Wired still better than wireless?

At some point in the past 5-9 years or so, I decided wireless wasn't so bad and it must be improving with age. I forgot that I used to despise wireless, somewhat because I'm elitist but also because having a cable solves some security issues inherently.

Well, at night my connection started just getting unusable. This started happening about 3 months ago. My new computer with the USB dongle wifi connector was much worse than my previous computer that had a PCI card wifi NIC. So I got suspicious, and started doing ping tests.

My two computers would periodically drop packets, but would alternate between about 45-60 ms latency to my local router would drop down to 5-10 latency, then skyrocket up to 500, etc. My USB-dongle machine worse than my PCI-nic machine, but some evenings it would be unusable. The next morning it would be fine, consistently. In the past, I've run into issues with my ISP getting overloaded at night and having to call them to get me a better connection, so I plugged a cable into my router.

My laptop on a wired connection got a solid 1-2 ms latency to my router.... what a difference. I tried pings to google and compared it against my wifi connection, and the cable was getting ~35ms where the wifi was 80-150ish.

So, I got googling. I found http://www.inssider.com/ and did a scan on my neighborhood. Found that as long as people use channels 1, 6, and 11, three networks can coexist. Well, the first day I switched my channel to 11 and sailed smooth. But then the neighbor's networks "intelligently" would change channels periodically, and the airspace would get saturated and everything would die again.

So, do I look into wireless AC, buy new NICs for all my machines, deal with ACs less capability to go through solid objects? Or do I just buy a long cable and run it from my router to a switch by my devices (3 computers, apple tv)? I also had to consider that the wife would think running a cord is "ugly", since I did this once before and she wasn't a fan.

A quick trip to the store showed that a wireless AC setup would probably cost me 200-500 depending on how fancy of router I want to buy, since the "shotgun" technology lets a single network hog up a bunch of channels at once. This doesn't really make me feel much better, since my neighbors probably all have these too and are already saturating the airspace.

So looking at Best Buy and the local Wal-Mart, I can pay $30 or $50 (I forget exactly now) for a 50' ethernet cable. Checking Wal-mart.com shows a price of $10, but then I'd have to pay shipping. Do they really expect me to pay over triple the price just for the "convenience" of driving to the store and getting it now?

Anyway, after consulting with the boss we both think spending $8 on a cable is better than 200-500 for a wireless setup that wouldn't be as good anyway, so I get the green light to buy a cable. Well, I order the $8 version off amazon so I can get free shipping and get a few other things for free (like a copy of the Numenera Roleplaying system, which I didn't have yet) if I can only be patient for a few days (Ended up borrowing a couple cables from people at work to get through the week).

All I can say, is totally converted. I can play League of Legends again whenever I want to and have the time, and also my movies stream to my apple TV at ~80mb/sec and don't clog up our wireless network for 5 minutes while buffering. So basically, totally win-win situation. Also my download speed is about 50% faster, I'm getting up to 1.8MB/sec sometimes (usually 1MBish) where before I would cap out at around 800KB/sec.

So ya... sometimes old technology is just better. Plus wired internet can do full-duplex, so it's faster even if you don't have wifi hogs living nearby.