow.

That's pretty good for wifi. Is it wireless N or wireless AC and how did you measure it?

[johngill]

Its wireless ac via asus RT-AC68U router to a dell laptop with a killer wireless 1535 ac network adapter. The killer reports 866 mbps. The 70mbps was transfer speed when moving a 8gb file from laptop to nas via asus router (1gb cat 6 connection between router and nas).

[Blatman]

On 7/26/2017 at 21:02, johngill said:

Its wireless ac via asus RT-AC68U router to a dell laptop with a killer wireless 1535 ac network adapter. The killer reports 866 mbps. The 70mbps was transfer speed when moving a 8gb file from laptop to nas via asus router (1gb cat 6 connection between router and nas).

Yeah the Killer reports 866 Mb/s because that's the maximum speed possible in theory and it's what the router was programmed to say on that particular page. To actually see that speed across the wifi needs both host and router to have 4 antenna's, both need be able to fully utilise MIMO, interference must be almost zero and even then I doubt it would ever really happen in the real world. I get questioned on this ALL the time...

As for the wired speed, was that 70Mb/s or 70MB/s. The difference is crucial to working out what the speed was. 70Mb/s over a gigabit link is terrible. 70MB/s is 560Mb/s which is pretty good.