Not buying a new router - just gonna up the service to a higher, business plan, which should allow us to get faster upload speeds, and more data.
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What would I need ethernet for? Difference in that and wifi only?
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Not buying a new router - just gonna up the service to a higher, business plan, which should allow us to get faster upload speeds, and more data.
Rather than futzing around with Ethernet… fix your Wi-Fi. Lots of devices besides Apple TV will benefit.
No offense, but I think you are still confused between your satellite internet and wifi, by reading the following line:
"My wifi signal is actually really great when the weather isn’t terrible."
Unless you are running wifi in open space, most wifi are used in enclosed space (e.g., home, office). I'm not sure how wifi signal is affect by weather. Do you mean satellite signal instead of wifi in this case?
I have 7 AppleTV's all running on ethernet with no issues.
I would download the SpeedTest app onto the AppleTV. Run the app while connected to WiFi and see what the download speed is. Then, download and run SpeedTest from a laptop or PC that is connected to ethernet and compare the download speed with the WiFi result. If both are similar, then there would be no advantage to connecting to ethernet. Then decide whether the WiFi download speed is sufficient to sustain video streaming. In my experience, 10Mbps is marginal, while 20Mbps should be sufficient. Choose the connection method that gets at least a sufficient download speed to support streaming.
One very important factor with Wi-Fi is the law physics; wi-fi, sound and light all vary as the square of the distance. Your signal will degrade the farther away your devices are from the router. Ethernet has a limit of 300’ without degradation. I have installed many small networks in businesses and as a design consultant on large networks for military hospitals. Without exception, they were all ethernet networks. There were situations where wireless access points were installed to handle portable hand held devices, such as the network upgrades to 20 Big Lots stores. We used 3 Cisco professional grade accent points.
Egads, folks, it’s the satellite connection. They’re notoriously slow and flaky. I’m a strong proponent of connecting everything you can by ethernet, but in your case, that would only help with transfers from one machine to another in the house. Are you getting Starlink or are you stuck with Hughes?
Right now I’m stuck with Viasat - no Starlink here yet, but I’m keeping my eye on it. We did upgrade our plan by a lot because my husband is able to have the company pay the tab, so we shall see if that helps.
The Apple TV arrives today - gonna see if it works worth a flip.
Yes, that’s the issue. I understand the problem, I lived in a rural area for a while, the choices were dial-up speed service or satellite. The biggest problem with satellite is the latency, it can be over 500ms when my current fios connection can be as low as 4ms. That means when you request something from a server, it’s sitting around waiting for the reply for a very long time. If you’re only talking about appleTV streams, then it should work ok, as long as the new plan is consistent. I’m not sure how the higher speed satellite plan will deal with cloudy weather, as that’s going to hurt the signal even if you have a higher cap on speed. Is there really no other option than satellite? They’re notoriously slow, and extremely expensive. Even a slower land connection would be more reliable than satellite. If you could get 25mbps over a land line, that would be preferable in almost every case.
It’s really our only option. I‘ve tried some of the cellular hotspots and direct cellular - no luck at all. The cellular out here isn’t great either.
The new plan is supposed to be about 3-4x faster with downloads if I remember correctly. The cap is 3x what we had before.
I know not to expect much with cloudy weather, but I’m just hoping it’ll work on a good day.
Yeah, I hope it works out with the new service. The problem is laid out in this piece on Ars Technica. I was just curious, but it seems though Starlink would be an improvement, it seems it wouldn’t be a cure-all for you either.
arstechnica.com
I mean holy moly:
“Despite the evidence of Starlink getting slower, Ookla's second-quarter data shows it clearly outperforms Viasat and HughesNet satellite services that have lower speeds and much worse latency. In the US, Viasat posted median download speeds of 23.7Mbps, upload speeds of 2.8Mbps, and 631 ms latency. HughesNet was measured at 22.6Mbps downloads, 2.5Mbps uploads, and 716 ms latency.
Wireline broadband is still the best. Overall, fixed broadband services in the US posted median download speeds of 150.1Mbps, uploads of 21.5Mbps, and 14 ms latency, the Q2 Ookla report said.”
Just a thought, if you’re close to your neighbors, do any of them have land based internet? If you’re friendly enough, maybe you could piggyback on theirs with a focused wifi link. It’s a stretch, I’m sure. I actually did end up setting up a repeater to the local university’s wifi network when I was in this bind. It wasn’t great, but better than 800kbps speeds the local provider was giving me.
Starlink is getting a lot slower as more people use it, speed tests show
Starlink capacity limits hit users—SpaceX says more satellites will make it faster.
arstechnica.com
I mean holy moly:
“Despite the evidence of Starlink getting slower, Ookla's second-quarter data shows it clearly outperforms Viasat and HughesNet satellite services that have lower speeds and much worse latency. In the US, Viasat posted median download speeds of 23.7Mbps, upload speeds of 2.8Mbps, and 631 ms latency. HughesNet was measured at 22.6Mbps downloads, 2.5Mbps uploads, and 716 ms latency.
Wireline broadband is still the best. Overall, fixed broadband services in the US posted median download speeds of 150.1Mbps, uploads of 21.5Mbps, and 14 ms latency, the Q2 Ookla report said.”
Just a thought, if you’re close to your neighbors, do any of them have land based internet? If you’re friendly enough, maybe you could piggyback on theirs with a focused wifi link. It’s a stretch, I’m sure. I actually did end up setting up a repeater to the local university’s wifi network when I was in this bind. It wasn’t great, but better than 800kbps speeds the local provider was giving me.
Yeah, I hope it works out with the new service. The problem is laid out in this piece on Ars Technica. I was just curious, but it seems though Starlink would be an improvement, it seems it wouldn’t be a cure-all for you either.
Starlink is getting a lot slower as more people use it, speed tests show
Starlink capacity limits hit users—SpaceX says more satellites will make it faster.
I mean holy moly:
“Despite the evidence of Starlink getting slower, Ookla's second-quarter data shows it clearly outperforms Viasat and HughesNet satellite services that have lower speeds and much worse latency. In the US, Viasat posted median download speeds of 23.7Mbps, upload speeds of 2.8Mbps, and 631 ms latency. HughesNet was measured at 22.6Mbps downloads, 2.5Mbps uploads, and 716 ms latency.
Wireline broadband is still the best. Overall, fixed broadband services in the US posted median download speeds of 150.1Mbps, uploads of 21.5Mbps, and 14 ms latency, the Q2 Ookla report said.”
Just a thought, if you’re close to your neighbors, do any of them have land based internet? If you’re friendly enough, maybe you could piggyback on theirs with a focused wifi link. It’s a stretch, I’m sure. I actually did end up setting up a repeater to the local university’s wifi network when I was in this bind. It wasn’t great, but better than 800kbps speeds the local provider was giving me.
Well that’s not super promising.
And no - we have no land based internet out here at all. Believe me, we and all the neighbors will be jumping on it as soon as it’s an option!
I wonder how many people here use Starlink now?
I bought the RV version over a month ago and have used it in several places in Nevada, rural California and Arizona. Congestion is definitely a problem around big urban areas (like Phoenix), but I found the download speeds good elsewhere. In fact, I tested several live TV services with an ATV HD while camping off-grid somewhere near the south rim of the Grand Canyon - it convinced me to get rid of DirecTV and go to strictly streaming, and it also got me reading the fine print of a number of the live TV streaming services - most are restrictive and don’t like cellular or satellite services including Starlink, especially when it comes to network stations.
Starlink is still a “work in progress.” Things do change as time goes on. I understand residential customers were sent an email a couple of days ago that said their prime time priority would be capped at 1TB a month. Since I have an RV account, I didn’t get the email - I have no guaranteed priority for download. Except for Phoenix in the evenings, I have had good enough speeds for streaming, even in the evenings (when my speeds near Phoenix are very slow, useful for email and some web surfing only).
I bought the RV version over a month ago and have used it in several places in Nevada, rural California and Arizona. Congestion is definitely a problem around big urban areas (like Phoenix), but I found the download speeds good elsewhere. In fact, I tested several live TV services with an ATV HD while camping off-grid somewhere near the south rim of the Grand Canyon - it convinced me to get rid of DirecTV and go to strictly streaming, and it also got me reading the fine print of a number of the live TV streaming services - most are restrictive and don’t like cellular or satellite services including Starlink, especially when it comes to network stations.
Starlink is still a “work in progress.” Things do change as time goes on. I understand residential customers were sent an email a couple of days ago that said their prime time priority would be capped at 1TB a month. Since I have an RV account, I didn’t get the email - I have no guaranteed priority for download. Except for Phoenix in the evenings, I have had good enough speeds for streaming, even in the evenings (when my speeds near Phoenix are very slow, useful for email and some web surfing only).
That was me when I moved to my rural home in 2006. I got the Hughesnet business plan because it had the larger 1-meter dish and higher speeds. The speed was OK (compared to DSL of that era) but the latency just drove me crazy! I was able to get DSL two years later and dumped the whole Hughesnet setup. Paid an early termination fee but was at the break-even point about 6 months later because DSL was much cheaper. Verizon rolled out FIOS here in 2017 and that has been terrific.
Regarding ethernet, I have one AppleTV that is close to my router and use it on wifi. The other AppleTV is at the far end of the house and I ran gigabit ethernet through the attic for it. I am still using the AppleTV HD which only has 100 base T ethernet, but found the wired connection was still better for the one at the far end of the house.
I like to hard wire everything on ethernet if possible, the only things I use on wifi are my phone, iPad and that one Apple TV.
I agree. I hardwire where possible with power lines in each room and cat
7/8 Ethernet. . Fewer devices on Wi-FI means less sharing.
If your wifi signal is fine- fine where the Apple TV will be that is- then ethernet will do nothing for you.
If you only have a couple of devices connected at any given time then I doubt you'll have a problem.
Netflix specifies a download speed of only 5Mbps for HD and 15Mbps for 4K- which I doubt you need-and Prime is the same. If you have lots of devices connected then they share the service and it goes down but otherwise, that's not a very high requirement. Most old copper telephone lines work at between 3 and 8Mbps.
The problems come when there are lots of people using the service at the same time. Peak times that is, meaning the provider's service gets saturated and your speed slows to a crawl. This will lead to buffering- a spinning circle- and latency problems - meaning it takes a long time for web pages to load.
You say you are using satellite and upgrading the service and I know nothing about satellite or what your problems are exactly, but whatever they offer you it's the maximum and it doesn't mean you are really going to get it. When you take the fibre for instance it might say 2Gbps and you might get it for a while but when they have 4 people in the street connected to the same exchange, you'll get a lot less. At 3am you might get pretty close to the maximum you can get but as a rule of thumb you are doing well if you regularly get more than about half of what they say the maximum is. But that's probably going to be enough for you
A slower connection which has capacity, doesn't have time outs for several hours a week and which has low latency is way better than one which promises very high debit but has high latency, gets saturated and breaks down often.
It looks like you haven't got much choice so good luck.
If you only have a couple of devices connected at any given time then I doubt you'll have a problem.
Netflix specifies a download speed of only 5Mbps for HD and 15Mbps for 4K- which I doubt you need-and Prime is the same. If you have lots of devices connected then they share the service and it goes down but otherwise, that's not a very high requirement. Most old copper telephone lines work at between 3 and 8Mbps.
The problems come when there are lots of people using the service at the same time. Peak times that is, meaning the provider's service gets saturated and your speed slows to a crawl. This will lead to buffering- a spinning circle- and latency problems - meaning it takes a long time for web pages to load.
You say you are using satellite and upgrading the service and I know nothing about satellite or what your problems are exactly, but whatever they offer you it's the maximum and it doesn't mean you are really going to get it. When you take the fibre for instance it might say 2Gbps and you might get it for a while but when they have 4 people in the street connected to the same exchange, you'll get a lot less. At 3am you might get pretty close to the maximum you can get but as a rule of thumb you are doing well if you regularly get more than about half of what they say the maximum is. But that's probably going to be enough for you
A slower connection which has capacity, doesn't have time outs for several hours a week and which has low latency is way better than one which promises very high debit but has high latency, gets saturated and breaks down often.
It looks like you haven't got much choice so good luck.