Are LAN sockets still up-to-date? WLAN/wireless is the future!

And the building materials, size, and requirements also matter. It's nice that you are happy with your solution. Another user might not be anyway if several other people (children) lived in the house...

Despite the Access Point, the connection quality is sometimes very inconsistent – especially when the FireTV is streaming. In addition, there are irregular connection drops, and typically the printer gets disconnected from the Wi-Fi when you need it. We no longer want to have this in our house.

As much as Wi-Fi has its disadvantages, there is another problem. Wrong frequency band, poor position, old Wi-Fi standard, etc. A proper setup handles this without any problems; the term "getting kicked out of the Wi-Fi" has never come across my path in practice to this day.

These things aren't so expensive that you'd have to think long about it.

That's how it is. I keep not understanding the whole discussion. What money thrown out the window? A proper LAN is cheaper than the facade paint.

Lived reality:

32 LAN sockets in the house. WLAN as well.

16 of the sockets are permanently in use. 7 more occasionally. All others are either not yet in use (children of preschool age) or still plastered over. Additionally, there are 8 devices almost always on WLAN. No gamers. But still, I'm glad about the LAN because that way I always have access everywhere with the necessary speeds and bandwidths.

Every room has at least one double socket. It hardly cost anything.

By the way, when neighbors come into play, then good luck! with the WLAN. In one direction, I have almost no data throughput because the neighbor has "set up his network," and we thus interfere with each other.

It's not about the money for me. This argument is also silly, you constantly hear that during house construction ("only 1% of the construction cost") and that's comparing apples to oranges. Ten times 1% quickly add up to 50,000 or more in today's house construction, and the facade paint is also needed with 1,000 LAN duplex sockets.

The discussion is a technological one. Just because something is cheap or practically costs nothing, I still don't install TAE sockets anymore. And having it is nice, but is it useful (?) to have what is sensible. What you use/need should be there and possibly a little reserve here and there. But a LAN socket orgy seems questionable to me nowadays at least.

I had started with this myself too, took the floor plan, placed furniture, and distributed LAN duplex sockets. When I then saw three or more in every room, the question of sense came to me. Hence the discussion.

: What is connected to the 16 permanently occupied sockets at your place? This is a serious question.

As much as Wi-Fi has its disadvantages, there is another problem. Wrong frequency band, bad position, old Wi-Fi standard, etc. A proper setup handles that easily, the term "getting kicked out of Wi-Fi" has never crossed my path in practice.

It is more of a structural limitation. Reinforced concrete ceiling, only repeaters (because access points are not possible due to lack of cables), long distances between devices. It does not happen every day, but occasionally you do notice the limitations. With these experiences in mind, I would definitely plan for LAN today as well.

I believe the discussion is also influenced by the (false) perception that WLAN technology is advancing rapidly. This is a misconception.

Current high bandwidths in WLAN (>1Gbit/s) are essentially based on the use of the 5 GHz band and the bundling of more and more channels. 5 GHz has, at worst, a range up to the next massive wall. Channel bundling heavily burdens the available frequency spectrum, so that neighboring WLANs increasingly interfere with each other and the theoretical bandwidth turns into sad real bandwidth.

The same applies to the savior 5G! The perception through mainstream media of what this technology is capable of is unfortunately extremely distorted.

Cables for everything that is stationary and regularly requires higher bandwidth or low latency. For the rest, WLAN is fine. Foregoing cables in new buildings is simply shortsighted and stinginess in the wrong place.