[Karunamon]

To be a bit pedantic, lag and throughput aren't the main bugbears for wireless anymore, it's stability. If you live or work in a reasonably populated area, there is often enough Wi-Fi pollution around to make things like gaming or video calls painful. Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time, the problem is it will occasionally spike to 200 or 2000 for a moment and there's very little you can do about it.

[falcolas]

100% - it's these occasional spikes which honk everything up. Google meets immediately assumes your internet is crap and degrades the client, you become a robot to your listeners, and recovery takes noticeably longer than the few hundred MS it occurred in.

[vel0city]

> Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time

If you're getting 20ms to your AP you're in a pretty poor environment or you need to upgrade away from 802.11b.

While on a video call on my laptop just now, while my home theater receiver is streaming internet radio over WiFi, while I've got a dozen other devices active on my WiFi, my average latency to my router is ~1ms. Running a speed test on my phone pushing pulling >500Mbit, my latency spiked...to 12ms!

Just like with the rest of this discussion about Bluetooth being bad, if you've got poor equipment and a poor environment you're gonna have a bad time. I have some cheap USB WiFi adapters which are terrible and struggle to get good performance. I don't use those except for temporary things or when I just don't care about network performance. I don't have issues with the Intel WiFi chips on my desktop or laptops or my Ubiquiti APs.

[rockostrich]

Thank you. My ping to my router from everywhere in my house on WiFi (even my roof, 3 story row house with an AP on each floor) is 5 ms. So stupid to run wire across a living room when you could just have decent networking equipment.

[jaywalk]

20ms to your router? That's horrendous.

[rockostrich]

I live in a city. Opening my wifi menu on my MBP, I see dozens of networks. I've never really experienced any spikes like you mentioned every with gaming or video calls.

[t-3]

It probably heavily depends on your networking equipment. Most modern APs should have interference detection, MIMO, beamforming, variable channel width, etc., but if you're on 2.4GHz in a crowded building with thin walls I'd imagine things could get pretty hairy. Even in ideal conditions, wireless will have far more dropped packets, transport overhead, power draw, etc.