Wi-Fi 6: A Step Forward, But Wired LAN Still Holds the Crown

Wi-Fi 6 is here, making wireless LANs better than ever. Unfortunately, it's still not that good.

A future in which computers and servers finally become untethered from wired connections seems beyond the horizon.

That, at least, is my takeaway from experimentation with the latest wireless technology. Here are the details, and an explanation of why I don't see wireless LAN replacing wired ethernet in mission-critical settings anytime soon.

A Tale of Two LANs

Let me begin with a personal anecdote: About a year ago, I moved my home office up to the attic above my two-story house. My new office is spacious, comfortable and, most importantly, not a place where my young children can easily intrude.

But there was just one problem: The Wi-Fi connection was weak. My router is on the ground floor of the house, since that's the only place where the ISP's cable comes in. Connecting wirelessly from the attic —  which requires network packets to traverse two stories of plaster walls and ceilings — proved unreliable at best. While the network performance was relatively OK on some days, on others I was the guy being told repeatedly that I was breaking up on Zoom calls.

I figured a better router might fix the issue, so I bought a fancy one that supports Wi-Fi 6, the latest Wi-Fi standard. That improved my network performance considerably — which makes sense, because in theory Wi-Fi 6 offers much better range than earlier wireless LAN standards — but it was not perfect. Without warning, my connection would still sometimes cut out or slow down. That might have been OK in an age when real-time data streaming was not so important. But even occasional networking blips just aren't acceptable for tasks like virtual meetings.

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I thought about buying a repeater router (or creating my own by installing open source firmware on a device and configuring it to operate in repeating mode) to boost the Wi-Fi signal across my house. But that would have required the purchase of more hardware while complicating my networking setup, and it still wouldn't have protected against issues like wireless interference.

So, tired of wondering whether slow page load times were due to server-side issues or bad Wi-Fi on my end, I spent the better part of a day fishing an ethernet cable from my ground-floor router up through my house to the attic (a task made easier by the balloon-framing of my century-old house).

Now, with a wired LAN, I enjoy flawless network performance. It feels like 2001 — when my household first got a high-speed Internet connection, and when it was wired because we hadn't yet purchased a wireless router — all over again.

The Problems with Wireless LAN

That was just my personal experience, but I think it underscores a broader lesson: No matter how good wireless LANs get, it's hard to imagine them becoming a full-scale replacement for wired ethernet connections.

To be sure, wireless works pretty well when devices are in predictable locations close to routers. But when you need to connect from the periphery of your wireless range, or when you can't predict exactly where your users are going to be located (and therefore can't install routers close to them), wireless becomes suboptimal at best. On top of this, wireless LANs present security challenges that don't apply to wired networks.

To be fair, few people have claimed that wireless LANs are as good as wired alternatives, even in the era of Wi-Fi 6. But the idea of freeing homes and offices of wired connections, and even creating wireless data centers, has long been a dream. Clearly, if they actually worked reliably, wireless LANs would be everyone's preference.

Unfortunately, we're not there yet, and it doesn't seem likely that we will arrive anytime soon. Wireless LAN technology dates to the 1970s, and it started to go mainstream in the later 1990s. Yet the speed and reliability of wireless networks have evolved only gradually and incrementally since then. They're better than they were 25 years ago, but they're still not that good compared to wired ethernet.

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Long Live Wired LANs!

My networking experience since running an ethernet cable to my work computer has been so great that I'm thinking of retrofitting ethernet into other rooms in my house, so I can plug in from multiple locations — even in places where wireless connectivity is typically pretty good. Given the choice, I'd rather have a flawless connection than the ability to move my devices around easily.

I doubt I'm alone. Wireless LANs certainly have their place, but wired networks are not going anywhere, even as Wi-Fi standards continue to evolve.