BrazosDog02 said:
I have one of these ready for pickup. Have a promo code that took it to 130.
I can't believe a wired setup is better than modern routing technology. I'm not a good source though.
https://www.frys.com/product/8697300
Hopefully I can provide some clarification. First of all, using the term "routing technology" to refer to wireless vs. wired is somewhat misplaced. When discussing networks, specifically packet-based networks that use the IP protocol, routing generally means the act of bridging two or more distinct network segments together. Your home router, whether it has a wireless interface or not, is generally providing a routing function between the public-facing WAN interface and your "private" internal network (usually with both wired and wireless interfaces) using a technique called network address translation, or NAT.
With that out of the way, the point of confusion seems to be how modern wireless air interfaces (802.11n, 802.11ac, etc.) don't stack up favorably against their modern-day wired peers. I spent a good chunk of my early career designing and implementing layer 2/3 wireless protocols for military air-air and air-ground communications, and the challenges associated with delivering a robust and reliable wireless communication path over any appreciable distance (and without consuming huge amounts of power) are immense.
For starters, at the very basic physical layer (Layer 1 of the OSI model), your medium for a wired connection is essentially a private highway, less a few occasional sources of interference that are usually dealt with rather swiftly either by the use of shielded cable in extreme environments, or by simple common-mode rejection of interference sources by the very nature of twisted pair cable. Your medium for a wireless interface is an absolute jumbled mess of interference sources, including, for example, signals that bounce off of objects in the environment and arrive as multiple copies at the receiver, all slightly out of time phase with their twins (known as multipath interference). Modern wireless protocols are very good at dealing with common sources of interference and multipath effects through the use of techniques such as forward error correction (where additional information is packed into the data stream which allows recovery from small blips in the signal... where the user wouldn't normally even notice it). However, the FEC data (among other things) is really just additional data that has to be packed into the channel alongside the raw traffic. As channel conditions degrade (when you move further away from the access point or find yourself in a congested area where there are multiple wireless networks in close proximity), most all modern 802.11 based protocols will start shifting to what's known as "more robust" rates.... slower and at a higher transmit power level. It's akin to standing in a loud, crowded room and yelling louder but at a much slower pace. Someone across the room probably has a much better chance of making our what you're saying over all the background noise, but throughput suffers.
Most of the marketing hype and throughput claims around wireless networking technologies are fast to mention the theoretical maximum speeds that the protocol itself can support. These are usually assuming near-perfect environments (and for measurement's sake, many have actually been taken in lab conditions where the RF signal path was sent over a piece of coax cable instead of over the air with antennas). Wired transmission paths (and the protocols that run over them that don't have to make performance trade-offs and include tons of overhead to deal with crappy channel conditions) will always win the performance and reliability battle, period.
Edit: most of what I said above centers on traditional wired Ethernet vs. wireless. Powerline adapters still share many of the same characteristics (and cleaner channel conditions) as compared to wireless, especially given the lower frequencies and noise floors as compared to a true OTA wireless link.
