I think it is mostly because they don't understand how much better wired internet is than wireless. I've basically forced many people to connect their devices with Ethernet as a "temporary" measure to solve their problems. For the most part, every single person has decided to leave whatever it is connected. Almost all my friends rent too, which is a huge barrier to using wires, since the wires can't be hidden in the walls or ceilings.
One of the big things that people don't realize is that bandwidth of wireless is split between every device on that channel. So if you are streaming to your TV/roku/xbox/etc over wifi, you are killing the bandwidth for your laptop and phone as well. Plus, if you live in a city your wireless bandwidth is pretty much guaranteed to suck because every ISP includes wifi with their modems, destroying the noise floor. Comcast modems are a particularly notable example, as they have a "public" 2.4 ghz network in addition to the "private" 2.5 and 5 ghz networks. There are no fewer than 30 wifi networks available inside my house when I check on my phone, and I live in a row house with metal lathe under the plaster, which greatly attenuates wifi signals.
I think the biggest barrier to wiring things is that patch cables are incredibly expensive if you buy them at Best Buy, etc. Most non-technical people I know only own the patch cable that came with their modem. Once I get them wired up, they are astounded by how much faster their internet is. They don't have buffering issues, the internet doesn't drop randomly, and it just seems "faster" (which I attribute to lower latency). I toss extra patch cables in my Monoprice orders now and sell them to my friends at-cost. To be honest, it's partially for my own sanity as well, because watching Netflix at 480p on a 50/15 connection drives me nuts.
I think it is mostly because they don't understand how much better wired internet is than wireless. I've basically forced many people to connect their devices with Ethernet as a "temporary" measure to solve their problems. For the most part, every single person has decided to leave whatever it is connected.
Yes. Same here. Ethernet is an oddly underrated technology. And Monoprice is one of these things that nerds know about and no one else does. There may be other companies like that—someone above mentioned an enterprise router company that sells better stuff than most consumer companies. Yet I've already forgotten its name.
Probably Ubiquiti and the Edgerouter Lite. It's an amazing router, but it doesn't have an integrated switch like most consumer-grade routers. It's not quite as user-friendly either, but the performance is unmatched. It costs about ~$90 and can handle gigabit internet, and a billion packages per second. I bought one recently because I was having issues with bufferbloat and extreme latency with my run of the mill 75/15 internet service.
Ubiquiti also makes a great series of wireless APs that are worth checking out.
My network right now is a Edgerouter lite, 2 Unifi AP AC Lites, and a used Dell 2816 managed switch.
We had a Ubiquiti wifi router in-office that would constantly refuse to allow certain devices on, or randomly drop devices and not let them back on. Apparently it was a known issue between those routers and Apple laptops so I was told.
I could see that. Their implementation of zero-handoff is really strange. For instance, all the APs have to be on the same channel. I could see that causing issues.
I didn't even understand how much better my laptop's wireless could be than my wireless, much less Ethernet. I was using a WiFi repeater to get to the old WiFi router, and eventually got frustrated with the random disconnections/freezes and began messing around. I was shocked to see my Internet speed (speedtest.net) go up substantially with a new WiFi router, and then go up to a total of 6x when I cut out the repeater using a big directional antenna - and it still wasn't equal to the numbers I was getting from plugging directly into the router with an Ethernet cable. So now despite the bother, I'm just going to run 200-feet of Ethernet cable from the router to my laptop. I knew Ethernet was better than WiFi but if I had realized just how much, I would've bitten the bullet years ago.
I'm surprised a software developer doesn't know basic stuff like that a typical Ethernet connection is 1Gb/s, and WiFi around 20-200, depending on conditions.
This is like an engineer not knowing the mains voltage is 230V, or a baker not knowing about standard grades of flour.
I knew perfectly well that Ethernet goes up to 1000 megabit/sec and WiFi generally 50-200 megabit/sec, but my reasoning was that the LAN shouldn't matter because my ISP only gives us ~6 megabytes/sec (or ~45 megabit/sec) and as far as I knew, all possible configurations easily saturated that as my laptop and repeater were the only things on WiFi with no interference from neighbors. In performance, you usually focus on the weakest link, and here the weakest link (ISP/Internet) was by far weaker than the other links.
Apparently I was grossly wrong, and I still don't understand why I was wrong and why the changes made such a large difference. Something to do with network protocols and response to packet loss or something, I guess.
I'm not. Software developers are generally pretty ignorant of things like network latency. You often see things like caching used to improve n+1 database performance problems which doesn't really help when the cache is also on another machine.
One of the big things that people don't realize is that bandwidth of wireless is split between every device on that channel. So if you are streaming to your TV/roku/xbox/etc over wifi, you are killing the bandwidth for your laptop and phone as well. Plus, if you live in a city your wireless bandwidth is pretty much guaranteed to suck because every ISP includes wifi with their modems, destroying the noise floor. Comcast modems are a particularly notable example, as they have a "public" 2.4 ghz network in addition to the "private" 2.5 and 5 ghz networks. There are no fewer than 30 wifi networks available inside my house when I check on my phone, and I live in a row house with metal lathe under the plaster, which greatly attenuates wifi signals.
I think the biggest barrier to wiring things is that patch cables are incredibly expensive if you buy them at Best Buy, etc. Most non-technical people I know only own the patch cable that came with their modem. Once I get them wired up, they are astounded by how much faster their internet is. They don't have buffering issues, the internet doesn't drop randomly, and it just seems "faster" (which I attribute to lower latency). I toss extra patch cables in my Monoprice orders now and sell them to my friends at-cost. To be honest, it's partially for my own sanity as well, because watching Netflix at 480p on a 50/15 connection drives me nuts.