| Q: 1a. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical barrier? A: WiFi does not exceed the price/performance of hard-wired Ethernet. They are different enough it is difficult to compare properly - for instance, for wired Ethernet, do you include the cost of the wire installation, termination, etc? I don't think it is reasonable to include - complex wiring gets more expensive - potentially by an order of magnitude! Fiber can be much more expensive than copper.. or cheaper. Fiber transcievers get very expensive for very long distances (miles) etc. So to do a simple comparison - 10GbE vs. Wifi. Let assume you are adding these to a computer which doesn't have them. The Wifi adapter is $26.90
A 2.5GbE adapter is $30 What about the network switch? (or wifi access point) Typically with wired ethernet, you do this as a "cost per port" - currently about $25/port on the low end (rated at 10Gbps, by the way, but able to step down to 2.5Gbps). This (top performing "high end") Wifi router runs $250. It may officially support 200+ clients but that just means it can theoretically talk to them at all. Good luck pushing actual data to/from them! In practice, to match up in cost/performance with a 10 port ethernet switch, it would need to drive the full 2.5Gbps for 10 clients simultaneously! I guarantee you it can't. And the price equation only gets better if you go full 10Gbps - which is probably the "sweet spot" right now for price/performance, buying in SOHO-sized quantities. Q1b: The ethernet standard is pretty excellent, and currently goes to 400Gbps, and if you have the cash to buy 400Gbps equipment - you can basically expect it to work to spec - if the switch fabric says it will support X Tbps concurrently - it will. Good luck with that on Wifi. There is a TON of demand - you just don't see it in your house. Or your neighbor's house. Or your friend's house. You should though! Ethernet is AWESOME - and back when we had wired landlines, people ran those wires all over their house. It isn't that hard, or that expensive, and you'll get MUCH better, more predictable performance from doing it, and moving as many devices as you can to wired ethernet. Even your WiFi access point benefits from an ethernet cable running to a location where it's signal works best, rather than some closet off in the corner of your house. Q2: Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer? In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all blasting full strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi performance actually near as good as wired performance? A: No, real life wifi is nowhere near as good as ethernet. Switch to ethernet as much as you can! Of course, it doesn't make much sense to run an ethernet cable to the tablet you read sitting on your couch. But every desk, printer(?), your WAP(s), etc. |