I see what you’re saying and this is a good inquiry. The reality is that most networks are what we call North/South traffic exclusive. In this context, we use “North” to describe towards the Internet, “South” to be from the Internet, and east/west to be LAN to LAN traffic.

Networks that are primarily or exclusively North South, your contention will always be your ISPs committed speed (the speed they’re allowing you to use). So most of what’s South of that is pretty trivial, as long as it can keep up with, or exceed the speed of the North connection.

That changes if you do any East/West traffic. Whether that’s a home lab, a home server, or even just a NAS, or computer to computer file sharing… Once that traffic is more than a trivial amount of the network traffic, then you see a lot of benefit from wired connections to your computers. The switch backplane can handle a lot more bandwidth than any individual port, and the only way you’ll see that bandwidth is if some traffic is going somewhere other than your router, or the Internet.

To say most home networks are North/South heavy is obvious. Business networks frequently have servers and other LAN resources that are frequently utilized. So East/West traffic is usually non-trivial.

To spin an example, if your ISP is providing a 100mbps committed rate, and you gave full gigabit ethernet inside and at least 802.11ac wireless, with almost all traffic going to the Internet and back, you’re going to see little difference between Wi-Fi and Ethernet. The only major change moving from Wi-Fi to Ethernet is that your ping time will be more consistent and lower overall. It won’t be a huge change, something in the range of 10s of ms, but it’s literally the only thing you’ll notice a difference with.

Another example where it will make a big difference is if you have a NAS or home server, where you have files stored. Compared to a file storage service like drop box or Google drive. The LAN specific traffic will move at line rate, or the speed of whatever storage the data ultimately rests on, whichever is slower. In that context, the East/West traffic benefits greatly from Ethernet, and the full duplex connection between the two devices.

It’s all subjective to how you are using your network. You’ve made a good point, so thanks for that. Have a good day.

Sorry, I’m married.

:p

My wife doesn’t think it’s sexy, she usually just falls asleep whenever I get into a topic I’m passionate about. Oh well.

Is this a kink?

The first six hexadecimal digits of the Mac address are referred to as the oui, or organizationally unique identifier. They are supposed to all be registered, but with modern systems, mac address randomization is common, so the Mac address in use can be little better than nonsense.

I have a theory that some of the more budget oriented manufacturers (think Ali express), just don’t bother using a registered mac address at all.

This all makes my job harder as a network admin, I usually need to look up what a device is by mac address to help identify what it is and what it’s doing. I need to make sure everything is on the right network, and I can’t do that if I don’t know what anything is.

The last six hexadecimal digits of the Mac are simply to uniquely identify the interface that the Mac is burned into. This also means that any systems with multiple network ports, have different mac address on each port. Some things are exempt, like network switches, but for the most part, every interface has, or is supposed to have, a unique mac address.

Also, the mac isn’t hex, it’s binary. Hex is just how we’ve decided to present it to users. The switches, routers, and interfaces don’t work with the hex, only the binary. Same for IP addresses, which normal are shown in “dotted decimal notation”, but are just binary. But you didn’t ask about IP.

Did you need me to whisper ouis into your ear and you can guess what company is registered to that oui?

Nobody wants my info dump. I know way too much about networking and computers. The topics are massively deep, like iceberg levels of deep. One for each topic.

I could lecture for an entire day on the nuance and considerations of picking a Wi-Fi channel, or you can ignore me and just hit “auto” which may or may not take some, or all, of my considerations into account when selecting a channel.

If anyone is keen to hear some generally good advice about home networking, here’s my elevator speech:

Wire when you can, wireless when you have to. Wi-Fi is shared and half duplex, every wired connection is exclusive to the device and full duplex. If you can’t Ethernet, use MoCA, or powerline (depending on what internal power structures you have, this can be excellent or unusable, keep your receipts). Mesh is best with a dedicated backhaul, better with a wired backhaul. Demand it from any system you consider. The latest and greatest Wi-Fi technology probably won’t fix whatever problem you’re having, it will only temporarily reduce the symptoms and you won’t notice it for a while. Be weary about upgrading and ask yourself why you require the upgrade. Newer wireless won’t fix bad signal, or dropouts.

For everything else, Google. That’s how I find most of the information I know.

Good luck.

I’ll be around in case anyone has questions. No promises on when I’ll be able to reply tho.

For anyone that does mostly office work/paperwork, yes.

For everyone else, not so much. The refresh on eink displays is often orders if magnitude longer than with traditional displays, so forget watching YouTube or something, on a display like this.

Almost every display in existence does 60+ Hz. This is required for light emitting displays, since humans generally see 60Hz flickers of light as solid light (consistently on), so they have to run at that frequency to produce an image that doesn’t look like it’s flickering on and off.

With eink, it’s only reflecting light, not emitting it, so update times can be and are, a lot slower. Due to the mechanism that’s bringing the relevant pigments to the surface, which isn’t fast, you’ll see these displays measured more in seconds per frame than frames per second. Partial updates of the screen can be done much faster, but full frame updates can take several seconds. Eg, adding one more character (while typing a document), is a quick update and can happen many times per second on most eink displays, changing the whole screen, which happens often in video content, takes 1+ second(s) to complete.

So for the office drones that deal with email and text files all day, this is great. For any media content including TV, movies and video games, this is utterly useless.