TIL having both a wired and wireless setup saves my butt more than I thought

I was a hardcore wired only guy for years, thought wireless was just for lazy people. Then I got a call from a client in Austin last Tuesday where their office had so much interference from old building wiring that dropping a Cat6 cable would have taken 4 hours. I grabbed a TP-Link mesh system I'd been sitting on for emergencies and it fixed their latency issues in 20 minutes. Anyone else find themselves keeping backup wireless gear even if you prefer wired?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancyw976d ago

And honestly even if it was packet loss, the mesh still helped in that moment. That's the thing I've noticed with older buildings - you can spend ages trying to trace where a signal is getting killed by some random interference source. I've got a buddy who does AV installs and he keeps a couple of those little Nest WiFi pucks in his van exactly for houses with plaster walls and old wiring. Sometimes you can't beat just throwing a wireless node in a hallway closet and calling it a day lol. The wired stuff is still king for permanent setups but having that backup plan saves you from those 3 hour cable runs through crawlspaces.

anna_ross196d ago

Actually that mesh system saved you but calling it a fix for "latency issues" isn't quite right. Mesh adds hops and usually makes latency worse, not better. You just needed connectivity fast and it worked. The real problem was probably packet loss or intermittent drops from the old wiring, not latency.