[mythtv-users] Wireless Bridges and "Thinking it's wired"

[Travis Tabbal]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 03 February 2010 05:37:24 pm Brian Wood wrote:
> >
> >> My point was that using a Wireless bridge is *not * the same thing as
> using
> >>  a wired connection. It might work in a similar manner in some cases,
> but
> >>  wireless is a very different animal from WiFi.
> >    ********
> >
> > I meant "wired", of course.
>
> One advantage of a wireless bridge is the ability for the client to
> PXE boot from their wired card, a feat which is tricky from a wireless
> card.
>
> The Squeezebox devices can act as a network bridge, and I have my
> bedroom frontend plugged into one and netbooting.
>
> Sometimes the wireless doesn't provide enough bandwidth, sometimes it
> does. I suspect other traffic is the problem, when my son goes into
> his bedroom and starts browsing/downloading off his wireless laptop,
> the bedroom PC seems to stutter more.


That's the worst part of wireless networking, IMO. Only one station can
transmit at a time, so if you have another user (or even a neighbor on a
close enough channel)  using the network, your stream can't use it. Not
really a problem for normal internet traffic, but a big deal for HD
streaming. I found it worked OK if there was nothing else going on with the
network, but as soon as another computer wanted to do anything more than
ARP, the stream would stutter. This was a test before I built my house.
Based on that, I wired every room with cat5e and rg6. WiFi is for my laptop
and my smartphone to get to the internet. If I'm moving large amounts of
data with my laptop, it gets a wired connection as well. It's just so much
faster and more reliable.
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