Going All Wireless

[ncted]

I am still on the fence between U-verse and Dish, and the time to decide is fast approaching. My new (to me) house doesn't really have a good ethernet wiring setup. I could potentially do some stuff with MoCA over RG59 as well as ethernet to build a network for devices like the Hopper or U-verse DVR, remote clients, Rokus, etc, but I am wondering if it would just be easier to just go all wireless. Previously, I have tried to limit the wireless use in my house to ensure a good wireless experience for the devices which require it, but I am wondering if the technology has just gotten good enough that I don't have to worry about it any more.

The new house is fairly small (~1900 sqft), open, and compactly laid out. It is a pretty typical suburban neighborhood. I have neighbors on both sides and across the street, but no one behind me for at least 300 ft.

The AT&T Fiber Residential Gateway is centrally located in a closet under the stairs (the kind that Harry Potter would sleep in). At each TV location, of which there are 4, I will have a TV DVR/Receiver, a Roku/Fire Stick, and a Blu-Ray Player (which is not wireless). Additionally, in the living room, I will have an AVR and a Mac Mini. On top of that, my wife and I each have a smart phone, a Tablet, and at least 1 laptop, but sometimes 2 (work and non-work).

That adds up to 18 wireless devices competing for airwaves, which is likely to bring the noise floor way up compared to what I have now, where everything except the streaming sticks, phones, tablets, and laptops are wired, and I have fewer TV locations.

Anyway, I guess the question is, is it worth the effort to create a wired network, or should I just not bother with it and go wireless for everything?

Thanks,
Ted

 

[Riverpilot]

Speaking for myself, I try to keep as much wired as possible. Things have gotten better on the wireless front, and new tech allows MU-MIMO, etc.. which helps with the over-crowding.

Even so, I still have wired ethernet throughout my home.

The way I see it. If you can have the devices wired, I would go that way. I guess I'm a bit old fashion in that sense.... I like my more important items to be wired. :shrugs: I guess it depends on how much "work" is involved with getting wired.

 

[ncted]

Speaking for myself, I try to keep as much wired as possible. Things have gotten better on the wireless front, and new tech allows MU-MIMO, etc.. which helps with the over-crowding.

Even so, I still have wired ethernet throughout my home.

The way I see it. If you can have the devices wired, I would go that way. I guess I'm a bit old fashion in that sense.... I like my more important items to be wired. :shrugs: I guess it depends on how much "work" is involved with getting wired.

I tend to agree, but the question is how to implement it.

Well, it is actually more about the money at this point. I have determined I have 1 good ethernet port in the kitchen that will actually auto-negotiate to 1 Gbps Full. The only other "working" port is in the living room, which auto-negotiates to 100Mbps half, so I am thinking there is some problem with the line or the termination. The termination looks fine to me, but I don't have the tools available to me any more to determine this for sure. I'd have to buy them or hire someone.

The roughly 20-year old RG59 pre-wired cable actually looks to be in good shape, and I could theoretically leverage it to create a MoCA network at all the locations other than the kitchen. The Dish feed would come in on some RG6 run specifically for that purpose at some earlier time, and U-verse comes in on the Fiber feed.

So, if I want to wire as much as possible, I could either [pay to] troubleshoot/fix multiple UTP connections of dubious quality, or just try setting up a MoCA network leverage that unused coax. The former is probably more work, and may be more expensive, but is likely to deliver the best results, while the latter, is likely to be less work, and might be less expensive, but I don't know how well it will work -- the only MoCA network I have had before was the one used by my Hopper 2000 and Joey 1.0.

 

[Riverpilot]

I don't envy your decision. I guess it comes down to the almighty dollar. The way I see it, if I'm going to be putting money into something like this, I'm running new CAT6 cables.

If I'm going to run new cables, then I'm running a new conduit that goes to the head end, etc...

If you can run new cables yourself, then you're just out time and the price of the new cables. Or hire someone to run the new conduit and you pull the new wires, or hire someone to do it all...

It always comes down to the almighty dollar.

 

[dishcomm]

I am still on the fence between U-verse and Dish, and the time to decide is fast approaching. My new (to me) house doesn't really have a good ethernet wiring setup. I could potentially do some stuff with MoCA over RG59 as well as ethernet to build a network for devices like the Hopper or U-verse DVR, remote clients, Rokus, etc, but I am wondering if it would just be easier to just go all wireless. Previously, I have tried to limit the wireless use in my house to ensure a good wireless experience for the devices which require it, but I am wondering if the technology has just gotten good enough that I don't have to worry about it any more.

The new house is fairly small (~1900 sqft), open, and compactly laid out. It is a pretty typical suburban neighborhood. I have neighbors on both sides and across the street, but no one behind me for at least 300 ft.

The AT&T Fiber Residential Gateway is centrally located in a closet under the stairs (the kind that Harry Potter would sleep in). At each TV location, of which there are 4, I will have a TV DVR/Receiver, a Roku/Fire Stick, and a Blu-Ray Player (which is not wireless). Additionally, in the living room, I will have an AVR and a Mac Mini. On top of that, my wife and I each have a smart phone, a Tablet, and at least 1 laptop, but sometimes 2 (work and non-work).

That adds up to 18 wireless devices competing for airwaves, which is likely to bring the noise floor way up compared to what I have now, where everything except the streaming sticks, phones, tablets, and laptops are wired, and I have fewer TV locations.

Anyway, I guess the question is, is it worth the effort to create a wired network, or should I just not bother with it and go wireless for everything?

Thanks,
Ted

Unless one has a very good wireless router and great reception in all parts of the home, it sucks. Use hard wire. It will save a lot of headaches.

 

[KAB]

Unless one has a very good wireless router and great reception in all parts of the home, it sucks. Use hard wire. It will save a lot of headaches.

+1!

 

[comfortably_numb]

I live in an area where the DSL company installs the same wireless routers in all the homes and businesses. The routers all use the 2.4 GHZ band. So, no matter how fast the speed they provide to your router, the wireless congestion slows everything down. So I bridge their modem, put a 5 Ghz router behind it, and boom. Everything's great. I'm running 11+ devices off it with no problem. Very few people use 5G, and it has something like 150 channels, so congestion is rare. Dish's wireless adapters have 5G capability, so that's something to remember if you're going all wireless.

 

[ncted]

I live in an area where the DSL company installs the same wireless routers in all the homes and businesses. The routers all use the 2.4 GHZ band. So, no matter how fast the speed they provide to your router, the wireless congestion slows everything down. So I bridge their modem, put a 5 Ghz router behind it, and boom. Everything's great. I'm running 11+ devices off it with no problem. Very few people use 5G, and it has something like 150 channels, so congestion is rare. Dish's wireless adapters have 5G capability, so that's something to remember if you're going all wireless.

I use primarily 5GHz now, and I know that Dish's wireless Joeys and the U-verse clients would be on 5GHz, which is why I wasn't sure about the limits given the number of devices. I think I am going to get a couple of MoCA adapters and see how the throughput is on them with the existing wiring.

 

[osu1991]

I've become fine with using Moca. My previous home didn't have vaulted ceilings so I pulled Cat6 and RG6 everywhere terminating in a media panel in the garage. My current house is a newer 2000sqft all brick with neighbors about 30Ft away on either side. It was built in 2000 and only wired minimally with rg59 and a few phone lines.

I used the wifi analyzer app on my old android phone to check all the wifi signals around me. Crap load of people on 2.4Ghz, no one on 5Ghz, so I use 5Ghz N and AC for everything. I have a gigabit wireless ac router that performs well for my demands.

Due to the ceiling vaults in this house, I don't care to climb around the attic over all the vaults in each room to pull ethernet at this time. I use wireless to the 2 phones, 3 tablets, 2 rokus , 2 laptops, desktop computer, laser printer, 3 tv's, wifi light hub, Amazon Echo and a Dot. I use Moca 2.0 over the existing RG59 and have gigabit switches to hardwire all the tivo's, tivo mini's, nas, slingbox and a WDTV media player. This works very well for me.