in your home, you can upgrade your Gigabit
gear without changing your cabling.
However, 5Gb/sec Ethernet requires
Category 6 and 10Gb/sec requires Category
6a, with each type tending to be more
expensive than the last.
Any switches or other equipment for
distributing the signal are more expensive
than standard Gigabit equipment too. An
8-port Gigabit switch can be bought for £30,
while an eight-port 10Gb/sec switch will set
you back £300. It’s for these many reasons
that we stuck with Gigabit Ethernet for our
testing, as it’s the most readily available,
affordable and realistic option at the moment.
Whichever standard of Ethernet you
choose, the tricky bit comes from the need
to have a load of wires strewn around your
home. Even now, most new homes
aren’t built with this most common
and universal connection built
into the wiring system alongside
the mains power, meaning you’ll
have to either retro-fit the cable,
lifting floorboards and chasing
cables into walls, or have a load of unsightly
cables tacked round your skirting boards and
door frames.
The most realistic option for many
households will be to have a single Ethernet
connection from a front room router through
to another section of the house, such as
an upstairs office or down the garden to an
outside office. A single long run is easier
to hide away than a connection for every
room, and you can then attach another more
convenient networking system at the far end.
It’s also common to run a single short
section of cable to a switch behind your living
room AV setup, so you can then run cables
to your TV and games consoles, all neatly
hidden behind the TV cabinet.
So just how fast and reliable is Ethernet?
Well, in our tests we obtained identical
results in all three test locations (margin
of error notwithstanding), proving the
point that for home use the performance
of Ethernet doesn’t deteriorate over long
distances, which categorically can’t be said
of most alternatives.
What’s more, the Gigabit rating attached to
Ethernet actually just about holds up in real-
world transfer tests. We measured speeds
of 816Mb/sec upload and 907Mb/sec
download. That’s still a little way off Gigabit,
but it’s far closer to the claimed speeds than
most other alternatives reach.
Our ping test also proved impressive, with
an 11ms average and just 15ms maximum. In
other words, not only will your ping generally
be low in games, but it will be reliably so.It would take a catastrophic failure of your
internet connection, the server or your
hardware to lose your connection.Wi-Fi
Ethernet’s performance numbers might be
brilliant, but there’s no getting around its sheer
inconvenience for most homes, which brings
us right back to our original option: Wi-Fi. Do
the latest technologies largely eliminate the
problems we outlined earlier, or is it truly a
waste of time for mission-critical connections
such as gaming PCs?
Unlike Ethernet, where Gigabit hardware
has been around for decades and is now
ubiquitous, there’s multitude of different
Wi-Fi standards – the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard
used by the routers in our Labs test has only
been around for a couple of years and has
been offered in umpteen variants. Indeed,
even in our Labs test, no two of the routers
sported quite the same Wi-Fi configuration.
Meanwhile, if you’re still rocking the router
provided by your ISP, it probably uses the
older Wi-Fi 5 standard at best.
The latest Wi-Fi 6 standard (which used to
be known as 802.11ax) can theoretically hit
maximum throughput speeds of a massive
9.6Gb/sec, split across its two frequency
bands of 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi
5 maxed out at 3.5Gb/sec. Those numbers
are spectacularly far from reality in most
situations, though, for several reasons.
The first is that, while the likes of the Linksys
MR9600 (see p53) can claim to provide that
maximum 9.6Gb/sec, your typical laptop is
likely to have a 1.5Gb/sec (AX1500) Wi-Fi card
to connect to it, while even a dedicated PC
expansion card, such as the TP-Link Archer
TX3000 (see Issue 196, p58) maxes out at
3Gb/sec. Generally, the only way you’ll get
that maximum connection speed is betweenThe Asus RT-A68U is a great example of a powerful
modern router, but it still has range limitations
While the Linksys MR9600 has a claimed
maximum 9.6Gb/sec speed, a typical laptop is only
likely to have a 1.5Gb/sec Wi-Fi card to connect to itMesh Wi-Fi systems, such as the Asus ZenWiFi
XD6, offer a near-effortless and reliable way to
extend a Wi-Fi networkFEATURE / DEEP DIVE