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by dasl 1829 days ago
A couple of months ago, another setup for a wifi to ethernet bridge was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26940521

I like Will Haley's setup better though, because it keeps everything in the same subnet.

The slowdown from the bridge is negligible, in my experience. After running 10 trials, I found that:

* median ping was 2.4% higher on the bridged pi

* median download speed was 3.6% slower on the bridged pi

* median upload speed was 0.1% slower on the bridged pi

More details about my setup and how I performed this speedtest: https://github.com/dasl-/pitools/tree/main/wifi-ethernet-bri...
1 comments
PragmaticPulp 1829 days ago
> * median ping was 2.4% higher on the bridged pi

Pings are best compared in absolute terms as the latency of the Pi would be additive, not multiplicative.

I looked at your results and the Pi appears to add 0.6ms, which is indeed very negligible!

Thanks for sharing detailed results

link
KingMachiavelli 1829 days ago
Even download & upload should be posted as bride/no-bridge speeds. Assuming they meant internet upload/download then it makes a big difference if you are testing using a 50Mbps internet connection or 500Mbps.

I'd be very curious of the Wifi & Ethernet can both operate at link saturation speeds so 1Gbit on the Ethernet. While the 4B has AC WiFi, just quick search shows it can only hit ~120Mbps with maybe 200Mbps maybe being achievable with some tweaks. At best it can do 480Mbps.

Considering the 4B costs ~$80, you would be better off buying a dedicated bridge. I think any Ubiquity AP can be used as a bridge for example. An old router would also work. I have a hard time thinking of a situation where you would want a 1-many bridge but don't need decent bandwidth. i.e most situations where minimal throughput is OK means you probably only need 1 raspberry pi for the task anyway.

Still it's a pretty decent project and good intro to networking.

link