My hub currently runs on a small computer connected by wifi, because that is where the power socket is. It mostly works, with occasional periods where things feel slow or a device does not respond.
Every discussion I read says to use ethernet, usually without explaining why beyond it being more reliable.
Is there a specific failure this causes, or is this general advice that would apply to anything?
The other half is that wifi has failure modes that look like software bugs, which is why the advice is so absolute among people who have debugged it.
A dropped connection that recovers in seconds shows up as a device that did not respond, a message that vanished, an automation that ran once and not the next time. Nothing logs a network error, because as far as the application is concerned the connection was fine before and after.
People spend weeks debugging their configuration for that. It is one of the most reliably wasted efforts in this hobby.
And there is a specific hardware trap: on a lot of small single-board computers the wifi radio and the USB controller share a bus. If your hub also has a radio dongle plugged in — which most do — heavy wifi traffic and the dongle interfere with each other, and the symptom is devices dropping off, not slow internet. Moving to ethernet fixes an apparent radio problem, which is why the advice sounds superstitious until it works.
One way to find out whether this is actually your problem rather than guessing: leave a continuous ping running to the hub from another machine for a day, and log it.
If you see periodic gaps or spikes into hundreds of milliseconds, you have your answer and it is not the configuration. If the network is flat and things still misbehave, you have saved yourself buying a cable and can look elsewhere with confidence.
Measuring first is cheaper than either the cable or the week of debugging.
If ethernet genuinely cannot reach the socket, the options in order of how well they work:
Powerline adapters. Ethernet over the mains wiring. Not as good as a cable and much better than wifi for this. Works badly across different circuits, so test before committing.
A wired mesh node or access point near the hub, with the hub cabled to it.
Move the hub, not the cable. It needs power and network, and it does not need to be anywhere in particular. Plenty of people discover the right answer is a different room.
Keep wifi and fix the environment: fixed address, a dedicated band, away from the microwave, and a good aerial position. This closes some of the gap and does not close all of it.
And if any radio dongles are involved, get them on a USB extension away from the machine regardless. That single change fixes more range problems than anything else.
@hub_hazal · 4d ago
There are specific failures, and they are worse for a hub than for an ordinary computer for a reason that is worth understanding.
A hub is a hub. It is not one device using the network, it is the thing every other device talks to. A momentary wifi problem on a laptop means a page loads slowly. The same problem on the hub means every automation in the house is unavailable at once, and anything that was mid-conversation with it fails.
Automations are latency-sensitive in a way browsing is not. A motion sensor firing a light is expected to feel instant. Wifi introduces variable delay — usually small, occasionally hundreds of milliseconds when the channel is busy — and the perceptible result is a light that comes on late sometimes. That is the "feels slow" you are describing.
Wifi shares one channel. Somebody streaming video, a neighbour's network, a microwave, all compete. Ethernet does not share in that way.
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