Building or kitting out your home: WiFi or Ethernet?
To 802.11 or to RJ45 — the perennial question. My pal Jeremy is outfitting his new place, and is on the fence about a wireless or wired home network. As a former network engineer, it’s a question I can hardly resist. My take: wireless is great (and always necessary), but wire your home as much and as well as you can.
Reasons not to rely solely on wireless:
- Inconsistent speed and range.
- Constant concern of having network traffic captured/cracked if you allow any legacy access.
- Depending on the house/setup, multiple APs may be necessary.
- Multiple points to maintain or fail. Consumer WiFi devices require constant restarts… besides, do you want to update firmware/configs on two or three APs?
Reasons for hard Ethernet:
- Consistent speeds and reliable connectivity.
- Future-proofing: some good quality Cat6 line will do gigabit now, and probably 10 gig later. Wireless? It’s 2008 and 802.11n (which you’ll be lucky to get 100Mbps on) still isn’t even done yet — don’t count on speeds catching up to Ethernet any time soon.
- Many devices charge extra for (or simply don’t support) WiFi. It’s seriously baffling, no question about it, but your Xbox 360, TiVo, Slingbox, and probably printer, etc. isn’t wireless out of the box. (Besides, who wouldn’t prefer having wired latency rates when playing some CoD4 online?)
- Some devices support PoE (power over Ethernet). Suck on that, WiFi.
- If you really MUST do wireless, local Ethernet can always be used to hook up more APs.
That isn’t to say that a modern home should be wired-only, because you’ll probably want to use your iPhone or laptop from your living room, and there will always have guests over who need to get online. Ethernet is in no way the sole answer for any network environment, home or corporate. But I’m a big fan of hard-wiring as much as I possibly can, while leaving a single, well-secured, non-legacy WiFi AP running in an area that services those devices that tend to come and go. Everything else gets a cable. And hell, if you really don’t want to invest in a decent in-home Cat5/6 infrastructure, there’s always powerline networking!
I'm an editor and technology critic in the midst of founding a new web startup: 
Completely agree with you on all points. My home is wired with Cat 5e in all the rooms that have network devices. We also have an 802.11n network in place for notebooks, and a separate g network for iPhones.
With all my network drives (which thankfully have gigabit), streaming of DVD-rips, and heavy file transfers, 802.11n just wasn’t good enough – you almost have to wait till the next standard starts coming out, for the current one to be reliable.
So I went to 1-gig Cat6. Definitely worth it.
My house is set up just like Andru’s. We have an 802.11n Airport Extreme we leave on and have never touched, then we also have 802.11n Airport Express’ set up for music. Wherever possible we use ethernet though.
At my girlfriends we set up ethernet throughout the apartment, and then just plug the Express in to the ethernet when required. It’s already powered, so as soon as it gets DHCP (<3 seconds) it’s up and running for use on the couch or the bath or wherever.
I’m an electrical engineer for an architecture firm and I completely agree with you that wired networks are by far better than wireless. For any new building I work on, a wired network is always the first choice and wireless AP’s are secondary.
However, when it comes to renovations, that’s a whole other set of issues. Cutting into walls and floors is usually not the most cost-effective method to provide networking to an existing building, so wireless becomes a much better option. Of course, every project is different, and if the budget allows, I would put in wired networking drops everywhere. Labor is 50% of the equation and the harder something is to accomplish, the more expensive it will be.
With the cost of wireless equipment so low, it’s still the most cost effective way to provide a computer network in the average home. Power ethernet is still a bit expensive and when it comes down it price, it will look like a good alternative to wireless. Wireless has really improved since the 802.11b/g days and I have had a lot less connection problems with my 802.11n AP. There are security issues, of course, and everyone needs to lock down their wireless as much as possible.
Another issue is the cost of copper is going up and this will further force the development of the speed and security of wireless. Wired networks will always have the advantage, but wireless is getting closer every day.
All your points are spot-on. 90% of the traffic in my home goes over our WiFi network, but Ethernet still has its place. I would add two more examples of why wired is always good to have:
1) Network-based backups. Need to back up your entire 160gb drive in your Windows laptop – it’s going to be painfully slow over WiFi … even if your NAS has a gigabit hookup to your home router. Put CAT6 in the walls, and when you need to do a full backup – just go hardwired for a bit.
2) Devices that don’t support WiFi. My employer recently sent me a VPN appliance from Cisco, for in-home secured access to certain corporate assets. Yup, hard-wired connection only for its WAN link. Fortunately, I had two CAT6 jacks wired in my office, so I just plugged it in and was ready to go.
Who needs wifi? If you have a guest just have an ethernet cable ready they can plug into and for your iPhones just steal your neighbors wifi. That’s what I…wait…nvm…
I use wireless a lot, and am still learning about wired- (for wired) which would you use; switches or routers?
Yeap, 110% agreed and one more reason to wire it, is to hope for a good NAS and Gigabit ethernet attached storage so your light notebook can access those HD photo/audio/videos without the hickups.
My house = HomePlug and WiFi.
I use HomePlug for all the connections to the fixed devices (router, slingbox, media center etc.) and then have a WiFi AP sitting there for the laptops etc.
Best of both worlds, the speed of the homeplug (ethernet over power) is noticeably faster than wifi, particularly when it comes to latency.
:)
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[...] But Ryan Block, on the eve of his departure as Engadget’s editor-in-chief, made the case for wiring your house up. WiFi or Ethernet? As a former network engineer, it’s a question I can hardly resist. My take: [...]
I know I am the only crazy one here, but: what about the unknown influence of wireless transmission on health?? I prefer wires…
My home has got Cat5 from my coat closet (where all my gear is stashed) to each phone jack in the house. I don’t regret for a second the extra costs to have it installed during construction.
The only thing I will do different next time is to run conduit in addition to cabling. If Cat6 does go the way of Cat5, it’ll be easier to re-wire a house that is roped with conduit instead of bare cable.