I would argue that the public needs to be better educated or at least saved from themselves with WiFi, however, nobody will be doing that. Having multiple lower-powered APs in a space can dramatically reduce how far outside of your premise the signal travels, and provide fast speeds indoors, however, it only takes one dummy to pick up a long-range AP, and put it in their apartment to ruin the wifi for everyone else around them.

Unless we start EM isolating apartments, or get everyone to start using modern lower-powered WiFi with multiple access points for coverage, things won’t change. I largely consider it to be impossible to fix WiFi in large buildings; especially established apartment buildings. No company is going to spend on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz isolation insulation to be installed between units just for their renters to have better WiFi, and the general public as a whole… well, it’s basically a fool’s errand to convince everyone to do anything without government regulation, and bluntly, the government, made of the same idiots that make up the general public, isn’t any better and won’t be forcing everyone to “do it correctly”… so we get this dystopian landscape of WiFi for any high-density area.

IMO, new builds don’t really have an excuse not to, it’s a trivial additional cost to install while things are being built, putting AP hookups in the ceilings, and WiFi blocking measures in the walls between units, but they still don’t, because cost. They want to spend nothing and collect huge rent payments for basically squatting on a plot of land.

Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.

Thing is: You can get better hardware for $250. OpenWRT support for mikrotik devices is spotty, though, not many people care as the things already run Linux (with proprietary network stack and management interface looking, well, like an enterprise-grade router, not server). That is, the issue is not that they’re locked down (they’re not) but lack of interest in using custom firmware, these aren’t dumbed-down html interface only types of machines but office endpoints from a company producing ISP-grade hardware.

Generally speaking having wifi is usually a good idea because smartphones and guests exist but connecting PCs via wifi is nuts. First of all, I’d have to buy a wifi card and sacrifice pcie lanes…

And lastly, a fun reminder: Once upon a time there was a German black hat, and he used wifi. The police already had evidence that he lived in a particular neighbourhood, but nothing specific enough to get a search warrant. So they went war-driving in the area, correlating spikes in (encrypted) wifi traffic with messages in a chat room where nefarious things were planned, until they figured out which house the traffic was coming from, then parked a bit nearby until they had statistical significance tighter than a fingerprint. They never had to get that search warrant once they presented the court with the data it issued an arrest warrant straight away and no degree of disk encryption could save the guy from a verdict.

That’s one solution… unless someone wants to use the computer while you’re watching something, it’s fine. For any shared access TV/computer set up, this falls apart quickly.

I want my SO to be able to watch something on the TV while I’m playing a game though (and vice versa). Personally all of my stuff is independent, we each have a gaming computer, and the TV ruins separately of all of it. We have a Samsung smart TV and it has a Chromecast attached, so we have options there… but not everyone is set up like me.

My wife and kids found Jellyfin easier to use because it more closely resembles Netflix. Your mileage may vary but I get it, and it’s why I even use a media server over just plugging in a laptop with Kodi.

Sometimes the best solution is whatever you can get the users to actually use.

Indeed, i’m genx

I’m pretty sure the love for Warcraft III evenly splits X and Y.

Ehhh… not quite. There’s evidence that copper runs closer to the speed of light (aka c), than fiber. Light through glass runs at around 2/3 c, making it the slowest option.

Wireless technically runs as fast as light, through atmosphere that’s a tiny bit slower than c, but as close as we can get.

There’s also a large argument among physisicts and electrician YouTubers about the speed of electricity through a wire, and I don’t understand the conclusions, though they were articulated quite well by the YouTubers, it just didn’t stick in my brain. The premise is how fast a lightbulb would illuminate if it had one light-second of pure copper (or superconducting) wire between the power source and the bulb, with little to no resistance. It’s interesting but nuanced and complex.

Wifi, being EM waves (same as light) should run the fastest, copper ethernet close behind and fiber dragging it’s heels at 2/3rds c. However, in practical applications, wifi has more to overcome since it’s a shared medium. Copper and fiber have a dedicated medium, so they have no competition in signaling, wifi needs to contend with everything from other wifi networks spurious emissions from other frequencies, even background cosmic radiation, as well as itself (half duplex). Because of all of that, you generally end up with wifi in last because it has so many protections and checks that it delays itself to ensure that it’s transmission will be recieved intact. The packets are generally larger and take longer to get started, so all the additional (mostly artificial) slowdowns make it slower. However, if you use highly directional antennas, a pair of them, on different but otherwise equivalent frequencies for send/receive, and cut out a lot of the other factors by designing the system well, then disable most of the protections because they’re not needed by design, it will be faster, at least in terms of latency, than fiber or copper in almost every case.

Since designing a multi-access system that doesn’t need wifi’s protections is borderline impossible, this is limited to very controlled point to point systems where both ends are tightly constrained.

So the argument “wifi has a lower minimum latency” is correct, but irrelevant in 99.99% of use-cases. Copper is easier and cheaper than fiber and actually runs faster, than fiber, but it’s only viable for extremely short runs, up to 100m in most cases, and fiber, while “slow” at 2/3rds c, is better for longer distance since there’s less line-loss across the glass per foot.

This is a very deep topic and I’m no physicist, but I’ve been endlessly fascinated by this issue for a very long time. The information here is the result of my research over many years. I still consider fiber to be the gold standard of data communication, ethernet to be next-best and overall best for relatively short connections, and wireless to be dead last due to all the challenges it faces that are not easily overcome.