I have gigabit fiber coming into the house and I have speed tested it; consistently close to 1g speeds at the router. The house is wired with cat 5e cables in the walls with ports in each room. The cable connection from the router to modem is Cat 6. Is it better from a performance standpoint to run the satellites wired with the limitations of cat 5e or run them wireless? The house is about 4,000 sq ft. One satellite is about 25 ft from the router, the other is about 40 ft away on the floor below.
Is it better from a performance standpoint to run the satellites wired with the limitations of cat 5e or run them wireless?
Ethernet backhaul will outperform WiFi backhaul because:
Ethernet is full duplex, meaning that traffic can go in both directions at the same time, whereas
WiFi is one device at a time, meaning that the router, one satellite, or the other satellite can broadcast while the other two must 'back off' and wait their turn.
With Ethernet backhaul, there are separate links to each satellite which can both operate at the same time (in both directions).
Ethernet has almost no overhead compared to WiFi which loses a huge amount of capacity to management frames and to all that waiting for permission to talk.
At these distances, Cat5e supports gigabit with no problem.
