Are people really replacing their home network infrastructure every 5 years?
Unless you’re living out in the wild with no devices to interfere, speed and reliability will be well worth the effort and save a lot on ineffective Wi-Fi gear.
If a network-attached device is always in one place and it has an ethernet port, it has a cable.
If it's always in one place and it doesn't have an ethernet port, there's a cable to the wireless point in that room or the next.
5-port gigabit switches are about $20 each. A 12-port gigabit switch anchors the whole thing. None of them take configuration.
This is harder but not impossible for people who live in apartments; white cable run along the edge of the ceiling or along the foot of the wall is a good bet.
The upside here is adding Ethernet has been very low cost for me: Literally the cost of the cable and the keystones. Downside is I've been here like two years and my Ethernet runs are still somewhat random/piecemeal.
In one case, which has performed surprisingly well for basically the whole two years: I used an existing coax run with a pair of Motorola MoCA adapters, which provides a gigabit connection from my basement to a room that's particularly hard to retrofit a connection to.
Wi-Fi is for guests and smartphones. Ethernet is for life.
Can't recommend this enough. WiFi is great for mobility but it's just not that reliable. For anything that doesn't have to be moving, pull some ethernet to it and be happy for the long haul.
