An ethernet connection is a must for me. Unless I'm traveling somewhere and need to log in on someone else's network, it's a pain to deal with wifi's slow speeds and connection issues, even in 2022.
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This is probably highly subjective, but I rarely have WiFi issues. I think primary driver there is investing in a stable home networking equipment.
Even with high end networking equipment (at work), I have found WiFi introduces a lot of latency which is noticeable when e.g. SSHing to other machines.
I’m in no ways an expert on this, so someone please correct me if it’s wrong, but one of the things that I learned that was surprising was that one client with marginal reception can really dominate the airtime with retries, effectively DOSing your wifi network. So good coverage is also pretty key.
That may explain why some people have more trouble with wifi than others. I have a lot of wifi devices, but I also have four ubiquiti access points with good overlapping coverage. Using wifi instead of wired ethernet costs me about 1.5ms more latency.
Can you quantify "a lot of latency"? It should be...a few microseconds more latency? I have to guess the high end networking equipment was configured incorrectly or something. I ssh to machines on my network from wired and wireless devices and it is impossible to tell what kind of network you're on when doing so.
Latency highly depends on interference and attenuation. If you’re sitting right next to a 5 GHz AP that’s used exclusively by you, then your latency should be minimal. If you’re trying to connect to a router behind a couple of brick walls, or your roommate is using a leaky microwave, or you’re in a convention where everyone’s trying to connect to the same WiFi, then you’ll notice it in a video call, multiplayer shooter, slow-loading webpage, or anywhere else where double-digit-% dropped packets matter.
Latency is a few tens of ms (milliseconds) larger. It's not that much, but it matters to me.
It's like keyboards, as measured by Dan Luu [1]. I can totally feel the difference between some listed on that web.
Stacks are adding up a lot of latency, and I'm trying to remove as much as I can from my configuration.
An extreme comparison is to run Emacs in text mode with Ethernet, a good wired connection and USB Magic Keyboard vs Emacs on a heavy desktop environment, WiFi and a laggy wireless keyboard. Night and day difference. On the second one, there's a lot of lag.
It's going to be more than microseconds for point to multipoint Wifi.
Depending on signal strength, contention, hardware quality, WiFi mode, etc, you'll get multiple milliseconds.
Right now I checked and got 20ms+/-5. 802.11n, decent signal strength, very low interference (rural location).
In midtown Manhattan 2.4 GHz is useless. Webpages take up to a minute and sometimes multiple attempts to load.
More typical latency figures: https://hpbn.co/wifi/#measuring-your-wifi-first-hop-latency
Wi-Fi latency 5-10 ms typically, and highly variable. I'm on fiber, and my wi-fi doubles or triples the latency to close data centers (about 5 ms from here in Annapolis to Ashburn VA).
I agree with you, but:
-- It took a lot of years to get here.
-- It took expensive equipment to get here.
-- I'm lucky that my house doesn't have a lot of brick or steel or some other material that blocks signals
-- I still believe that wired is more secure.
-- When it's wired, I know it's either working or it's my ISPs fault. When it's wireless, I'm left doubting.
Based on the anecdote Inread home wifi works great, other network APs do not.