ethernet and wifi

[GloriousGamer321]

I was just wondering, if I were to use ethernet on my computer, would I still be able to have wifi in my house?

[kb5zue]

Yes, I currently have my pooter hooked up the Cat 6 ethernet while the rest of the house, wife with iMac, son with XBox, hooked up to wifi.

[GloriousGamer321]

3 minutes ago, kb5zue said:

Yes, I currently have my pooter hooked up the Cat 6 ethernet while the rest of the house, wife with iMac, son with XBox, hooked up to wifi.

which ethernet cable do you have connected, the one from the modem or the router?

[kb5zue]

For the internet in my house, I of course, have a router, and then for the wifi I have a Netgear Nighthawk.  I have my computer plugged into the Nighthawk thing using Cat 6 cable.  The Nighthawk thing has two ethernet ports.  One going to/from the router and the other going to/from my computer.

 

The wife's machine (iMac) connects to the wifi using a Cat 6 cable going to/from her nest part of the wifi and my son has the same sort of cable connection to his part of the nest wifi setup.

 

As a backup when working on a machine other than my desktop, my computer also has a wifi antennae setup so incase I have to use my cable for a machine for me to work on, I can still connect to the wifi using that so I'm good either way, cable or wifi.

 

The Netgear wifi is a nest setup.  Here is the exact wifi setup that I have in my house.  It works great for me, maybe it will for you too.

 

https://www.netgear.com/home/wifi/mesh/mk62-3/

 

[jec6613]

On 12/28/2021 at 8:13 PM, GloriousGamer321 said:

I was just wondering, if I were to use ethernet on my computer, would I still be able to have wifi in my house?

Yes, in fact this is what you should do.  Any old Ethernet cable will work fine, just plug it into the LAN ports on your router.  A standard home router is configured for a single broadcast domain (aka single subnet) so devices can talk to each other just fine between wired and WiFi.

 

The reason you absolutely should do this is that WiFi is a shared medium - every device on it shares the same pool of available bandwidth, and even a device doing almost nothing is still communicating periodically with the router or access point and using bandwidth.  Every wired device has dedicated bandwidth back to the router (until you get to multiple switches, anyway).  Therefore, every single device you can remove from the WiFi and wire in reduces this overhead and makes your WiFi faster, as well as giving that device dedicated bandwidth.

 

The rule of thumb is: if it doesn't move, wire it to the router if practical.