I wasn’t expecting your post to end this way… you really don’t value the convenience of not having to plug in, of not having cables around to get tangled up in? All I can say is - I think most people do.
I’m not one of those people. I read Tim’s post and thought “this is the kind of low-tech solution that fits my skill level.” I bought a cable at Walmart and I’ll try it out tonight.
My best guess is it relates to how the signal is shaped leaving your router.
Imagine it is coming out as a cone shape being broadcast from the router antenna (just for illustration). Few, if any, router broadcasts are omnidirectional.
When you get really close to the router you are “under” that signal cone and are getting reflections instead which lowers your speed. Same in reverse from your laptop.
If Hulu is not working reliably then the solution is to move your router.
That said, you only need about 7mbps for a 4k signal to watch video. Unless you are getting less than that you are fine…so what if you are only getting 10 of your 100…you only need 7 while lying in bed watching movies.
Or…buy a longer ethernet cable (still cheap) and move the router somewhere else. Just an idea.
You seem blind to the fact that the convenience factor is apparently being swamped by the inconvenience of inconsistent results.
Some forms of convenience really are not worth the price that one has to pay in other ways.
25mbps is the number I’ve always heard, though I think that’s for Netflix. Hulu recommends a minimum of 6mbps for HD and 16mbps for 4K. How old is this equipment that’s having trouble maintaining single-digit mbps? Yes interference is likely an issue, but it wouldn’t be so much of a problem with more bandwidth to start with, and a router that’s not 10 years old. A 50% dropoff from 100mbps is still orders of magnitude better than a 50% dropoff from 5mbps.
It depends. Their recommendations tend to be much higher than needed. Also, they tend to assume more than one person in the home could be streaming at the same time (Netflix pricing structure certainly assumes it).
But, Netflix has lowered the bitrate quite a lot:
Now Netflix has launched a new video-encoding system that adapts the bitrate depending on what’s being shown on screen at the time. That means, for example, that the amount of bandwidth required for a 4K animation can drop from 12Mbps to only 1.8Mbps, putting much less demand on customers’ broadband connections and making it easier to stream 4K content on mobile devices over cellular networks. SOURCE
An adaptive codec is a bit misleading when it comes to required performance. It only works when there is enough video data buffered in the client to cover the ebbs and flows of the varying data rate. There is nothing to prevent a rapidly changing dynamic scene from running right up to the peak rate for long enough to exhaust the buffer and demand the peak rate from the link.
The codec will come into its own when customers are running into download limits, but less so if they are hitting bandwidth limits.