But what if you're gaming downstairs and the router is upstairs and then you have to go upstairs for pizza rolls so you take your gaming laptop upstairs and you're eating right next to the router and so you're just plugged in and then what if you forgot to turn off the oven and your girlfriend is yelling at you "You're going to start a fire! Why can't you remember to turn off the oven? What's wrong with you?" and then you go back downstairs to finish gaming?

*Excluding running ethernet cables to every room through the attic, down the walls to wall jacks. Also the cost of the jacks, and the various switches needed for several rooms. And the contractor to do it all.

But hey for like $600 I have cat6a in basically every room so

Ethernet is obviously better but running ethernet around your home can be a pain in the arse

Nah, wifi is pretty good today. I just dont like the consumer devices like the router shown here. Recently redid my wireless and went with a non wifi router, a poe switch and a few access points, connected through ethernet. I wouldnt dream of going back to the conventional one wifi router. Still use wired for stationary devices I can reach with a cable though.. TV, AV, consoles, PC are all wired.

Wireless tech has improved greatly over the last 20 years. Speed, latency, bandwidth, stability…all generally excellent. 15 years ago I wouldn’t have wanted to use a wireless mouse or LAN connection. Now? NBD. They just work. Still have issues with poor signal in some areas, but mesh range boosters take care of that pretty easily.

Let's see that ethernet cable do orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing...

Dude I just bought 4 refurbished Linksys MX4200 (tri-band) access points for $80 (total), put on OpenWRT, and built a mesh system. I'm incredibly happy with the result, especially for the price. And, I've got wireless bridges all through the house so I can keep some things off the forwarding channels and only in the back haul.

It's not wired, but it's close enough and doesn't require me drilling through all my walls running cable or carving out a space in the house for all of it to coalesce.

Granted, I'm in an area with not a lot of wireless interference...I work in enterprise networking and I've had a lot of issues with remote workers on wireless networks that weren't capable of handling the volume of data that the users were uploading. Sometimes just because there's too much interference...but a lot of the time it's because of misconfiguration (either out of ignorance or because the good features, like multicast-to-unicast, are missing), or printer drivers that spam the wireless with multicast whenever the printer is offline (which I've seen a surprising amount of times).

If you're on wireless...multicast is bad, mmmkay? Only "one" device can talk at a time on wireless (barring MIMO shenanigans), and when it's multicast traffic...it has to get sent at the lowest compatible rates. A lot of routers set this to 6Mbps or even 1Mbps by default. So your nice fancy "1200Mbps" wireless has to slow down a crawl every time your Roku wants to tell Alexa that it's there. Which is surprisingly often. Scale up for all the internet-of-crap stuff people have and it's a miracle their wireless works at all.

Oh and I've found people with extenders they don't know about. Ring Chime? Apparently it functions as an 802.11n (only) extender. Huge bottleneck right there. And then it can only be as good as the signal it gets from the next access point.

Wireless data links should be the exclusive domain of temporary, nomadic and/or sacrificial applications.

If the channel is permanent, static, or critical; as much of the path as practicable should be provisioned with constrained energy transmission.

Until the clip breaks off...

I spend a lot more money on good Ethernet switches. But at least that works and is easier to manage than Wifi.

Given the choice, I'd definitely choose a cable for anything I know will require high internet usage. Wireless is just too slow, even on a 5G connection.

I still remember I once broke my Windows installation (young me had tried dual-booting the Windows 10 beta and my Windows 7 installation). I had to get system restored discs from the manufacturer. It wasn't particularly tricky to fix, but it took a long time to download those Windows updates after it finished. I noticed an immediate change once I remembered I had an old 30 ft. ethernet cable lying around and plugged it in. (This was maybe 8-10 years ago.)

Who buys a $300 home wifi box? They're $50-100

I got a used 10Gbe switch and a thunderbolt 10Gbe adapter for my computer and now I can transfer my videos and photos from my NAS like it's my internal hard drives.

It can also do 2.5Gbe which pretty much future proofs me.

I set up a mesh router pair a while back - super easy setup, and the speed is good enough to have multiple TVs streaming at once, and without needing to run cables between rooms... Worth it.

if that's the latest one that's a great deal. it's usually $800.

That one in the picture is $599 isn't it?

I have about 6 or 8 ethernet cables in use plus more in my spare cables box, and I don't remember ever paying for one. Where do they come from? I never seem to run out.