[NovemberWhiskey]

Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.

[Dalewyn]

I routinely cap out at ~10MB/s over 5GHz Wifi 6 (wireless AX). This obviously depends on your hardware and environment, but needless to say I always just connect good old copper if I need speed.

Also: Do not trust those "<four digits> mbps over wifi!" claims on marketing, they're all worthless horseshit. The numbers are derived from ideal conditions you would never find in the real world.

[supertrope]

I agree that those "AX9000" marketing numbers are fake.

>This obviously depends on your hardware and environment

This is the key point. If you have:

A high link rate client.

A high link rate access point.

Line of sight between the two, same room.

A low utilization and interference channel.

No one else heavily using your Wi-Fi.

Non-bad drivers for Wi-Fi.

Then TCP throughput of about 1/2 to 2/3 link rate is possible. 1200 Mbps link rate yields 600-700 Mbps speed tests. Some applications have small TCP windows so their throughput drops on 5 ms latency wireless versus <1 ms wired.

Yes if you plug you always get 920 Mbps throughput.

[NovemberWhiskey]

I mean, I literally see 1.2Gb/s over Wifi 6E from my MacBook Air M3 to my NAS, which is more than I get over wired GigE. So that's not marketing, that's (very-micro) real-world benchmarking.

I do live in a house on a 1.5 acre parcel, so I'm not getting much congestion on the Wifi bands. Even so, I would regularly get 400Mb/s on Wifi 6 in our condo in NY where you could see 30 or more networks.

[Dalewyn]

I do nightly backups of my critical machines to a central server, some are connected wirelessly. The server is obviously hard wired.

Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s. I might see it go up to ~30MB/s if I'm lucky, but we're talking pigs flying over blue moons.

The wireless machines range from "one wall away" to "other side of the bloody house", but they're all the same. Even if I get one one sitting right next to the router it won't do more than ~10MB/s. I'm also located in the middle of nowhere in terms of EMI, so the air is clear.

Wireless is bullshit. If you need speed, just run copper and save yourself the grief. You only use wireless when the convenience of not running copper and/or being mobile trumps the lack of speed and reliability.

[NovemberWhiskey]

>Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s.

If your backup mechanism is chatty/latency-sensitive, then that would affect overall throughput. Content streaming is neither of those things though.