Samursus Posted December 6, 2011 Posted December 6, 2011 (edited) Quick question. Am I better off using a wireless B adapter that has to travel around 12' through 2 interior walls, or 25' of CAT 5E cable? Edited December 6, 2011 by Samursus Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
MercuryDoun Posted December 6, 2011 Posted December 6, 2011 Quick question. Am I better off using a wireless B adapter that has to travel around 12' through 2 interior walls, or 25' of CAT 5E cable? 25' of CAT 5E cable Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stonerboy779 Posted December 6, 2011 Posted December 6, 2011 Cat 5 and you must be routing the cable fair bad if it is traveling that far. A few tips always cross Amy power carrying cables perpendicular (if you know anything about electromagnetic curl ect, you'll know why) and do not leave coils of cable. This way you will get the max out of the cable. I have seen some very bad cable routing which left horrible interference on the lines but even with that it would still be better than wireless b. Should have better latency, bandwidth ect Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Black64 Posted December 6, 2011 Posted December 6, 2011 What exactly are doing? Do you need to connect just one PC or more then one? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
d6bmg Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 CAT 5E. 802.11b is backdated. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
greengiant912 Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 (edited) Wireless B only supports up to 11mbps, with a wired connection your at least going to get 10/100 speeds, if not gig. That is of course your local speeds, internet speeds will be determined by your ISP. If you can get a wireless G or N card, as it will get better speeds with most modern wireless routers and access points. B is still around, it will often be used with a lot of low bandwidth applications and in legacy environments. Edited December 7, 2011 by greengiant912 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
potatochobit Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 (edited) cat5 cable is fine, no one other than a nasa employee or bill gates would ever need more in their home but... dont be a cheap bastard, instead just buy cheap budget hardware get a wireless N usb adapter and router they can both be had for under 50$ nowadays look for tenda or tp link Edited December 7, 2011 by potatochobit Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wevsspot Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 Def CAT 5E cable if your primary purpose is gaming or any other bandwidth rate / data security or data integrity intensive uses. The only wireless option I would consider would be wireless N. As already pointed out, wireless B is old, outdated and very bandwidth limited. I disagree on the maximum length of the run though - per the spec. you can run up to 100m of CAT 5E cable before you need to install a repeater or switch. And as for coiling, that is ok too. We have literally thousands of feet of CAT 5E installed in our manufacturing facilities, and much of it is coiled, either for future expansion or for moving existing terminations if we change the layout of the shop floors. The spec. states that you can coil the cable at any radius as long as the coils are at least four times the size of the diameter of the cable. Now, we don't game on our enterprise network, but we are a data intensive organization and operation and following the fairly simple guidelines laid out in the spec. and we have zero issues with transmission rate or data integrity. Other recommendations about running network cable parallel instead of crossing over power transmission lines is very valid. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
medbor Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 Wireless B only allows for a theoretical 11Mb/s speed, usually (in a low noice scenario) you will get about 5Mb/s on a good day, if others use the wireless too it will be much less for both you and the others (as your traffic will take a lot of airtime). My high school had wireless B and we rarely got more than 2Mbit/s useable data, more like 30-50KB/s usually. It will also have latencies of several ms locally, which a cable wont have, and they will act randomly sometimes with spikes of several hundred ms, especially if you have multiple users and interferring equipment nearby (microwaves, brick/concrete walls and so on) even a 50m (150 feet) Cat4 cable got an easy 9MByte/s (72Mbit/s) when more than half was rolled up, and the rest crisscrossing through a few rooms during our last lan party. Cable all the way! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samursus Posted December 7, 2011 Posted December 7, 2011 Lol, thanks for all the answers. I am not that cheap as to be buying a wireless B adapter. Its an old one I have had for years and considering I only have 10Mb/s DSL I figured it was good enough. I recently lent the adapter to my sister for a computer she had given to her as I had a long length of CAT 5 lying around, and I figured it'd be better for gaming anyways. I have a laptop that uses wireless G and it's simpler to have the router set to G, as in the past, B/G setting caused some issues. My only concern was the length. Thanks for the reminder about coiling and crossover, just checked and she's all good. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
GSG-9 Posted December 8, 2011 Posted December 8, 2011 Yeah you should not have any REAL issue with the length, the latency will be far less than what the card would give you. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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