Hi all,
I just moved into a new house and am trying to get my networking figured out. I have a cable jack in the living room, family room, and master bedroom, but want my PC in none of those places. It looks like I'll have to run a cable from the living room or the master bedroom, which will end up being between 60-100 feet.
I figured that performance is going to degrade at long runs so the other option is to get a wireless-N PCI adapter for my PC. My router is a D-Link DIR-655 which will end up being probably 10 feet away from the PC through a foot and a half of floor or a few walls. As far as the presence of network interference, my laptop usually picks up 3-5 wireless networks within range including mine.
The PC is my main internet and bittorrent machine and my cable service is rated at 15 Mbps which is of course well within the spec of even wireless-g. I don't do much gaming online these days nor do I do much video streaming besides youtube, etc. I do nightly backups and a decent amount of file transfer to/from my NAS which is attached to my router via ethernet.
The only streaming activities I do right now is using my Squeezebox to play lossless music and my laptop to stream HD movies, both of which have been on wireless in the past. While there have been occasional issues with that, it generally performs fine.
In terms of speed and reliability, does the ethernet cable at this length of run still offer a significant advantage over wireless? If it's not going to be noticeably better for my everyday applications I'd rather not have wires running from room to room and put dozens of cable staples in the walls.
Thanks for any input!
I just moved into a new house and am trying to get my networking figured out. I have a cable jack in the living room, family room, and master bedroom, but want my PC in none of those places. It looks like I'll have to run a cable from the living room or the master bedroom, which will end up being between 60-100 feet.
I figured that performance is going to degrade at long runs so the other option is to get a wireless-N PCI adapter for my PC. My router is a D-Link DIR-655 which will end up being probably 10 feet away from the PC through a foot and a half of floor or a few walls. As far as the presence of network interference, my laptop usually picks up 3-5 wireless networks within range including mine.
The PC is my main internet and bittorrent machine and my cable service is rated at 15 Mbps which is of course well within the spec of even wireless-g. I don't do much gaming online these days nor do I do much video streaming besides youtube, etc. I do nightly backups and a decent amount of file transfer to/from my NAS which is attached to my router via ethernet.
The only streaming activities I do right now is using my Squeezebox to play lossless music and my laptop to stream HD movies, both of which have been on wireless in the past. While there have been occasional issues with that, it generally performs fine.
In terms of speed and reliability, does the ethernet cable at this length of run still offer a significant advantage over wireless? If it's not going to be noticeably better for my everyday applications I'd rather not have wires running from room to room and put dozens of cable staples in the walls.
Thanks for any input!