Depends on the challenge. Snakey boiy loses if the challenge is to move around the house and go into the backyard.
Nay, with long enough cable you’ll get consistently good performance. With wifi it’s a hit and miss due to interference and walls.
I’m guessing snakey boy is copper clad aluminum though.
Wait, are CCA ethernet cables actually a thing?
It’s become a cancer
Yes, all over Amazon.
Aside from you knowing what copper clad aluminum is I didn’t even know that was a thing for CAT cables.
Too old and achy to run snekbois all over the place any more (I used to), if wifi isn’t good enough, tough.
As someone who runs a mini homelab in a building I don’t have access to the Internet hardware, you’d be surprised how a combination of the two can be very reliable and fairly fast.
All my devices have a gigabit connection to one another but the web router is just a 5gHz link.
I can’t believe this is so far down. I do SMB tech support. I have clients where I have installed cable, wifi and power lane. In one case cable, wifi, and wifi,/cable powerline.
Which is best? Depends on your use case. Is cable, 2m away from the router best? Well, if you use a laptop that moves from the desk several times a day, it becomes a pain.
Working IT for many different companies mainly in the MSP and SMB markets, yes. There’s reason to have different kinds of connections. Powerline is fine if you’re on the same circuit, but Powerline can’t really jump a split phase in North America where I am, so if you happen to have them on different circuits which happen to be on different sides of the split phase, you’re going to have a bad time.
It becomes either a guessing game, or you need to have a journeyman level of knowledge of electrical to figure out if it will work. MoCA is a better option if you can, and of course, ethernet is king.
Anyone doing wiring for ethernet in 2023, I say to you this: for the love of God, don’t use Cat5e. Cat6 is the minimum, and Cat6A should be standard. Cat6 supports 10G up to 55m, which should be enough distance for any home applications with few exceptions, and 10G should be enough for the foreseeable future of home networking, since we’re barely touching 2.5G/5Gbps ethernet in homes now.
There’s a lot of good tech to solve any communication needs, so as someone who has spent far too long troubleshooting wifi, please run a wire wherever it is practical. Save yourself the headache.
Latency is the name of the game if you’re gaming. Copper will always give you the fastest ping times compared to the fastest wifi you can buy.
WiFi 5 latency is only two times higher than cooper (0.3ms vs 0.6ms). WiFi 6 has the same or even lower latency. WiFi 7 is even better. If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice. Unless you have spare money for an industrial 100Gbps set up. Which you don’t.
Please speak standards, not marketing language. Replace WiFi and number with 802.11 and letters in the end.
If latency is your game, copper is a poor choice
One packet drop for TCP creates huge latency for application level protocol. And not many games use UDP for their transport.
not many games use UDP for their transport
Citation Needed
I have never heard of a latency-sensitive game that doesn’t use UDP for inner loop communication. Sure they use TCP for login and server browser, but the actual communication for gameplay almost always uses UDP.
Let’s see… Terraria, Factorio, Minecraft.
Minecraft and Terraria use both TCP and UDP, presumably in the way I described (TCP for initial connection, asset download, etc. and UDP for world state sync). Factorio uses UDP exclusively, and implements reliable transport where needed in software.
Unless it’s changed in the past year which I doubt, Minecraft exclusively uses TCP for client/server communication. I’ve been modding the game for years and am pretty familiar with the protocol. I think it’s actually one of the few which don’t use UDP to some capacity.
The original PC Java client uses TCP; every other client, including the C++ PC version, uses UDP.
Oops, Factorio moved to UDP.
Can’t find any UDP implementation or even UDP protocol description for Terraria, while there are implementations of Terraria protocol that use TCP and documentation for it. Basically no evidence of UDP and a lot of evidence of TCP for gameplay.
Minecraft uses only TCP. Sources: wiki.vg, myself, myself and friend of mine and myself again(no link for now, but two minecraft proxy server implementations)
Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that’s why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.
Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people’s routers nearby.
No shit?
I mean copper runs at 2/3 the speed of light.
Wireless is pretty much the speed of light.
I thought they used dedicated fiber for their links.
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.
The wifi latency on generic 5ghz routers is like 5ms if not less
Not even 5 ms. I have a properly set up Wi-Fi at home and you’ll feel no difference in gaming. Wi-Fi only adds like 1-2 ms latency at most.
Is the notebook or desktop wifi NIC and antenna important or only the router? Because when I had a shitty laptop a few years back the latency sucked ass, both at home and at my university (where I hope they had good network components but idk)
With wifi, everything is important, even the number of people connected on your channel… not the number of wifi networks on the channel, the number of total nodes using the same channel. The ap hardware factors in, your wifi card (client) factors in, even drivers and other things can factor in. The band (2.4/5/6 GHz), the non-wifi traffic, spurious emissions from other harmonic frequencies, even electrical noise from gadgets and other devices nearby. You can even factor in distance to the ap and cosmic background noise.
On top of that, it’s half duplex, so only one node can successfully transmit at a time. So it interferes with itself.
It’s a complete mess of unknowns and unknowable things, unless you have a very good spectrum analyser to look into it.
IMO, this is what makes WiFi so terrible. There’s simply too many factors that can be slowing you down, most of which you can’t see and aren’t obvious.
Unless you have no choice - a good WiFi will not add noticeable latency.
Myself I am playing over 5ghz wifi. I would say I don’t feel much difference, but prefer cable any time!
WiFi 5 latency on a decent router (not the shit your ISP gives you for free) is only 0.6ms. Yes, that’s less than 1ms.
I just tested ping between my weak computers, one of which supports only 100mbit ethernet and are sequentially connected via cheap 2$ dumb switch and ISP-provided router and got 0.187ms average, while ping via same system, but using 802.11ac for one device got 8.16ms with standard deviation of 11.9, maximum of 67ms and minimum of 1.44ms.
You have a very shitty WiFi over there. I haven’t seen anything over 1ms ever.
I just don’t live on the moon, neighbours have WIFI too.
Maybe…
your latency on your network might be 0.6ms, but for most practical use-cases, it will be orders of magnitude more. Partly due to the interference and half duplex nature of wifi, but also because of CSMA/CA (carrier sense multi access / collision avoidance) algorithm, which listens before transmitting to ensure the channel is clear, and waits when it’s busy until it’s clear before transmitting. The actual transit time for each frame is very short, but getting to the point where you can actually transmit is the main challenge for wifi.
Propegation time for a 1500 byte frame on gigabit Ethernet is approximately 12 µs, or 12 microseconds, aka 0.012 ms. So the argument is kind of squished here. Given that you have a dedicated channel to the switch (and not needing a carrier sense, collision avoidance of detection algorithm with ethernet) the frame can be immediately sent, so the total transit time from a computer connected by ethernet to a router or switch is orders of magnitude faster.
Here’s the thing - it won’t in real life.
This comment does not make sense to me
Right. Like even in the shittiest scenario that’s not a major difference. There’s stuff like interference and the speeds are lower, sure, but 1 gigabit is plenty for non enterprise situations
There’s no interference unless you live in a Soviet block.
Your experience varies massively depending on your RF environment. In my suburban neighborhood, I’m getting a stable 3.4ms to my router. The same hardware when I was in a dense urban environment was around 11ms. I’ve never looked at retry counters, but if I had to guess, I’m getting close to zero right now, but was getting considerably higher in a dense area.
How would you get an entire 5g BTS without frequency regulating agency hunting your ass?
I meant to say 5ghz
Why is this my top post? What joke am I missing? So confused.
The joke is that you have to spend $350+ on a router if you want a lot of bandwidth to spare for all your devices – and more importantly – a strong, reliable connection (especially if you live in an area with a lot of competing WiFi traffic, like an apartment building). Or you could just buy a $3 ethernet cable and get the same thing.
Happened to me. The cheap $100 routers kept dropping the signal, so I blew $400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support. Problem solved. That said, if it weren’t for the fact that smartphones exist (and the fact that I have a girlfriend with a laptop), I wouldn’t bother with WiFi at all. I miss the 2000s, when all you needed was a 10Mbps switch, and WiFi was something you only got if you wanted to brag to your friends that you can browse the internet in your backyard…
$400 on a fancy gaming router with custom firmware support
I think I need to bold this up. Custom firmware support, especially OpenWRYT, means that your router will live for years to come.
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.
What’s the speed? Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you’re easily saturating that line either way.
Do you have gigabit? Then Ethernet, but then again getting like 600mbps wirelessly is good enough.
Biggest thing is having GOOD coverage. My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere. People with a shitty ISP router shoved in the cupboard in their basement make no sense lol.
I had 100mbps ethernet because incompetent ISP worker who crimped only two pairs out of four. And I had AFAIR 150mbps plan! Don’t know what to wish for that idiot.
Do you have a shitty 10mbps connection like my parents? Then WiFi, because you’re easily saturating that line either way.
Only if latency doesn’t matter. WiFi has a lot more jitter, no matter if your WAN connection is 10 or 1000mbps.
Packet loss really, and the latency and jitter said loss can contribute to.
Radio waves go faster (speed of light) than through a medium (copper). Not that it matters at such a small scale, but it’s helpful to have a good picture of the elements at work here. The further you are from the receiving point, the more obstacles (matter) that can obstruct it. But in ideal conditions WiFi is better than most people think. Replicating those ideal conditions though…
Radio waves go faster (speed of light) than through a medium (copper).
Except that copper ethernet is baseband, so it’s not radio waves. WiFi is still faster than copper AFAIK (there was a huge debate about this between youtubers not that long ago), at least for signalling, but the difference is smaller than you think. light (which is EM, the same waves as radio/WiFi) through glass is about 2/3rds c (aka the speed of light), and it’s actually a lot slower than ethernet or WiFi for propagation delay, however, WiFi must use CSMA/CA as well as other tricks to ensure it doesn’t step on itself, and that it doesn’t step on other sources of radio interference (Microwave ovens, wireless controllers (like xbox), bluetooth, zigbee, etc, on 2.4Ghz and stuff like RADAR on 5Ghz). It’s half-duplex, so only one station can transmit at a time, hense CSMA/CA being required, where ethernet doesn’t need any collision avoidance or detection except for rare cases of 10/100 half duplex, all gigabit is full duplex. Half duplex on wireline networks is basically eliminated at this point, so it’s little more than a footnote.
Factoring all this in, getting the signal down the line, WiFi loses in almost every case, due to all the considerations it needs to take into account.
What crap are you doing that so intensive WiFi causes latency? It’s essentially a negligible difference unless you are saturating the signal. We’re taking less than 3ms for a reliable round trip.
Wi-Fi has constant retransmissions. This adds perceptible latency because the checksum check, turnaround, and packet transmission add a lot of time compared to the speed of light through air across 3 meters.
Few Ms. It’s absolutely unperceptive.
I often will be downloading a film, streaming youtube or music and be playing video games. Latency matters to me and WiFi is just not stable enough
downloading a film,
Latency matters to me
Can you not contradict yourself?
and playing video games. No offense, but did you read the whole comment? I need good latency for my games and I need it while downloading a bunch of other stuff. Idk if you’ve ever tried downloading a few torrents while gaming, but it’ll definitely have an impact. Especially if you’re on WiFi.
I did. Just pointing out uselessness of mentioning big downloads in context of latency. Just don’t bring bad arguments.
downloading a few torrents while gaming, but it’ll definitely have an impact. Especially if you’re on WiFi.
Yes, but also setting up network priority(QoS), limiting torrent transfer speed and other stuff.
You’re probably right, but I’m not a power user and nor do I care to be. I can make all my problems go away by just plugging in a cable and making sure I have good Internet otherwise. That’s my point and what matters to me in this discussion
Something is wrong. None of this is perceptible to humans.
If you don’t want to figure it out, cool. But it ain’t the protocol causing your issues.
I’m pretty sure it’s wifi from the neighbours interfering. I can’t be bothered to deal with that, not when I have a cable laying around. Plus, no matter what, a cable will always be more stable than wifi
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Wi-Fi adds like 4ms. It’s not high latency.
There are lots of factors that can cause jitter on WiFi, and it’s mostly outside of your control if you’re living somewhere more densely populated. My apartment randomly gets a lot of noise, and as a result my WiFi starts to get unacceptable amounts of packet loss and jitter. It doesn’t happen often enough to motivate the effort for me to go around signal analyzing, but still…
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15 wired devices, kthx. Once & done.
No more “why’s it down now”; no deauth attacks; no weird outages when highway traffic spikes from nav\music-streaming users getting tower timeouts that cause their WiFi to aggressively cry out for every known SSID.
With wired connections, I set it up once & it keeps working. With WiFi, it’s a constant shouting match version of the Telephone game, with openly malicious actors literally headquartered a few blocks away.
My house has multiple access points so that my connection is great everywhere
As an IT professional who has worked with a lot of wireless systems, I approve. This is the way.
you realize that you need a router to plug in a LAN cable
Isn’t that just a WAP ?
I think it’s actually a JPEG
I think it’s a combo, but I’m not 100%
Wet Asscess Point?
Wet ass point
Wet ass plane
You could go straight into the modem or into a switch. :)
In my setup, I have modem > router > switch > patch panel > outlets and POE APs.
Obligatory warning AVOID CCA CABLES! They can be a hazard!
Go for copper. More on this issue:
https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/cca-vs-solid-copper#page_comments=1
For PoE? Yeah. For data only? No. Short reply: if cable passes test for its category, it passes, otherwise it does not.
The difference in cost for 1000ft spools is <$50 CAD, and you get a product you know always works, is less brittle, can do PoE without becoming a fireball, can be used in commercial installation legally, and is actually in spec. I mean a lot of people who are actually running cables already have separate spools for solid and stranded, plenum and riser, maybe even shielded/burial… no need to add CCA to the mix with all of its downsides (and potentially make that mistake…)
Ok, that was an interesting read. Learning is fun y’all
I’m just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.
I won’t defend CCA wire but aluminium is an excellent conductor… by weight, not by volume. It’s not that you can’t make good aluminium wire it’s that CCA wire are generally shoddy. Brittleness is an issue but with time copper work-hardens so you can’t mess with it infinitely, either. It’s especially useful for overhead lines as it’s so light.
Somewhat not entirely unrelatedly: Steel bike frames are generally better than aluminium. They’re it practical terms about as erm sturdy at equal weight, but steel bends quite a bit before it breaks so a good steel frame will be lighter than an aluminium frame and can get by without shock absorbers when the geometry is good, that’s why you see curved forks (not if it’s a downhill bike, of course, and “generally” means “if you’re not looking for a carbon-fibre race bike”, there’s reasons to want stiffness in bikes just not for most people).
Next up: Oxygen-free copper and audiophiles. Practically no increase in performance (and definitely none compared to simply using a tiny bit more of regular copper), meanwhile, so cheap that when you’re at a decent store (say, Thomann) and sort by price the cheapest stuff will have OFC.
I don’t like to use aluminum for anything, mainly that it fatigues more easily and will thin/break of strained. My home insurance provider also hates aluminum, I couldn’t get insurance if I have any aluminum wire for my electrical work. Anytime I see it, I just want to pull it out.
CCA feels like the worst of both worlds.
Copper is king for me.
There’s a plethora of problems that can be listed for both aluminum and copper and CCA. Aluminum/CCA is cheaper, but the trade-offs are not worth the savings IMO.
Real talk though, I own that router and it’s awesome. Can’t say the wifi signal is much different than any other router I’ve owned, but it’s got loads of awesome features I use for hosting stuff. DDNS support plus Let’s Encrypt plus OpenVPN support in one box. Very handy.
You could get a Mikrotik for that price, I think.
What’s the criteria?
Speed and reliability? Snakeboi.
Ability to move around unimpeded and/or taking a dump while being on Lemmy? $350 router with spikes.
And if prison rules, I’m going router with spikes…
Reliability 100% the snakeboi
But for speed, WiFi can actually out-perform those particular snakebois in many scenarios.
Snaky boi is consistent
Nope. While WiFi has fancy claims you’re not going to get any more than around 1200mbps at 20 metres on the best day with the best gear.
While with cat6 you’ll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem, and even 10gbps. Even cat5e will do those speeds at certain distances.
I have a 10 meter cat5 cable I use for one application that can’t have any interruptions or lag.
Calling it cat5 cable makes any woman who hears me want to leave their man for me. Good to see another king our there using the proper terminology, stay tight player
Cat5, what is this? The year 2000?
At least use cat5e
cat6 or bust!
Cat5e. What is this 2005? Use Cat9.
U wont believe but its almost easier to get cat5e than cat 6 here
Hmmm, that reminds me; I need to separate out all the old ones that say “10BaseT”
I did buy the cable around 2010 for cheap
Also WiFi is half duplex so you only get those speeds in one direction at a time.
Didn’t know that, thank you!
Physical limit for 2.4GHz is 1.11 gigabits per second or only 143 megabytes per second AT ALL. For 5GHz it’s slightly more than twice as much, but still less than even shitty cat5e, that allows 2.5GBE at 100 meters or in certain conditions 5GBE.
While with cat6 you’ll probably do 2.5gbps to 100m no problem,
Cat6 is 5gbps no problem at 100 meters and 10gbps at 55 meters.
TLDR, Intel banned my country
In perfect conditions for Wi-Fi. I live in a high rise and the 2.4 Ghz band is hardly usable. My previous phone didn’t have dual band Wi-Fi and it was much faster on 4G than WiFi.
Plus, modern routers and APs often rely on band aggregation and so even with devices that have dual band, crowded airwaves will have a negative effect on speed.
Wi-Fi is very fast when I’m in my cabin in the countryside. But when I get home with the same devices, it’s barely usable.
You could argue that I need a better router with the newest protocol and gizmos but so far, even with new bands and protocols, Wi-Fi is still a competition of which router and devices will shout louder than their neighbors.
Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.
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.
I have 0 faith that a router which doesn’t have high speed ethernet will ever be able to deliver such fast WiFi. If they’ve cheaped out on the ethernet I doubt they’ve splurged on WiFi most devices can’t use. And if you’re talking about fast ethernet, then WiFi is chanceless.
“fast ethernet” is defined as 100mbps. I know what you meant, but there’s an actual industry definition for “fast” ethernet…
Most of the marketing is showing a combined speed at 100% optimal conditions. Unless you live in a faraday cage and have 4x4 802.11 equipment on all of your 5Ghz devices, and 2x2 at least on all of your 2.4Ghz equipment, then do massive, consistent and continual one-way data transfers using UDP or something which doesn’t have window sizes and can support one-way no-reply transfers like with multicast, all with a perfect signal and the highest wireless PHY rates, you’re not going to even remotely see that much speed.
But router needs cable.
There are some pretty long snakebois in prison, there usually in the shower areas
Idk… I’ve got some pretty long snakey bois
SAME…ladies?
Are you hitting the max yet? 100m
There are also the glass snakey bois that you could use.
Be careful though, glass snakes don’t like being coiled too tight!
I ran a 100ft snakey boi to my desk around the start of COVID and it’s still there.
Bonus: switch mounted under desk feeds another 75 footer to kid’s room and PC.
Only the best.
I ran a 100ft
It looks big, but it’s only 30 meters. It’s nothing.
If it’s anywhere near that long you should see a doctor.
Yo
Unless your toilet room just so happens to have a RJ45 socket in the wall. I know one that has two of them.
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What communitys do you browse that dont load satisfactorily with a normal wifi router?
Normal router wasn’t one of the options
Depends, am i routing data or cosplaying the lich king?
Fucking millennials. Learn to multitask.
Wrong generation
I’m pretty sure the love for Warcraft III evenly splits X and Y.
Total Annihilation.
ARM vs Core
Indeed, i’m genx
My last several multicore multithreaded “smartphones” each sucked at multitasking; why should I hold myself to a higher standard than the entire telecom industry?
Have that router. Snakey boy wins.
You must have forgotten to sharpen the spikes 😹
How do you find it? Do you manage the scary spikes?
If you flip it upside down it’s a Halloween spider decoration.
The cheapest way to get cables is to know somebody who crimps it themselves, but for the majority of people probably buy from shitty places like walmart for a 1,000% upcharge.
Pretty sure the biggest cost of crimping your own cables is finding a place to store the remaining spool.
Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP
Or ensuring the spool is still useful 15 years later while everything has migrated to SFP/QSFP
Nah, the remaining spool will be useful for the rest of its/your lifetime, it always comes in handy as a generic 4-pair twisted pair signal cable for any non-ethernet purpose. I’ve used my old spool twice this year; first for an m-bus cable to my power meter and then for a limit switch for my garage door.
That’s me lol. I’m still sitting on my spool of Cat6 I bought a few years ago. At pre-COVID prices it was approximately (CAD) $1 per termination, and $1 per 6 feet of cable.
Today at Infinite Cables and other Canadian stores I can buy premade lengths at almost those costs, shockingly. Prices really came down.
For me, its more running lines through the walls of my old house.
I’ll just say: attic. That’s all.
Going to be tricky dropping cables from the attic of my three story house into my first-floor home office.
Up from the basement?
If it’s an unfinished basement, easy. If it’s finished, that feels bad man.
Depending on local building codes, you can run them through vents so long as they’re fireproof coated, but TBH that’s pretty silly.
Crimper costs you about 2$, rj45 connectors cost 0.05$ and cable costs 0.1$/meter. Not that much.
Alright but I’m storing enough tools and large coils of various cable/wire at my home so I’m going to pass until I move into a bigger place. I don’t even work in IT so I’d probably snip one segment and have the rest laying around forever. Still cheaper than buying finished cables at the store, though, I give you that.
You can hire low voltage writing contractors to do it, they usually charge per run (up to a certain length), and they only leave you with what you will use. They’re a bit more costly, since you’re paying for their time, but it will save you the hassle of buying tools, learning how to use them, buying cable, running the line, doing the crimping (usually several times as you will probably mess up at least a few), and everything.
Saves a bunch of headaches… just an option I’ll throw out there.
Don’t hire an electrician for the work, most don’t understand the requirements of low voltage or ethernet, they’re simply not trained for it. They can wire up your fridge or whatever perfectly great, but the rules that apply to high voltage are very different than what is needed for low voltage… specifically Ethernet.
Crimper costs you about 2$
Pffft flathead screwdriver.
…no seriously if you want to buy a crimper spend 10 bucks upwards or so, people have spent more on screwdrivers. A knipex one costs about 30 bucks, we’re not talking fibre splicers here. Regarding outlets, those 10 buck LSA Plus things are perfectly fine. Finagling those things with a flathead is way harder if you want more than an electrical connection but actual signal quality.
if you want to buy a crimper spend 10 bucks upwards or so, people have spent more on screwdrivers.
We live in different economies
380₽ right now, about 3.8$It’s not that you can’t get crimpers that cheap here (cheapest I found on Amazon is 3.50 Euros, incl. 19% VAT) it’s that they’re almost guaranteed to be made from chinesium with the engineering and manufacturing precision to match. There’s a difference between inexpensive and cheap.
just a heads up for anyone deciding to make their own cables, make sure you buy pass through rj45 ends or it becomes substantially more annoying to make a successful crimp. with pass through you can prep your cable and it doesn’t matter how long you make the strands you’re working with because you cut the excess off, with non-pass through you have to cut them to a specific size and if it’s too long when they bottom out, your conductors will stick out making your crimp weaker inviting poor connection issues later in the cable’s life.
thank you for tuning in for this controls tech tip
I like the ones that have a separate little sleeve with a pass though. You put the wires through it, clip them, then insert it as a unit into the connector.
Those are the way.
I bought a bulk bag of the shitty kind. Worst purchase of my life. I was too stubborn to throw them out and it took a decade+ to get through them all.
Didn’t know this was a thing. Tytyty
