Apple for some reason cheaped out and stuck a 10/100 port on a $150 HD streaming box in 2015...wireless AC gets throughput about on par to a wired gigabit connection, so way more than a 100Mbps connection. It sucks for me because my Apple TV literally sits right next to my router.
You should hook it up! And 10/100 actually makes a great deal of sense.
I'll go into a bit more detail below since Internet networking was my field of research in grad school, but the TL;DR version for why 10/100 is superior to 802.11ac
for in-home game streaming is relatively straightforward:
- Bandwidth doesn't matter*. 1080p streaming typically only requires about 5 Mbps at most, so the extra throughput that wireless provides won't give you any benefit.
- Latency matters a lot. As any online gamer can tell you, lag kills, and wireless connections suffer from lag spikes that are both more frequent and more severe.
* Again, speaking solely with regards to in-home game streaming. Obviously, bandwidth matters in a number of different situations.
And now, to get into more detail...
Video streams come in two flavors: compressed and uncompressed. Uncompressed streams typically only get used in professional settings (e.g. newsroom, sporting event, etc.) or between dedicated video devices (e.g. blu-ray content streamed over HDMI). When it comes to what we typically think of as "video streaming" (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Steam in-home streaming, etc.), we're dealing with compressed video streams
Compressed streams, as you'd expect, have been reduced in size so that we don't have to send as much data over the network. A compressed 1080p stream typically clocks in between 1 Mbps and 5 Mbps, which is why even a poor Internet connection is sufficient to watch Netflix in 1080p just fine. As for the higher resolutions (e.g. 1440p, 2K, 4K, 5K, 8K, etc.), the new Apple TV can't handle them anyway, so we need not concern ourselves with them.
Now, you might be asking: why not just use an uncompressed stream? After all, it'd mean we could skip the processing needed to encode/decode the stream, along with the lag introduced by the processing. The answer for that is rather simple: uncompressed streams are MASSIVE. An uncompressed 1080p stream
starts out at more than a gigabit Ethernet connection can handle and only goes up from there.
All of which is to say, bandwidth won't be a bottleneck, regardless of whether you go wired or wireless, since uncompressed streaming is not an option and they both have far more than enough to handle a compressed stream.
In fact, about the only benefit a gigabit Ethernet connection would provide is that app downloads may go faster, but for that to be true, you'd have to have an above-average Internet connection, given that most Internet connections lack the bandwidth to fill even a 10/100 connection, let alone take advantage of gigabit.
As for latency, I recall that Valve once posted a great graph highlighting the differences between wired and wireless for in-home streaming, but for the life of me, I can't seem to find it. What I do recall, however, is that the graph really showed off why Valve strongly recommends wired for in-home streaming.
The biggest reason is spikes in latency. Even under the best of conditions in a home, wireless connections will still deal with frequent latency spikes. They won't be a problem if all you're doing is watching YouTube, since that content is buffered, but for in-home streaming, you can't be buffering like that. As such, you feel each of those spikes much more acutely.
A lesser reason is that wireless just has a higher overhead in terms of latency than wired. Which is to say, given typical conditions, a wired connection will on average get back to you with a reply a few milliseconds faster than a wireless one. It's small enough to be imperceptible to most people, but those little delays can add up, so for gamers, every bit counts.
Anyway, hope that explains why I'd recommend the wired connection over the wireless one any day when it comes to in-home streaming. And, really, I'd just recommend it in general when it comes to the current Apple TV. Until they upgrade it to handle higher resolutions or app downloads gets prohibitively large, there's really no need for gigabit throughput.
