Home-networking primer, part 2

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NETWORKING By Ed Tittel It’s time to revisit home-networking tools and technologies, especially on the wireless side of things. In this, the second of
[See the full post at: Home-networking primer, part 2]

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IBM1130, fisher75, SueW, DLivesInTexas, Cybertooth, KevSpa, lmacri

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Good article.  I might add a few additional hints regarding wireless deployment.

Use the same SSID (wireless network name) on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.  Most modern access points have features that aid in a moving end point device (your smartphone or a laptop) to hop from the preferred 5 GHz band to the more distance optimized 2.4 GHz band as the device moves further from the AP.

Understand that any mesh solution that does not have a dedicated backhaul transceiver built into the device will effectively half the network speed because everything must be received and re-transmitted with each hop.  Devices like the Netgear Orbi and similar do a better job of “meshing” because they have a primary radio for just connecting the access points together, and then another radio for handling access point duties.  If at all possible, connect access points to a wired Ethernet connection.

Wired Ethernet is always preferred.  Wire up as much as you can and leave the WiFi for less critical duties.  Expect latency and just average performance on WiFi and you will be OK.  Work VPNs, gaming, and to an extent high performance streaming don’t reliably lend themselves to WiFi.  Not that you can’t do this, but have reasonable expectations if you do.

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Thanks for your excellent observations, especially the potential for half-duplex (one direction only for either send or receive) versus full-duplex (send and receive simultaneously) in mesh situations. Yet another reason why I often prefer using multiple router/gateway devices, with one fully-enabled and the others set to WAP only status.

Your suggestion about SSIDs (same for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, probably also including 6 GHz bands on Wi-Fi7 — and FWIW, Copilot says that’s OK, too; I’ve never tried it myself) is a very good one. That goes double for households where cellphones come and go, or where some users may wander further away from Wi-Fi routers, WAPs, or mesh devices). Good stuff!

And obviously, I’m a long-time member of the “wired beats wireless” club, too. My first networking job was in 1987-88, when we were still using coaxial cable and 10-Base-2 or 10-Base-5 networking with vampire taps. Things are much faster and easier now.

Thanks again for your excellent comments and suggestions. Readers like you make AskWoody the precious resource that it is for so many of us, myself included.

–Ed–

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Ed, thank you for this pair of useful and interesting articles.

Some years ago, I looked into ways of wiring up a home network without punching holes in walls to run Ethernet cable, and found several intriguing alternatives such as powerline networking, MoCA, and HPNA. Is there a chance you might extend the series to cover these alternatives?

 

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Powerline networking is a decidedly mixed but interesting blessing. I’ll ask the editor if he’d like a story about it. I already know that houses wired with aluminum power cables (mostly houses build from 1963 until 1975 or thereabouts) may run into bizarre issues when attempting to use Powerline Ethernet. But older and newer houses can often add to or extend their wired coverage using these interfaces. Expect to spend US$90 to $120 for a pair of such devices, and US$45 and up for additional ones.

Thanks for asking!

–Ed–

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Cybertooth

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If a WAP’s effective range is 15-20′, then how can you expect 2 WAPs to talk to each other when separated by 1.5-2.0 X that? Is Figure 2 really correct?

Doesn’t it also need to be said that displaying the effective range as a circle is misleading? It’s more like a isobars on a weather map, dependent on objects absorbing the signal and reducing the range.

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Each WAP includes a wired Ethernet connection to tie it into the household network. It acts as a bridge between wired and wireless networks, while supporting wireless devices within its coverage area. Sorry if I didn’t make that sufficiently clear. Thanks for asking this excellent question.

–Ed–

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I wish I could have found a tool to build an isobar map for signal strength. That’s obviously the best way to really map out coverage. I have observed that unobstructed WAPs and mesh devices offer double the coverage of those in dense or noisy environments. I cut the range by 50% to account for that. At my house, the two router/gateway/Wi-Fi devices are 22’8″ apart, and each device offers about 60% coverage at the location of the “other device” in the pair.

Thanks for sharing your observations and info. I appreciate the opportunity to respond and clarify my story.

Best wishes,
–Ed–

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Cybertooth

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Ed Tittel wrote:

My first networking job was in 1987-88, when we were still using coaxial cable and 10-Base-2 or 10-Base-5 networking with vampire taps.

Ah yes, ARCnet!  I still have all my assembly and testing tools for that although it is now really only used in industrial control applications.  Boy were we happy when Ethernet displaced it once support on Novell servers got much better.

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Believe it or not, I worked for Thomas Conrad in Austin in 1989 (a leading purveyor of ARCnet at the time). Got to learn more about token-passing than I ever wanted to. Of course, token ring and token bus have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and we’re all 802.3 or 802.11 now for local area networks. Thanks for the reminder, though…

–Ed–

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