[HN Gopher] WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi CM4
___________________________________________________________________
WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi CM4
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 172 points
Date : 2020-12-22 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| mciancia wrote:
| Eh, clickbait title. Suggests speeds of built-in raspberry WiFi
| which is not the case.
| NRv9tR wrote:
| The implication is more on the reader. I don't expect the title
| to be as verbose as "WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi
| CM4 with pcie wifi adapter."
|
| It's wordy enough as is. And anyone who is in the market for
| this news knows that you aren't getting that with the stock
| radio.
| crazyjncsu wrote:
| If we're concerned about wordiness, we could have dropped
| "Rasberry Pi CM4" from the title as this detail seems
| irrelevant when the external wifi adapter is doing the heavy
| lifting.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| That's the main point of this, though--until the CM4, it
| was not possible to get this kind of card working easily on
| any kind of Raspberry Pi.
|
| There are some other SBCs (usually more expensive) with the
| capability, but being able to (easily) put AX WiFi into a
| Pi project enables some new use cases.
| zymhan wrote:
| > anyone who is in the market for this news knows that you
| aren't getting that with the stock radio.
|
| Well, yes, but the suggestion that it is possible from this
| clickbaity title is why I'm here to begin with.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Why not? This looks like a much better title to me.
|
| Of course, maybe the article wouldn't have been read as much
| then...
| geerlingguy wrote:
| This also reminds me of the many people who complain about
| my YouTube thumbnails from time to time.
|
| I do have the 'open mouth' from time to time (I hate it but
| do it)--and the reason is not because I think that's
| appealing, professional, or amazing.
|
| It's because through a lot of A/B testing over the past
| year, the same quality and subject matter in a given video
| with _out_ a dumb thumbnail gets at least 30% less
| impressions on YouTube.
|
| What use is making great content if your marketing around
| it can't get people to read/view it?
|
| You have to hold your nose to do any marketing (IMO), and
| there's a reason most of us on HN distrust salespeople and
| marketing people. But they exist for a purpose. I've had to
| dip my toes in those murky waters to be able to sustain the
| open source work I'm doing.
| CamJN wrote:
| And yet my RPi4 can't get more than 9.1MB/s over ssh when wired
| to cat5e, or 17.14MB/s over netcat. I know the connection is good
| as testing with my laptop I can get gigabit speeds, but the pi
| insists on being sluggish.
| diarmuidc wrote:
| That's not the networking performance though. RP4 can hit line
| speed on Gb Ethernet: pi@kodi:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep Rasp
| Model : Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.1 pi@kodi:~ $ uname -a
| Linux kodi 5.4.72-v7l+ #1356 SMP Thu Oct 22 13:57:51 BST 2020
| armv7l GNU/Linux pi@kodi:~ $ iperf -c 192.168.0.39
| ------------------------------------------------------------
| Client connecting to 192.168.0.39, TCP port 5001 TCP window
| size: 214 KByte (default)
| ------------------------------------------------------------ [
| 3] local 192.168.0.214 port 44960 connected with 192.168.0.39
| port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec
| 1.04 GBytes 891 Mbits/sec
| goalieca wrote:
| I just setup my rpi4 as a gigabit router with a USB Ethernet
| for the wan port. I can hit 980mbps and negligible latency.
| It's got slightly more spread on small packet sizes compared to
| a 300$ gaming wifi router. Where it really sucks is VPN and
| cryptography since there is no hardware acceleration. It sits
| mostly idle just doing nat and ipv6 forwarding (and pihole)
|
| I'm going to document it once i work out the kinks. Ipv6 was a
| real learning experience and had to workaround issues with lack
| of good native ipv6 support in the tooling and configuration.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Just imagine how much you could get with a wire.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I imagine around 2.5Gbps as that seems to be the speeds the
| compute module is getting using a SATA RAID. If we want to be
| optimistic then it would be 5Gbps as that's the limit of PCIe
| on the Pi.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Real-world usage it seems like somewhere around 3.5-4 Gbps is
| the limit on the PCIe x1 lane on the Pi--I'm still doing more
| testing around that.
|
| I'm actually testing a 2.5 Gbps card with the Realtek
| RTL8125B chip in it now:
| https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-
| devices/iss...
| FooHentai wrote:
| Optical maybe, but copper has more limitations. Signal
| propogation in air is faster, and with things like beam-forming
| there's big advantages to having multiple sending and receiving
| points spread apart.
|
| So to push speeds in a similar way with a wire you might end up
| needing a mesh of wires.
|
| Power delivery and (relative) protection against signal
| degredation are, for me at least, the remaining big reasons to
| wire things in. Speed not so much.
| cbhl wrote:
| Getting a wired connection above 1 Gbps seems non-trivial --
| there are products that do 2.5 Gbps, and other products that do
| 10 Gbps. It seems like you'd have to pick one or the other and
| hope the rest of the world standardizes on the same speed as
| you.
| zymhan wrote:
| 10GbE is a standard. It's expensive for home users, but it's
| very much the standard for faster-than-gigabit ethernet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
| amarshall wrote:
| > there are products that do 2.5 Gbps, and other products
| that do 10 Gbps
|
| And 5, 25, 40, 50, 100, 200, 400 Gbps.
|
| > seems like you'd have to pick one or the other and hope the
| rest of the world standardizes on the same speed as you
|
| Huh? A connection between A & B will just be as fast as the
| slowest link between them, be it 400 Gbps or 6 Mbps,
| regardless of the various other speeds. And a 10GBASE-T NIC
| will happily autonegotiate with a 10BASE-T NIC and everything
| in-between.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not that I imagine it causes problems in practice, but as a
| point of order I think 10G copper PHYs cannot negotiate
| below 100BASE-TX.
| amarshall wrote:
| Maybe, not sure. I can't immediately find anything that
| would specify as such, but I suppose adapters could opt
| to not support some modes (and I guess technically I may
| have been overreaching a bit on that bit anyway since
| autonegotiation is only mandatory at all in 1000BASE-T
| and later).
| pantalaimon wrote:
| some 10G-BASE-T cards don't support the 2.5G and 5G modes
| as those got standardized later.
| liuliu wrote:
| I think the mentioned Mikrotik switch should work with 2.5Gbps
| port (if you run the router in AP mode)? I've run successfully
| the mentioned Mikrotik switch against 2.5Gbps NIC and 5Gbps NIC
| to reach the advertised speed cross computers.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yep; it was a matter of an older transceiver I was using. I am
| using a different one and it supports 2.5 GbE now. Sadly, I
| can't edit video on YouTube like I can edit or update a post :)
| skavi wrote:
| thanks for respecting system theme on your website.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Of course! The day the dark mode feature came out on Safari I
| added a darkmode theme. I also set background to 000 black, so
| it consumes less energy on OLED displays.
| hinkley wrote:
| Is there any flavor of hardware that lets me use PCIe as layer 1
| for a TCP/IP stack? Specifically, with a switch in the middle
| instead of daisy chaining?
| moonbug wrote:
| pcie switching is a thing, but it's wasted on IP.
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| > Have you ever started a project that should take a couple hours
| with a fifty dollar budget, and realized at the end you spent a
| whole month on it and spent close to a thousand bucks?
|
| Ah man, costs aside, that's my last weekend and probably the next
| few ones as I've been trying to make my old Motorola Xoom tablet
| run a modern kernel. When/if that's completed, the return on
| investment will be a net loss.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| But the experience may net you something... an ounce of pride,
| or maybe a pound of regret, depending on how it goes!
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| Definitely! Already to have successfully compiled a working
| kernel is an achievement as most of my last attempts over the
| years failed. But I really want to satisfy those demanding
| user-space binaries who complains the kernel is too old.
|
| It's quite satisfying to have grown from "struggling to build
| from source" to hunting 2.36 era patches and diving in the
| code to port it. A lot of actual learning in the process.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| It'll all be worth it when you post about your hard work on
| hacker forums and get a deluge of angry comments telling you
| how you could have gotten thrice the power in half the time for
| 1/5th the cost.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The CM4 and the Pi4 hack expose one PCIe lane, correct? Is it
| possible to use some sort of... port multiplier / switch / hub to
| run more than one PCIe device on a Pi?
| hausen wrote:
| There's at least one reported case of a PCIe multiplier card
| working with the Pi4: http://labs.domipheus.com/blog/raspberry-
| pi-4-pci-express-it...
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yes; I'm testing two switches currently--see
| https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#pcie-switches-and-adapters
| hinkley wrote:
| I've been farting around with Friendly's devices. Several of
| them have 2x PCIe, which I'm using/will be using for persistant
| storage, but I don't think you could compare anything they have
| to the compute module, especially with respect to PCIe.
| jagger27 wrote:
| The RPI4 has a 1x lane of PCIe 2.0. Maybe you could split it
| into two 1x PCIe 1.0?
| labawi wrote:
| You can split it to two 1x PCIe 2.0, or perhaps even 2x, 4x,
| probably even 3.0, 4.0, with the right chip, but in any case
| you need a PCIe switch, and they will share the uplink
| bandwidth.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| Hey Jeff -- Just wanted to say I really appreciate you taking the
| time to write stuff like this up. I know that may be 'the point'
| of what you're doing, but I also know from personal experience
| that writing up a comprehensive review/guide/benchmark (whatever
| you want to call this style of writing) can easily double to
| quadruple the time investment for a project.
|
| Thank you for sharing the troubles and pitfalls for the rest of
| us to learn from, or even just reference.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I'd say doing the post + video at least 10x's the time involved
| in one of these projects.
|
| A lot of people can get to the 'I did this thing and I got it
| to work' stage. Getting to 'I did this thing and I can get it
| to work from scratch a 2nd time' is better. Getting to 'I did
| this thing and here's my documentation, enough to help you do
| it too' is my goal, for pretty much anything I work on.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| I wasn't even talking about the video, just the write-up.
|
| I haven't done much, but video production seems like a black
| hole of space and time where things are never 'done' and
| eventually you just release it because it's the only way to
| stay sane.
|
| > Getting to 'I did this thing and here's my documentation,
| enough to help you do it too' is my goal, for pretty much
| anything I work on.
|
| As they say in the biz, 'You're doing The Lords Work'. Again,
| thanks, and much appreciated.
| ksec wrote:
| Raspberry and Linux Drivers issues aside.
|
| This is 1.34Gbps on a 2x2 5Ghz 160Mhz WiFi 6 with theoretical
| speed of 2.4Gbps. I could get very close to 800Mbps on my WiFi 6
| on iPhone. So I was expecting 1.6Gbps with 160Mhz.
|
| With Wireless speed over taking wired, we really need 2.5 /5Gbps
| Ethernet, but the move to these standards are so slow.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| What? Cat 6a is 10Gbps so the actual speed is probably more
| than 5Gbps.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think the parent post is referring to the low rate of
| adoption of >1gbps networking. Switching and routing is
| expensive and not many devices support it.
| amarshall wrote:
| They're presumably referring to 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T. Some
| motherboards and WiFi 6 WAPs are now including NICs meeting
| these standards but not 10GBASE-T. Still not commonplace
| throughout, though. Both 2.5 & 5GBASE-T are rated for 100 m
| on CAT 5e.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
| wongarsu wrote:
| 10G Ethernet has gotten a lot cheaper, certainly viable for
| enthusiasts. I'm not sure what I would use it for except for
| faster access to my NAS, and that's coincidentally also the one
| device category where 10G ports are somewhat common. For
| everything else 1G per device seems plenty, and with Ethernet
| you actually get the advertised speeds in typical scenarios.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| A network card for 10Gpbs costs at least EUR100 per device
| here, whereas 1Gbps goes for less than EUR10. A switch with
| at least 4x 10Gbps ports costs over EUR300 (whereas 4x 1Gpbs
| costs about EUR20).
|
| Using 2.5Gbps ports is more cost effective, with switches
| available at a third of the price of a 10Gbps version and
| network cards going for about half the price of a 10Gbps
| port.
|
| A literal 10x price increase is not exactly what I'd call
| "viable for enthusiasts". With 802.11ax, WiFi has surpassed
| ethernet for all practical purposes for end users. You can't
| _rely_ on ax working at full speed, but if you try it and it
| works, it's a whole lot cheaper and easier than setting up
| wired internet.
|
| It's sad, but this is only the case because network device
| vendors want to keep cashing in on "enterprise" hardware with
| ludicrous pricing. Prices have barely dropped over the last
| 4-5 years on many 10Gbps switches, probably because they're
| mostly used in data centres anyway.
|
| I've run into annoyances with 1Gbps ethernet a few times,
| usually when transferring large files between PC and laptop
| or from my NAS. After 10 years of universal gigabit ethernet,
| I somehow felt like it shouldn't be faster to copy everything
| from my laptop to an external SSD and then copy it back to my
| desktop than sending the data over a short wire connected to
| both computers, but here we are.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Ignorant questions, if I may:
|
| 1. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard
| lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical
| barrier?
|
| 2. Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is Ethernet/wired
| still a sane choice, or does that just make them an old geezer?
| In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all blasting full
| strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi performance
| actually near as good as wired performance?
| mlyle wrote:
| > How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard
| lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical
| barrier?
|
| "Per-port", 2.5gbps is cheaper than fast wireless. But one fast
| wireless interface on a router can work in a star configuration
| with many devices. You can get a 2.5gbase-T card for $30. You
| can get an 8 port 2.5gbase-T switch with 2 10gbit SFP+ uplinks
| for $450. This will run circles around any wireless network in
| practice.
|
| Decent 802.11ax adds more than $30 to your device in most
| cases. And a router with good 802.11ax is still a couple
| hundred bucks.
|
| It'd be even cheaper, but 1gbps is good enough for 'most
| everyone, so we have to deal with repurposing low-end business
| stuff instead of consumer gear.
| wil421 wrote:
| You can get 10 gigabit with Ethernet. 10gb switches and
| especially 10gb NICs from retired servers are getting cheaper.
|
| After you upgrade to a 10gb you might need to use something
| other than SATA drives to reach the full potential. At least
| for a NAS. I'd benefit from faster restores and transferring 4K
| video.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Perhaps things have changed since I last upgraded my home
| network, but iirc, advertised wifi speeds are half duplex,
| while wired speeds are full duplex -- i.e. wifi speeds are for
| the combined upload/download while wired can go full speed in
| both directions.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| It's even worse, because wireless is basically a hub. Or
| phrased differently: there is only one wire available for all
| devices on a wireless network, and your (as well as others on
| same frequencies) devices have to figure out which packet is
| for which device by themselves.
| topspin wrote:
| > Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is
| Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them
| an old geezer?
|
| Absolutely not. Wired gigabit ethernet is far better than wifi;
| on a small wired network the packet loss is negligible and
| contention is non-existent, so the network is smooth and fast.
| You get better than 80% of theoretical wire speed in file
| transfers. Remote desktops have minimum latency. Every couple
| months another wifi router zero-day pops up and some huge
| fraction of all such routers become vulnerable to remote
| attacks. It's nice not being involved in that mess.
|
| My fellow remote colleagues with wifi sound terrible on their
| contended networks; dropping packets and getting cut off calls.
| The people with wired connections like myself are always glitch
| free.
|
| Wifi is for toys and casual use. Ethernet is for work.
| ConceitedCode wrote:
| 1. Taking a shot in the dark - Maybe check your ethernet
| cables? Not all ethernet cables are the same. If it's a cheap /
| old ethernet cable then it might not be rated for the same
| kinds of speed as your wifi. There is a chart on this page
| labeled "Ethernet Cable Performance Summary" with some stats
| for different ethernet cables.
|
| https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/connectivity/ethe...
|
| 2. Yes, although in my experience this is very minor. On my
| network - good wifi has a 3ms latency and good ethernet has a
| .3ms latency. While that is a 10x improvement, in the scheme of
| things I don't notice 3ms of latency. I live in a high rise
| condo with lots of interference in a major city and can't say
| it's caused me any issues.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Mostly just no one is bothering to make the consumer products,
| not that the tech isn't there. Most consumer products are the
| ubiquitous 1gbps Ethernet ports with 10gbps on certain
| prosumer/gamer chipsets. Those 10gbps boards are meant to be
| the upsell so they're expensive for a lot of reasons.
|
| At a consumer level what does that buy you? The average
| internet connection is far far less bandwidth than that. Most
| consumers don't have a need to stream large amounts of data.
| You can just use sneaker-net for bulk transfer with a thumb
| drive.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Although slowly, 2.5gbps ethernet is starting to land. I have a
| few devices in my house now with 2.5gbps interfaces, my hangup
| has been that I currently have a commercial GbE switch that was
| moderately expensive and I'm not feeling the need to replace it
| with a 2.5gbps switch that will be quite expensive (and if I
| really wanted to I could get full speed on some ports with
| SFP).
|
| But not feeling the need, I think, kind of makes the point...
| WiFi has to continuously push to higher and higher speeds in
| large part because for various fundamental reasons WiFi is not
| able to deliver speed with consistency. Packet loss, jitter,
| contention, and periodic serious disruptions in connectivity
| are the norm for WiFi, and very high speeds offer more overhead
| to tolerate these problems. Unlike Ethernet, WiFi is also
| fundamentally half-duplex and contentious between multiple
| devices, so very high speeds and MIMO techniques (as well as
| beam steering and other more cutting-edge technology) are used
| to mitigate this. All of these enhancements are aimed towards
| allowing WiFi to consistently and reliably achieve 100mbps and
| more in practice - something which even the latest WiFi
| standards still struggle with in much of the "real world."
|
| By contrast, GbE can consistently deliver gigabit performance,
| full duplex, non-collision with only slight overhead, and a
| very high degree of consistency.
|
| Gigabit ethernet already allows saturation of most storage
| devices in consumer use, so from a practical perspective, there
| aren't many reasons anyone would want more--going to 2.5, 5, or
| 10GbE in a home network is not likely to allow you to actually
| _do anything_ faster because at that volume of data you 're
| probably reading from or writing to storage, and consumer
| storage devices cannot reach even gigabit speeds. Likewise
| there are few or no consumer devices capable of generating
| instantaneous/real-time data volumes over GbE, the ones that
| are are moving uncompressed video, e.g. HDMI at 10-20gbps,
| which is both beyond what "faster" ethernet specs currently
| readily available can do, and it's just something that few
| people seem to want - there aren't many situations where you're
| moving video over a distance longer than an HDMI cable and you
| aren't willing to compress it.
|
| I actually have an unusually demanding situation as I have a
| project that involves moving multiple high-rate IQ streams from
| large-bandwidth SDRs over the network. Even here, CPU and I/O
| issues on the sending devices are consistently a bigger problem
| for me than the actual network. There are SDRs with highly
| optimized network support that allow them to achieve real-time
| rates in the Gbps range, but they cost so much that owners of
| such devices aren't going to have a problem investing in
| commercial network equipment.
|
| It feels a bit lame to say that "GbE is fast enough," but for
| consumer cases I think this is largely true. The only thing I
| can see changing it is moving full-rate video around, but video
| streaming has already been captured for consumers by vendor-
| specific systems that use compression, and "works fine" within
| an ecosystem even over WiFi.
| e12e wrote:
| I mostly agree. On the other hand, the existence of
| hdmi/thunderbolt switches/chaining kinda proves there's life
| for networking at 10gbps and beyond - 4k@100hz stereoscopic
| video etc.
|
| But for better or worse, we didn't get ethernet for that.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired?
|
| While you can get impressive figures, a 1gbps wired connection
| is just so much better than the equivalent speed wifi
| connection. It's double or triple the speed in my experience.
| wojciii wrote:
| Also the wired connection doesn't degrade or die when I turn
| the microwave on to heat a meal. I really like the Ethernet
| in my house that I'm soon going to upgrade to 10 GE.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I have limited to zero success gamestreaming on wifi vs
| ethernet with the particular setup at my house in a townhome.
|
| I have not tested it on my Wifi 6 phone but I'd be tentatively
| skeptical that you'd want to use ethernet for this use case.
| ptmcc wrote:
| My home is wired with Cat5E and a gigabit switch, and my wired
| connection delivers consistent, uninterrupted, near-zero-
| latency 1gbps connectivity 24/7.
|
| I have two different nice wifi APs running all the latest
| standards and even on new devices supporting the latest and
| greatest the best I ever see over wifi is about 300-350mbps,
| plus a couple additional milliseconds of latency. Plus the
| random little transient wifi hiccups that just happen from time
| to time.
|
| I can see about a dozen other wifi networks in range of my
| house, so some radio noise out there but nothing crazy.
|
| And now that I also have symmetric gigabit fiber, only my wired
| connections can come anywhere close to saturating my WAN
| bandwidth.
|
| If you have the option/ability, wired is going to crush
| wireless every time. Wifi is great for casual use and I'm glad
| it has gotten as good as it has, but for real
| work/gaming/whatever there's no contest.
| KiranRao0 wrote:
| I remember doing an experiment with my roommates with
| Engenius APs (I can consistently get ~480mbps).
|
| For everything but direct large downloads, everyone thought
| that using a 100mbps wired connection felt faster/snappier
| than the 480mpbs wireless
| yftsui wrote:
| I have a similar all Unifi setup, I could get 350Mbps stable
| connection for any devices as I used 3 Unifi APs. Recently
| played with the new Eero Wi-Fi 6 AP, I could get 500Mbps as
| it seems to be duplex two channels. That's probably the best
| you could get, compared with a cheap gigabit switch can give
| you 970Mbps easily.
| zelly wrote:
| Just pull fiber and you or the next owner won't have to worry
| about it in the next 50 years. You can buy pre-terminated or
| use quick connectors. Most don't realize that fiber is cheaper
| to produce than copper; the expense comes from the fancy SFP
| switches and routers.
|
| Wireless is horrible. In urban settings, the RF pollution will
| lead to all kinds of misery. If you are doing anything
| important with the connection, it must be wired. It's also bad
| security because I can drive by in a van and knock out your
| whole block's internet connections because so many people
| equate internet with WiFi.
| fvv wrote:
| Yeah also fiber are smaller and can help sometimes.. and have
| no length issues like copper
| x3iv130f wrote:
| Single all in one modem/router/access points are popular
| because they are incredibly easy go set up and that is about
| it.
|
| The only people who don't run Ethernet cable are those who are
| too lazy to bother.
|
| The second any sort of performance becomes important you will
| need to find dedicated devices with Ethernet running inbetween.
|
| My parent's house is 100% wireless however I had to run
| extended lengths of Cat 5e to set up multiple wireless access
| points. We have multiple 4k TVs on different sides of the
| house. There was no way we could keep decent speeds and
| wireless coverage without running cable.
|
| Even for my Android phone. I will occaisonally use a wired
| Ethernet connection to speed up downloads.
| xvector wrote:
| > How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired?
|
| In the review it looks like he's using a PCIe card for WiFi. If
| you used a 10Gbe card on a 10Gbe network, I imagine you'd do
| even better.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Isn't that how all wifi is connected?
| penglish1 wrote:
| Q: 1a. How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired? Is the Ethernet standard
| lagging, or lack of interest/demand, or some more physical
| barrier?
|
| A: WiFi does not exceed the price/performance of hard-wired
| Ethernet. They are different enough it is difficult to compare
| properly - for instance, for wired Ethernet, do you include the
| cost of the wire installation, termination, etc? I don't think
| it is reasonable to include - complex wiring gets more
| expensive - potentially by an order of magnitude! Fiber can be
| much more expensive than copper.. or cheaper. Fiber
| transcievers get very expensive for very long distances (miles)
| etc.
|
| So to do a simple comparison - 10GbE vs. Wifi. Let assume you
| are adding these to a computer which doesn't have them. The
| Wifi adapter is $26.90 A 2.5GbE adapter is $30
|
| What about the network switch? (or wifi access point) Typically
| with wired ethernet, you do this as a "cost per port" -
| currently about $25/port on the low end (rated at 10Gbps, by
| the way, but able to step down to 2.5Gbps).
|
| This (top performing "high end") Wifi router runs $250. It
| _may_ officially support 200+ clients but that just means it
| can theoretically talk to them _at all_. Good luck pushing
| actual data to /from them! In practice, to match up in
| cost/performance with a 10 port ethernet switch, it would need
| to drive the full 2.5Gbps for 10 clients simultaneously! I
| guarantee you it can't.
|
| And the price equation only gets better if you go full 10Gbps -
| which is probably the "sweet spot" right now for
| price/performance, buying in SOHO-sized quantities.
|
| Q1b: The ethernet standard is pretty excellent, and currently
| goes to 400Gbps, and if you have the cash to buy 400Gbps
| equipment - you can basically _expect_ it to work to spec - if
| the switch fabric says it will support X Tbps concurrently - it
| will. Good luck with that on Wifi.
|
| There is a TON of demand - you just don't see it in your house.
| Or your neighbor's house. Or your friend's house.
|
| You should though! Ethernet is AWESOME - and back when we had
| wired landlines, people ran those wires all over their house.
| It isn't that hard, or that expensive, and you'll get MUCH
| better, more predictable performance from doing it, and moving
| as many devices as you can to wired ethernet. Even your WiFi
| access point benefits from an ethernet cable running to a
| location where it's signal works best, rather than some closet
| off in the corner of your house.
|
| Q2: Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is
| Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them
| an old geezer? In urban setting with overlapping wifi cards all
| blasting full strength at their neighbours, is real-life wifi
| performance actually near as good as wired performance?
|
| A: No, real life wifi is nowhere near as good as ethernet.
| Switch to ethernet as much as you can! Of course, it doesn't
| make much sense to run an ethernet cable to the tablet you read
| sitting on your couch. But every desk, printer(?), your WAP(s),
| etc.
| Bayart wrote:
| 1. At this point I don't think 10Gbps NICs are worth that much
| on the second hand market. Most of the cost will be in the
| wiring. In WiFi most of the cost would be in the router and
| APs.
|
| 2. Wired is far more reliable than wireless in urban settings.
| You just don't have to deal with overlapping channels, physical
| barriers, dropped packets, concurrency between devices etc. You
| might get away with free real estate on 5Ghz+ nowadays but
| that's going to change as the ISP-provided equipment rotates.
|
| I get a lot of wireless myself because I live in the middle of
| nowhere, without a single other Wifi AP in detectable range and
| the inner walls of my house are pretty thin. In that context,
| with a well configured router, I get extremely stable wireless
| connections with low latency (<1ms router<->NIC).
|
| But in a city apartment I'd rather have the old 10m Ethernet
| cable cutting across the living-room.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The biggest problem I run into with 10Gbps ethernet is
| finding a consumer grade switch that supports it. You are
| pretty much limited to commercial offerings.
| Bayart wrote:
| Mikrotik makes "reasonably" priced switches if you want
| brand new networking equipment for the home (with
| warranties, support etc.). But yeah it's not stuff you'd
| find on your ISP-provided whitelabel 15EUR all-in-one box.
|
| It's just one of these things. People who know they _need_
| 10Gpbs LAN are already completely outside of the scope of
| regular consumer use.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Switch availability is a big part of it. For my purposes at
| home, I've got two adjacent computers wired directly
| together with 10g, then wired over 1g to a wifi access
| point and router.
| jimmar wrote:
| 1. WiFi price/performance does not exceed wired connections.
| Real-world WiFi performance typically falls well below the
| advertised maximum. You're much more likely to get the
| advertised maximum with a wired connection. WiFi gets more
| attention because running cable is hard to do. Most people are
| content with weak signals at the corners of their homes. WiFi
| is the good enough solution for most people.
|
| 2. If you can use a wired connection, a wired connection will
| almost always be better. The 5ghz spectrum doesn't suffer from
| noisy neighbors as much as the 2.4ghz spectrum, but that's
| mostly because 5ghz is much more easily blocked by walls and
| its effective range is much shorter.
|
| When I started working from home because of COVID, I bit the
| bullet and ran ethernet cable in my 100 year old house. No
| regrets. I had been looking at WiFi mesh networks, but all of
| the performance reviews I saw on YouTube showed speeds much
| lower than the theoretical WiFi limits.
| benlivengood wrote:
| The key to good mesh wifi is to have wired mesh routers (at
| least with google/nest wifi). That still means one or two
| cat6 runs but better than a switch and as many cat6 runs as
| you need in every room.
|
| Wired connections will also have stable latency.
| rand49an wrote:
| That's not a mesh, that's just multiple access points
| broadcasting the same SSID.
| tesin wrote:
| Wired or wireless backhaul doesn't alter mesh
| capabilities? Multiple access points is merely range
| extending and is a much poorer solution, with no proper
| handoff and usually at half speed.
| rnicholus wrote:
| Handoff is handled by the client, not the AP. Mesh is
| useful when you can't hardwire multiple APs. Otherwise,
| you're much better off with wiring up multiple APs on the
| same SSID/auth with non-overlapping channels.
| tW4r wrote:
| Is 802.11r still the latest and greatest to do wired back
| haul with multiple AP?
| vizzier wrote:
| This comment is a great summary. For expanded information Ars
| technica did a great write up of the marketing spiel a few
| years back [1]. Remains an interesting read and few of the
| issues raised have been fixed, especially if using common
| 2.4/5ghz wifi.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2017/03/802-e...
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| This is another in-depth writeup:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672564
| e12e wrote:
| Also remember that in most ways, wireless is more like a hub,
| than using a switch. Fundamentally all wireless peers share
| the bandwidth (they can share it differently, but they share)
| - with a typical ethernet switch (i haven't seen a hub in
| years, let alone coax...) - you get 1gbps duplex between any
| two peers simultaneously (these day probably without much
| problems at 1gbps, depending on hardware at higher speeds and
| multiple ports - but much closer than with wireless, anyway).
|
| I think the "leap" to 10gbps was a bit too far for consumer
| grade switches - and "too fast" - faster than your SSD - so
| it didn't make much sense. Hight cost, low real world
| benefit.
|
| In a lot of situations, you'll likely only use 10gbps in
| order for your NAS to talk to multiple clients, each around
| 1-2gbps duplex.
| fvv wrote:
| Mesh wifi is not bad of properly done.. results depend on
| house shape.. consider it cut in half of wifi theoretical
| bandwidth after each hop
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Is the Ethernet standard lagging
|
| In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards of
| today are basically the same thing that we've had since like
| 2000. There's no reason it can't use a lot of the same
| techniques that are used in wifi, other than it increases
| complexity. 1 Gbps is enough for anyone... right :D
|
| Surprisingly, you'll see a lot of the wifi standards have
| analogs in cable broadcasting. DOCSIS is very analogous to how
| WiFi handles data transmission. It is pulling a lot of the same
| tricks.
|
| > Related, for somebody who wants reliability, is
| Ethernet/wired still a sane choice, or does that just make them
| an old geezer?
|
| Yeah, ethernet is still way more reliable than Wifi. You run
| into far fewer problems with interference or noise.
|
| Some of the higher frequency WiFi standards (60GHz) suffer less
| from noise (because they can't penetrate walls very well).
| moonbug wrote:
| Blame intel. they could've landed 10gige in their consumer
| choosers any time in the last decade.
| zokier wrote:
| > In many ways, yes. In a lot of ways the ethernet standards
| of today are basically the same thing that we've had since
| like 2000.
|
| 10Gbe is readily and widely available these days, even in
| consumer space, and the top end is pushing 400Gbps ethernet.
| For reference, 10Gbe over baset was standardized in 2006, so
| I'd say we have come pretty far from the turn of millennium.
| Ekaros wrote:
| To add. Wifi is still shared medium, so as devices increase the
| share of bandwidth lowers. With proper ethernet switches this
| really shouldn't be case. As any pair of devices should be able
| to communicate with each other at full speed.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Commercial applications could use and afford the higher speed
| 10Gbit over 'fiber' and other expensive interconnects. While
| the consumer side really did not demand >1Gbit speeds until
| very recently but even now the demand is still very low.
|
| 10Gbit network adapters consumer a lot more power and are a lot
| more expensive than 1Gbit chipsets. Consumers's primary demands
| are things like better battery life, price, and smaller form
| factors so it makes sense to go with 1Gbit. Additionally, a lot
| of the most popular computers today don't even include a real
| Ethernet port; it's a folding mechanism which saves space but
| would make a 10Gbit spec Ethernet port (shielding, etc.) even
| more of a challenge.
|
| Modern chipsets are starting to include 2.5/5Gbit chipsets
| which benefit from higher speeds but are still much cheaper
| than 10Gbit. I think a lot of players in this space were
| expecting and waiting for 10Gbit to become much cheaper and
| efficient but that did not happen.
|
| Many Ultrabooks drop the Ethernet port altogether forcing the
| use of USB-C adapters. USB-C/thunderbolt has a theoretical
| bandwidth of 20/40Gbit/s which means you, in theory, could buy
| a 10Gbit ethernet to thunderbolt adapter.
|
| I'm sure there's a lot more on the technical side that has kept
| the price/energy of 10Gbit high but I don't know the details.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| > 10Gbit network adapters [...] are a lot more expensive than
| 1Gbit chipsets.
|
| You're not kidding! I'm working on updating a lot of my
| network to 10 GbE, and it's kind of insane how you can get by
| with super-cheap hardware, cabling, connectors, etc. for 1
| Gbps and everything works fine... but when you go to 2.5 or 5
| Gbps, prices increase a bit (and the need for better cables
| with more shielding arises).
|
| When you hit 10 Gbps, there's a lot more expense on every
| layer, especially the chips/cards that you connect to your
| computers.
|
| The difference is something like $5-10 for 1 Gbps devices, vs
| $150+ for 10 Gbps devices (in many cases... there are
| exceptions).
| moonbug wrote:
| grab connectx3s from eBay, they're 20-30 quid a pop.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Stop complaining. My first 100 mbit switch was $4500 for
| all of the five ports that it had.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I don't think of it as complaining--I remember 'back in
| the day' when a 20 MB hard drive was thousands too...
| that's tech.
|
| I was just commenting on the fact that there is often
| more-than-a-magnitude price difference between 1-10 Gbps.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > WiFi seems to exceed the price/performance of hard-wired
|
| WiFi absolutely does not. This is a test in lab conditions,
| with a single, stationary device and no stats on packet loss.
| Unless you're happy to use your device in these conditions (but
| at this point why not use a wire?), this does not represent the
| real-world conditions in which you'd be using the device.
|
| If he tries again with people moving around and moving the
| devices around, with more people using the wireless network at
| the same time, he'd see much more different results especially
| when it comes to stability.
|
| Stability is the main problem with Wi-Fi. It's relatively easy
| to get a huge speed test, it's harder to maintain a stable
| latency and no packet loss. It doesn't help that operating
| systems aren't good at reporting this information to the user,
| so the Wi-Fi always _appears_ to work (with decent speeds)
| until it totally craps out when you launch an interactive
| application (like calling or multiplayer gaming) where low
| latency is paramount and the error correction /retransmission
| algorithms can't do their thing fast enough).
| colechristensen wrote:
| WiFi is very much worse than ethernet in dense apartment
| housing. With gigabit internet service, getting 90% is easy
| wired, getting 30% wireless is lucky. In a <1000 sq ft
| apartment my wireless performance depends on the room.
| Basically on the physical layer wireless is very busy with
| collisions and retransmitting. Better performance can come with
| some tuning, but ultimately it is quite limited.
|
| I plug in all the devices I can conveniently.
| josteink wrote:
| > How come today, for home use, WiFi seems to exceed the
| price/performance of hard-wired?
|
| Only if you read the advertised speeds instead of measuring.
|
| Also wired networking has the benefit of not using a shared
| medium, so _all_ wired clients get full capacity each, vs
| wireless where all clients share the bandwidth.
|
| Wired is so much better for almost any task I throw at it, by a
| magnitude at least, so the only units in my house left to
| wireless are phones, tablets and non-work laptops.
| centimeter wrote:
| Variance and latency is much higher with wifi than with wired.
| Sensitivity to interference is also a problem. Dropped packet
| count is usually much higher with wifi, which can wreak havoc
| on many applications.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| Latency and reliability on WiFi, even the best, pales in
| comparison to a simple UTP cable. Besides that, you're always
| just one step away from some security issue in the WiFi stack
| that might leave you wide open to abuse from nearby stations.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I wired my PS4 to the CAT6 cable to the router and it has zero
| issue. Comparing to that, when it was connected to wifi just 10
| feet away, I ran into all sort of issues with latency and drop
| packets when playing FPS games online.
| nisa wrote:
| 1. 10Gbe copper requires fast switching and more shielding -
| there was a discussion here a few days ago that it's still very
| expensive - there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon that is
| a compromise on price/complexity and speed.
|
| 2. As someone developing part-time with others on a community
| mesh network if you somehow can use a wire use the wire. no
| discussion. 802.11ax (wifi 6) does improve quite a lot, but in
| the end there a quite a few requirements to reach 1.3gbps.
| noise, distance, mimo-antennas, driver-issues, fresnel-zone
| should be free, enough free channels to blast 80mhz of wifi
| data through the air at 1024QAM - all devices must speak wifi 6
| - then there is latency due to aggretation and due to the high
| bitrates the distance is usally very low.
|
| On the one hand you have reliable 110mbyte/s on wire vs. maybe
| sometimes a little bit more via wifi.
| moonbug wrote:
| >there will be probably 2.5Gbe ethernet soon
|
| NBase-T is the magic, will train 2.5, 5 or 10g over cat5e,
| depending on the cabling
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-12-22 23:00 UTC)