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Shifts in network scarcity

When you set up a network, whether it's for home or work, you need to think about how the network's going to be used and which resources are going to be most limited.

For a long time, the relative scarcity looked like this:
  1. Internet bandwidth was very limited
  2. Wireless network bandwidth was somewhat limited
  3. Powerline adapters were faster than wireless, but slower than Ethernet
  4. Wired Ethernet network bandwidth was relatively fast
To get around these limits, you would avoid using the wireless network whenever possible. If you needed to get an internet connection from one end of a house or building to another, you'd try to find a way to use wired whenever possible, even if that meant something like Powerline adapters. Anything to maximize the scarce WiFi bandwidth. Keeping local copies of big files like OS updates also made a lot of sense, as those could take hours to download. I even had a well-tuned QoS (Quality of Service) setup on my old home network to prioritize things like games, video calls, and streaming downloads.

Now, though, I have a fast internet connection, a nice WiFi adapter, and a building with really old wiring. The old wiring renders Powerline nearly useless. So, for me, scarcity looks like this:
  1. Powerline adapters are relatively slow (around 50Mb/s)
  2. Wireless bandwidth is good in the aggregate, but individual devices rarely have enough antennas to break 200Mb/s
  3. Internet bandwidth is almost never limiting at 500Mb/s. 
  4. Wired Ethernet at 1000Mb/s is faster, but not overwhelmingly so.
The result is that there's almost no tuning to be done. Just connect it to the wireless network and go. Old habits die hard, so I've tried tuning a few different things, but nothing really makes it faster than just leaving it alone.

I suppose that it frees up time for other things... like patching all of the internet connected doodads that sprout up like weeds.

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