This is awesome. Noticing a problem and then actually measuring it is far too uncommon, thanks!
The end-advice (run ethernet for latency-sensitive uses) is reasonable, but it will vary greatly in how applicable it is. My large 1926 house in a residential area of Seattle has much higher barriers to running wires (lath and plaster walls, stucco exterior), and less interference with neighbors (less than a dozen SSIDs visible, none very strong). It’s big enough that I put in a quality wired-mesh setup (Unifi equipment: highly recommended for geeks, probably recommend Nest or Eero if you don’t enjoy this stuff. The key is to use ethernet to the stations where it’s possible, and mesh only for radio extension) and have had no problems.
I tend to test latency in-house (ping the router) rather than to ISP, just to remove that variance. Ethernet gets very consistently under half a millisecond, and wifi under light load gets under 10ms, with occasional spikes up to 35ms, and under medium load (it never gets all that heavy; only 60Mbps internet, and 1Gbps to the local file server) may hit a few hundred. I don’t ever think I’ve seen over half a second, let alone 1500ms.
You can probably get MOST of the benefit by having a hybrid solution—not every device needs to be wired, but you should wire the hungriest if you can, and wire multiple access points across the space, so that each radio only has to serve a subset of devices. Many routers also have reporting available for which devices are using how much bandwidth, to identify the ones that should move to wired (or to a different radio, or set up throttling so there’s room for others).
This is awesome. Noticing a problem and then actually measuring it is far too uncommon, thanks!
The end-advice (run ethernet for latency-sensitive uses) is reasonable, but it will vary greatly in how applicable it is. My large 1926 house in a residential area of Seattle has much higher barriers to running wires (lath and plaster walls, stucco exterior), and less interference with neighbors (less than a dozen SSIDs visible, none very strong). It’s big enough that I put in a quality wired-mesh setup (Unifi equipment: highly recommended for geeks, probably recommend Nest or Eero if you don’t enjoy this stuff. The key is to use ethernet to the stations where it’s possible, and mesh only for radio extension) and have had no problems.
I tend to test latency in-house (ping the router) rather than to ISP, just to remove that variance. Ethernet gets very consistently under half a millisecond, and wifi under light load gets under 10ms, with occasional spikes up to 35ms, and under medium load (it never gets all that heavy; only 60Mbps internet, and 1Gbps to the local file server) may hit a few hundred. I don’t ever think I’ve seen over half a second, let alone 1500ms.
You can probably get MOST of the benefit by having a hybrid solution—not every device needs to be wired, but you should wire the hungriest if you can, and wire multiple access points across the space, so that each radio only has to serve a subset of devices. Many routers also have reporting available for which devices are using how much bandwidth, to identify the ones that should move to wired (or to a different radio, or set up throttling so there’s room for others).