I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets.

We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.

That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.

In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.

Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/7/6/usb-c-network-hubs/

Wireless is just fine for devices connected to the internet but as soon as you want to connect multiple devices to do a heavy load, backing up or those kinds of things, wireless really does still take a hit depending on access point density.

Depends a lot on your house construction. I have a fancy Ubiquiti U7 Pro (on one floor, and a nanoHD on the other) but performance is crap all over my house because all the walls are reinforced concrete. In the hallway under the AP I get 1.6 Gbps on my phone but walk a few meters away into the living room and you're way under 200 Mbps because you passed 3 concrete walls.

Everyone comes home from a day out and you have several phones struggling to sync the 4K videos you shot meanwhile someone is streaming TV, open up my laptop to check the photos and now it wants to download updates...

I was able to option in Ethernet jacks where I lounge about in the living room, bedroom... - I have USB-C power bricks with built-in hubs so I stuck in cheap 2.5 GbE adapters there. Plug in to charge as normal and I automatically get 2 Gbps to the internet with no interference from anyone else, even works on iPhones with no setup.

I'd like to mention that the cat5e cable present in your walls is rated to 2.5Gbps, and would often still work at 5 or 10Gbps over shorter runs in a home. 2.5gb equipment is very cheap nowadays. I got a couple of no-name switches under $40 each and they all work perfectly. Wired networks will always have better consistency and latency characteristics, too, if that matters to you.

Surely your access points are hard wired?

Right, but where do you live?

I live in a 100m^2 apartment and the signal in the main bedroom is quite bad.

In most European countries, houses are built out of brick and concrete. The signal doesn’t easily reach the all house.

In my parents house, built out of granite, it’s even worse.