And @rakeshg, @steve.maddigan
How many devices do you have where switching to wired made a significant improvement? I border around 50 devices connected to my router at all times. The only things wired are my hubs and two small servers. There are 4 people in the household, so might be 4 devices streaming at once, plus 2-3 people on laptops playing games. I have never noticed any issues with everything being on Wifi.
I beleive there is one, maybe 2 connections (we stream everything using wifi), But it is the same problem, the cables are no where near where the internet modem (spectrum fiber) is. I know I'm going to have get into to running cables and putting connections in, just figuring out what I can re utilize, and the best way to do that. Actually there is some network cabling, it's just not connected to anything, and there's more cable in the attic than I can find ports for in the walls.
The house is less than 3 years old, and was (allegedly) built for smart home. Not sure what exactly that meant. No hub, no connected data lines, nothing but a Honeywell T6 wifi thermostat (if anyone wants it send me a message, I replaced it with ecobee) .
I used to run a 5-node Velop meshed network. Never-ending problems. So I installed the latest Eero gear - seemed to be more stable but no faster. I ripped it all out and bit the bullet on cabling the house with cat6a. The house is 150 years old so you can imagine the challenge. I still have 40 or so wifi devices but the biggest advantage I see (besides getting rid of Velop altogether) is wired backhaul for APs.
My router has 56 connected devices. About half of them connect through WiFi and the rest through Ethernet. The devices work either way. However, If I do a bandwidth test using something like Ookla, I get twice the download speed on the Ethernet devices that I get with the WiFi devices. That occurs even though I have a WiFi6 router and adapters on several devices. Even a great WiFi connection is unable to process data as fast as Ethernet.
In many cases, the bandwidth is not critical. If you are streaming movies at 1080p, WiFi is plenty fast. If you are streaming 4K, then Ethernet may be better, especially if your WiFi network is crowded.
My primary computer is connected via Ethernet. It is not in the same room as my router, so I did have to run cables. The computer I am using now is in the kitchen and is connected via WiFi. However, I normally use this one for doing email, forums, browsing the web, managing finances, and writing letters. None of those tasks require a lot of data transfer. If I am going to do something that is data intensive, I will use my primary computer.
The more devices that are connected via WiFi, the slower the download speeds will be as all the devices share the available bandwidth. Thus, getting high bandwidth devices off WiFi improves the response of all other devices. Most HA devices use only a tiny bit of bandwidth, so they can operate on WiFi with no issue.
Not broadcasting the SSID does enhance Wi-Fi security ā security through obscurity. Itāll help with wardriving, but does little if everyone knows your SSID. Knowing the SSID is 50% of most authentication processes. Often times the remainder can be guessed at.
Hiding can also help with limiting the ease of social engineering. Users often use their last name/phone #/address/etc. for the SSID. And often that is part of the Wi-Fi password, or another password.
Security is administered in layers. Obfuscating the SSID is one layer thatās easy to configure. It is possible an older device might not allow an option to enter the SSID, but then Iād ask how secure that device is to begin with.
I have AT&T fiber (1gb up/down) and the wifi would max out at about 300mbps). I have about 50-60 devices connected and an Amplifi HD mesh system. Each mesh router has 4 ethernet ports in the back, so I was able to leverage those as "switches" and also extend out the wifi network (Rachio, Ring are the outliers) since the fiber drop is in one corner of the house.
The primary ethernet devices are HE, RPi (Node-RED + Homebridge), 1 always on Mac (database, remote connectivity, development Node-RED, Homebridge, Plex server, Apple Photos library), 2 NAS (1 back up), 1 TimeMachine backup, 3 Apple TVs, 3 TVs, 1 DirectTV Stream box. I also backup the NAS to an offsite location and that would be really painful over wifi.
Wifi devices are mainly laptops, phones, Harmony hub, sprinkler and Ring cameras, thermostats etc. (anything that is truly mobile or does not have built in ethernet)
I can't say if it made a huge difference in speed but I know for a fact that my Tesla Powerwall would keep dropping the wifi connection and switching it to ethernet solved that issue. So the primary driver for MoCA was stability and reliability, secondly speed.
Humm hate to admit it, I am kinda guilty of thatpart of my name is in the SSID , though the password is randomly generated using Enpass. I guess before I worry about hiding anything, I should probably remedy that.
Now, am I correct in my understanding that if I change the SSID, then I Will have reconnect everything currently connected via wifi? And my hubs will be OK since they are connected by ethernet through a POE switch connected to the router?
Really??? I have like 15 coax/cable tv connections in my 10 year old house. They are everywhere, which made using MOCA adapters really handy.
Not the wardrivers I've met (opsec people, granted). They all have sniffers running full time, and the SSID is included in the packets anyway.
It may prevent the very most casual of people, but not anyone who knows next to anything anything about wifi sniffing/hacking.
I turned SSID broadcast back on after my son showed me his sniffer offering up my hidden SSID.
It literally takes about one second to find an ssid. Anyone who likes the tamper with other people's Wi-Fi has a sniffer running, and many of the tools auto extract all of the ssids they see in the packet sniff anyway.
It doesn't usually hurt anything to hide an ssid, so go for it if you really want to. I'm just pointing out that it really doesn't do anything practical in terms of security.
Yep. Built in 2020. There is an Ethernet port in the family room along with a coax connection (and speaker wire plugs for the speakers on the patio) a coax connection in the master bedroom, and i suspect there is a cat6 cable in the wall, but no port. I have seen a cable in the attic coming from that general area. And a coax cable in the two other bedrooms. Like I said I think the cables are there, they just aren't hooked up to anything. I would need to figure out if that's the case and how / where to co nect them to the modem. Which will also involve having spectrum come out to move it since I don't want to risk breaking that fiber. I've done that once already when I was setting my hubs up.
Well, withstanding getting a few Ethernet connections set up, I see that hiding won't get me what I was looking for. I am still considering changing the name to make it less identifiable to me.
Wouldnāt it make more sense to more carefully choose the name of the SSID? Or use strong passwords?
People that include part of their wifi password in the name of the SSID presumably are not particularly security conscious, so rather than hiding the wifi SSID name (from casual observers only, as pointed out by others) they should probably be encouraged to use better basic practices with their network naming and password usage.
I agree, but as I stated, security is administered in layers. Keeping out amateurs is only one layer, but often an easy one to implement. My router displays the Wi-Fi devices connected, but how often do I check? There arenāt any close neighbors by me and I am more than 300ā from the nearest road, so I am not concerned. When I did have closer neighbors many years ago, well, letās say that given my networking and programming knowledge, I was able to learn a lot about them. I didnāt do anything nefarious, but thatās the type of person I am.
Not broadcasting the SSID is similar to having an unlisted phone #. There are methods to finding phone #s ā often itās public because we make them public. In the era of doxing, hide as much as possible, IMHO.
Yes, if the SSID or password changes, then devices will need to re-authenticate. Otherwise, once a Wi-Fi device has authenticated to another device (router) regardless of whether the SSID was entered by you or was āfoundā by the Wi-Fi device, the credentials are stored on the Wi-Fi device; therefore, they should not need to be entered again.
My main goal was to get everything off the 5g where the number of devices has a larger impact. Since TVs donāt like the bandwidth of 2.4 (I tried this with one before buying the MoCA) the next option was to wire them.
I hardwired three TVs and the associated TV boxes. I switched to a locally rebranded xfinity hardware two years ago snd it was impacting the use of two iPhones and an iPad.
Moving the TVs to wired was a big improvement.
Three computers and one laptop were already wired.
I also pushed my echos to the 2.4 and I think that just as big of an improvement.
At the time I did this I probably had less than 25 other devices on the 2.4 including one nest cam and 16 Teckin (Tasmota) plugs, a Netro irrigation and four magic home led controllers. Oh, and an Onkyo receiver.
The echoās seem fine on the 2.4 except the show in the kitchen that doesnāt like it when the microwave runs.
I now have a triband router and reserve the lower 5g that has a limit of 600mbps for the echoās. I only have 5-6 of the teckinās still in use (replaced by zigbee plugs) and I am down to just one magichome (three replaced with Zooz rgbw controllers.
I reserve the upper 5g channel for our devices.
Final note - my router is reporting 30 devices right now across the three bands. The nest camera is gone but I have add three lorex (two 1080 and one 2k), three nest protects, one tradfri/Sonos speaker, and a konnected board. I also have three or four android devices from work attached right now. Iāve never really noticed anything really wrong on the 2.4. Aside from the three cameras everything else is low bandwidth.
Hmm, I have 22 devices just on the 5Ghz right now, including 4 Dots, 2 Echo Shows, 4 Fire TVs, Phones, iPads, and PCs. I did just upgrade to a new Wifi6 Asus AX68U router, but it was not really an issue before that either, my old router just wasn't getting updates anymore for a few years and I wanted to upgrade. The 2.4Ghz has 14 devices, cams, plugs, thermostat, printer, various IoT things.
I actually try to push more devices to the 5Ghz band because it has less saturation from neighbors.
Oh man. I am definitely no expert and I am sure I will get a lot of people correcting me.
I have a netgear RAX70 and on the upper 5g it can support 8 streams. Divide that in half if you have a MIMO devices connecting. Anything over four devices will reduce your throughput or degrade your beaming. As I said, I have gone on the notion that my upper 5g is gold so nothing IoT or something that is āwire capableā should be on it.
Even with the three steaming camera I didnāt notice any performance issues with the seven echoās and the single show on the 2.4g except when the microwave was on.
I just picked up my first fire tv and I opted for the cube simply because it has an Ethernet dongle.
May come down to total internet speed as well, I only have 200Mbps down which honestly is plenty but I always hear of people getting 1-2Gb connections. I can run a speed test from my laptop which is in the room furthest from the router, and get my max speed most of the time, unless people are streaming movies it might knock a little off the top. I grew up on a 2.4kbps modem originally, 56k was fast for me!
I could see if you had a much faster connection, then having more devices on the 5Ghz band might saturate it and cause it to slow down from the max speed.