Wireless is great, when it works. But a lot of cheap wireless routers just suck donkey balls unless you flash them with DD-WRT or buy something better.
Every client of mine with a WRT54G has weak signal strength 20 feet away even in a goddamn WWII era bungalow that’s 750 square feet on the first floor. There’s no excuse why any router shouldn’t give you 5 bars in any house of that size.
Wired is definitely the way to go. As I’ve got an unfinished basement in my house it was no problem to drill a couple holes in the walls and just take 50 ft. of CAT5e from my office w/computer, router, etc. to the den where the consoles are. Plus I feel the wired connection is a big plus for streaming big HDTV files to the 360.
Wireless is great for sitting on the couch with your laptop.
For gaming, wired is definitely the way to go if you can pull it off.
Gary, I went from a wireless bridge to a wired connection from my router to a switch, which splits the cable for the 360, PS3, and HTPC. Works flawlessly. The router can figure into it as well, though. My gaming perf got a lot more reliable after I switched to the DGL-4300.
Picked up a D-Link gigabit 5-port ethernet switch for $35 which now splits the wired feed from my Netgear router to the 360 and PS3, with ports to spare for anything I may add later (HTPC, Apple TV etc).
I had earmarked one of the ports for the Wii but it wasn’t until I looked around the back of the unit that I remembered the Wii doesn’t support wired ethernet. Weird.
We started with WiFi and still use it for the laptops but went wired for the Xbox and the upstairs computer (router/cable in the basement). Just works better for heavy gaming in my experience, in this house at least. When we were on wireless for gaming we sometimes had issues that simply don’t appear with the wired setup.
I do wish I had had the skill/inclination/time to do the clean wiring job with wall jacks though.Next house maybe.
Yeah I saw that - thanks! Looks like just what I need…
Speaking about wired connections, is there anyway to use it for the DS or is it strictly Wifi only?
Wired DS connection? That is no joke.
Got the Wii ethernet dongle; works like a charm!
Wireless is great for psp, ds, laptops, pda’s, smart phones, all those portable electronics. For anything you don’t move around like pc’s, consoles, set top boxes, printers, media streamers, hdhr, etc wired is still the best way to go and well worth the cost of wiring up your home. Besides, when you start pushing HD content around the house you really do need to go wired. Also, you cut around 50ms off your ping.
A little late to the party: if you don’t want to run Ethernet cable through your home, consider Powerline networking. I have the 85Mbps units to connect my upstairs & downstairs networks and it works pretty well.