Wired connections are generally more reliable than wireless. If you look at the current high quality video home network offerings from telephone companies and cable companies (for VoD and multi-room DVR) - Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, TWC, Comcast, France Telecom, Free (in France) - you will see that all these companies concluded that WiFi was not sufficient to deliver video around the home. They were essentially forced to use more expensive technologies like MoCA, HPNA (over coax) and HomePlugAV (over power lines). While Ethernet is ideal, it is not installed in many homes and requires pulling new cables - too costly for the telcos.
Granted video has much higher bit rates and these service purposely trade-off buffering to enable much faster channel changing times. So wireless may be perfectly fine for moving 128 kbps mp3, but my FLAC audio files range from 600 kb/s up to 2Mb/s for 96/24 hidef files. Also consider the following, Wifi 802.11g as used by Squeezebox is a shared network. The physical speed is 54 Mb/s which according to the Wifi standard allows a maximum 50% throughput of ~27 Mb/s. That should be fine if every client is attached at "54 Mb/s". A Squeezebox running at 54 Mb/s would use 1/27th to transmit of the available airtime to transmit a 1 Mb/s FLAC. On the other hand, if the device is far from the Access Point, the same file will use 20% of the available airtime if the client SB only trains up at 11 Mb/s. That should be fine unless you do lots of peer-to-peer networking, video download, etc I ran a Gigabit Ethernet link between my SC server and the GE switch that connects my SBR and PS3. It's certainly overkill but has lots of room for growth :) -- aweitzner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aweitzner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=12298 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=61758 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
