No, if it works fine don’t bother.
Thanks!
Generally speaking I agree with Stusser. Sure, you could get higher throughput with a GigE wire, but if you have sufficient bandwidth for what you are using it for, there’s no reason to mess with it.
As with most things, “that depends.”
I recently switched our 4K Apple TV form 5Gz wireless to wired gigabit ethernet. In general there’s no big difference most of the time. BUT initial time to stream, latency, and random & occasional drop-outs are for sure better.
So I woundn’t run wire specifically for this if it’s mostly working fine. But in my case I was already running wire to a nearby switch and had the extra port, so why not?
Diego
Hmm… Did some googling (please correct me, if I get anything wrong!):
- Netflix HD requires 5Mbps
- the 5Ghz 802.11ac+n connection provides (up to) 866 MBit/s to my 200 MBit/s internet
- 5 Mbps < 1 MBit/s right?
ie. my setup is completely overkill already, so no need to switch to a 1 gig ethernet?
No
Mbps is the same as MBit/s
“ps” = “/s”
Ah… was getting that confused with megabytes & megabits per second. However my wifi connection should still be fast enough to cover that, if I understand it correctly? (& could even cover a 4k stream easily)
If you can do it in an aesthetically pleasing way and without much fuss I always prefer wired due to guaranteed bandwidth without dealing with fluctuating radio waves.
The 866 mbps is internal on your LAN only and will always fluctuate. I’ve only ever seen 200-400 actual as the max. Wired gigabit will be consistently 500-800 for me depending on length. Everything in my place that can be wired is wired though.
Netflix currently recommends 25 MBit/s per 4K stream, so in theory sure.
But the over-the-air environment is continuously changing, which makes consistency and reliability difficult & your actual experience will thus vary.
An example:
My Comcast connection is theoretically 700 MBit/s down / 25MBit/s up & this laptop is currently connected to a nearby access point at a rough transmit rate of 700 Mbps.
But repeated runs of the Netflix speed tester (https://fast.com/) yielded pretty inconsistent results. The highest speed reported most of the time was 300 Mbps. But I also got one run that barely reached 50 Mpbs and was full of latency.
So a 4K video running in that same time window would have been fine most of the time. But I suspect there would have been garbled video, freezing, or slowness in that one brief window of 50 Mpbs service.
You can also try to separate any internal vs external network issues by testing between different endpoints to see what you get.
Another example:
Steam game streaming with statistics turned gives me a pretty good real-world view for the internal network. Testing to my wired gaming PC across the room in the same environment as above just yielded mostly-fine game streaming at 100 Mbps with near 0% frame loss. Yet I still saw occasional lag-spikes down to 5 Mbps with 20% frame loss every so often. Fine for strategy gaming, but frustrating and potentially useless for platforming or an FPS.
The moral is that YMMV when it comes to wireless.
Diego
Ok… Though looking at your worst case scenario of 50, that would cover 2x 4k streams (with latency issues). I’ve got a single HD stream, which would be 5 Mbit/s so still magnitudes below the 200-400 maximum that rei refers to?
(sorry if I’m being optuse!)
It’s OK if you want to be lazy and leave things as-is or if running a cable would be clumsy or unsightly. I just prefer minimal delay and latency.
Well, I’m renting an apartment and can’t drill a hole in the wall… Could run a cable past a doorway and tape it down so nobody trips over it, but that wouldn’t really be nice.
was just trying to figure out what sort of margin I have and it appears to be 5 to 200(ish) worst case, which is a huge window. The only lag I notice is if I’ve just turned on the tv I need to wait about 10 sec before I can start netflix & stream something.
All other traffic I have runs via lan cables (ie pcs / consoles…etc)
So, in short, it sounds like you are doing just fine and don’t need to mess with it until / unless your requirements change (like multiple 4K streams) or you start having trouble.
Go worry about something else instead :-) There’s no problem here.
Diego
Good advice! :)
Will do…
(eg still haven’t decided on what graphics card to upgrade to - all the grumblings about AMD drivers have dissuaded me from my initial 5700xt choice…)
Yeah technically megabit is lowercase b and megabyte is uppercase B just to avoid that confusion.
Tell you a funny story with my firetv. I was using it for months with a new TV until I realized I wasn’t watching 4k at all. (if netflix offers HDR options, you’re in 4k)
If it works perfectly well there’s no reason to change it. If it doesn’t, then there is.
If your TV has a cable outlet nearby you could go MoCA 2.0.
O brave new world, that has light bulbs that need fucking security patches in 't!
OMG are you saying a hacker could seize control of my network and… turn my lights green without permission???
Sigh & what’s new. This is one reason why we are urged to segregate the IoT stuff into its own network.
But that’s in practice also tough to do since you’ve got to poke lots of holes / make lots of routes for the stuff to talk back to Alexa / Google / HomeKit / whatever.
Diego