Ethernet Is Worth It For Video Calls

I have a family history of PC gaming, and we have done the " roll of cable, jacks, and crimper" method in every house I have lived in. If you want to avoid holes, you can run the cables on the floor along wall, and they will fit under most doors without impeding opening. another option is to put all your holes in the floors or ceilings of closets.

This is awesome. Noticing a problem and then actually measuring it is far too uncommon, thanks!

The end-advice (run ethernet for latency-sensitive uses) is reasonable, but it will vary greatly in how applicable it is. My large 1926 house in a residential area of Seattle has much higher barriers to running wires (lath and plaster walls, stucco exterior), and less interference with neighbors (less than a dozen SSIDs visible, none very strong). It's big enough that I put in a quality wired-mesh setup (Unifi equipment: highly recommended for geeks, probably recommend Nest or Eero if you don't enjoy this stuff. The key is to use ethernet to the stations where it's possible, and mesh only for radio extension) and have had no problems.

I tend to test latency in-house (ping the router) rather than to ISP, just to remove that variance. Ethernet gets very consistently under half a millisecond, and wifi under light load gets under 10ms, with occasional spikes up to 35ms, and under medium load (it never gets all that heavy; only 60Mbps internet, and 1Gbps to the local file server) may hit a few hundred. I don't ever think I've seen over half a second, let alone 1500ms.

You can probably get MOST of the benefit by having a hybrid solution - not every device needs to be wired, but you should wire the hungriest if you can, and wire multiple access points across the space, so that each radio only has to serve a subset of devices. Many routers also have reporting available for which devices are using how much bandwidth, to identify the ones that should move to wired (or to a different radio, or set up throttling so there's room for others).

This reminds me of a complaint somewhat made recently about cell phones – later-stage millennials tend to prefer texts over phone calls. At least part of this may be because millennials are used to crappy cell phone services, where you're constantly cutting out, hard to hear, and otherwise dealing with hiccups that make it a bad experience, whereas the previous generation had actual high quality landlines.

I used to have video stuttering until I switched from 2.4 GHZ to 5. That helped a lot more than I expected at the time.

I participate in a lot of VA video conferences with my counselors as a result of the Covid situation. Many of my counselors now work from home and our calls sometimes end on the phone because of the loss of video and audio breakup. This does not happen with everyone. When both people live "In town", this in West Virginia, my meetings are usually fine, when the other individual is not in town is the time when most of the calls run into problems. I ran a Cat6a cable between my modem and laptop which made a great difference overall to my system, but the calls still sometimes drop. I believe that, please tell me if I am wrong, if the equipment, signal strength, etc. are not strong on both ends then the call will fail. The conference will only be as successful as the weakest system.

Have a Great one!

Steve Fortney

Hey, I'm not sure what is wrong with your WiFi, but something fixable is probably wrong. I can run speedtest.net (on my roughly 70/10 connection) while pinging my router (an Archer C7 running OpenWRT which is roughly across the living room -- I have a home network with one AP at each end of the apartment) over WiFi and the ping time never exceeds 4ms. I live in an apartment with dozens of other visible networks.

You might want to check that it's using 802.11ac with 5 GHz on a not crowded channel, check that the signal strength looks good, make sure your client network drivers are up to date, check whether you have router hardware/software known for poor performance under load or bufferbloat problems, etc.

(edit: I notice you say that the router is three rooms away -- my guess is that the signal strength is just really bad and if you put an access point in between you could make it much better.)

Back in 2001 I was working on an 802.11a implementation, and the standard made a huge deal of supporting guaranteed quality of service. I don't think any of these features ended up being used by most consumer-grade base stations or subscriber stations, hence the spikes of latency and marginal streaming properties.

The things you crimp on the ends of cables are plugs. Pros do not run cables through walls and crimp plugs on them. They are punched down on wall or surface mount jacks (socket not plug) on the client end and punched down on a patch panel on the distro end - surface or wall jacks could be used too in pinch if one only needs a few. Solid wire is meant to be punched down for fixed infrastructure wiring as repeated flexing will damage the cable and stranded wire for patch cables meant for plugs to be crimped on.

I think that this would depend on other aspects of your setup. If you have a high speed fiber connection to your router, and you are surrounded by other peoples routers, ethernet will improve your ping times. If you have a bad copper connection to your router, and no other Wi-Fi hotspots nearby, then ethernet might be improving away from the bottleneck. Try pinging another device on the same wifi network, vs pinging an external site.

Must not play many MMORPG. Of course wired internet is faster and more stable than wireless. One is a solid connection. The other floats through the air and through solid walls.