Could I get away with mostly wireless in my home?

elsmandino

Hello.

My bungalow has been overrun with ethernet cables and switches and (as promised to my Mrs), I had a go at tidying it all up with a roll of network cable and a 16-port switch.

Unfortunately, due to the way my house is built, it is just not going to be possible to do what I had planned - i.e. I wanted to run various cables down into each of the rooms, from the loft, and create a node zero in our office.

I have a slightly unusual setup in that my router is in the master bedroom (due to the mastersocket being there).  The satellite output is also in that room, which feeds a SAT>IP box.  I also have a Odroid HC2 in there, which I use to schedule and record all the TV from satellite box.  The devices are all connected to a switch, which then connects to other devices around the house.

I am now thinking as to whether going wireless might be a viable option.

Could I upgrade the router to something better (and gigabit ports) and plug the Odroid and SAT>IP box directly into it.

Could I then connect everything else in the house via wireless?

The main thing that is going to be an issue is watching HDTV on the Raspberry Pis that are attached to all the TVs in my house.  Am I correct in thinking that "ac" speed should easily cope with HD TV?

My desktop PC could also have an "ac" PCIe put in it.  I am struggling to think of any reason why this would not be fast enough.

Would be great to hear from anyone that has gone wireless and whether it does, in practice, now work.

psychopomp1

Every client - including 2 VOIP lines & a Xbox - is connected via 802.11ac Wi-fi in my home and everything works a treat.
However I have almost ideal Wi-fi conditions mainly that there aren’t a shed load of Wi-fi networks nearby and the fact that my home has super thin walls (it’s relatively new). My work desktop  PC has an Asus PCE-AC88U pci Wi-Fi card installed and this provides around 1 gigabit real world throughput, with the card connecting at 2.1Gb/s to the router.

Of course wired is always better than Wi-fi but providing you use a half decent router and additional access points (if necessary) than you can get pretty good Wi-fi throughput provided the conditions are right. Isp supplied routers aren’t  often the best when it comes to Wi-fi , as they will normally
use inferior/low spec radios (d/t cost) so using a wave2 MuMimo router with high end Broadcom or Qualcomm Wi-fi radios will almost certainly give you better wifi performance. That said, even the best router in the world cannot change the laws of physics so you might need additional access points or a wireless mesh system for complete Wi-fi coverage.

I think the best thing to do is to start off with 1 router and see how you get on wrt Wi-fi coverage and then gradually add access points if necessary. Or alternatively, invest  in a wireless mesh system if a single router doesn’t cut it.

mickevh

Fundamentally, Wi-Fi is an "only-one-thing-at-a-time-can-transmit" technology (although MU-MIMO is mitigating this a little in the downstream direction - with the "right" client mix, AP and physical distribution.)

The more "things" you have, the more data they wish to transmit, the more competition there is for "air time." Estimating whether any particular mix of clients, traffic patterns, latency and so forth is "good enough" is the blackest of the data networking black arts and difficult to model/predict.  Welcome to our world.

For any given use case, it might be fine, it might be rubbish, no-one can predict with any certainty and you've little option than to just try it for a while and fix any problems if they become apparent.

Wires are always going to be faster and more reliable, which is why big companies won't be ripping out all the wires in their offices any time soon. Indeed, we often find we have to put more wires in to facilitate Wi-Fi as the ideal location for hanging up the Wi-Fi AP's almost inevitably doesn't have any wires in situ. We often end up building Wi-Fi infrastructure "as well" as the incumbent wired network rather than "instead of."

One of the reasons we put up multiple AP's on big sites as well as or in addition to achieving the geographical coverage, is to the break up the air time competition by creating multiple Wi-Fi cells tuned to different radio frequencies that can transmit concurrently with each other (though there's some limits due to the number of available radio channels.)

Ultimately, it's going to be a value judgement trading off the required speeds, the hassle of installing the wires (versus Wi-Fi) the reliability required, etc. There's no real "right" and "wrong" way to do it.

Bl4ckGryph0n

We watch several Netflix UHD streams at the same time. I have a WiFi only policy in our house. Don’t want to be running cables anywhere, and don’t need.

If you install it properly then there shouldn’t be any problems at all.