Thinking of purchasing a Tablo. I understand you can use Ethernet or WiFi. Which one works best? Is there an advantage of one over the other?
Thanks for your help.
Ethernet is your best bet… UNLESS you know you have good wireless signal.
I think that’s where people get frustrated is their wireless is shaky, either due to low signal, or just a crappy chipset. You buy a $30 router from Walmart, you will get $30 worth of performance.
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I agree with @KimchiGUN. Wired is ALWAYS better than Wireless. I usually don’t use such absolutes but unless you have a bad wire or bad port, wired is better in every case.
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Ethernet and switches for me, if a device have ethernet that’s my first connection for smart TV and other devices I put 3 access point in my house for cellphone, laptop and device don’t have ethernet like doorbell, thermostat, tablets, amazon devices, garage door, security cam and some other device. Ethernet is stable no buffering.
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With Gen 4, I had to use Ethernet, I couldn’t get it to setup with Netgear Orbi Mesh WiFi. It will always work better on Ethernet than Wireless anyways, no contest.
Cool, I definitely will use Ethernet. I appreciate everyone’s response and help!
I tried both and settled on WiFi. It’s great. My Ethernet port was on the other side of the house and the antenna cable was 40 ft. Signal loss was too much so antenna being closer to Tablo worked the best. FYI. My internet speed is 1 gig, so it’s super fast.
Ethernet. I have so much stuff on it (camera ect…) and the location of the router is bad enough that it did not work well for me. Ethernet just skips all those problems.
Ethernet is always better and faster.
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Unless you have a fairly cheap WiFi router, and /or are dealing with signal strength issues due to it being located too far away or lots of interference like walls/microwaves running etc, Wifi is comparable to direct connections any day of the week. To stream a 4k video you need upwards 50Mbs, which even earlier generations of WiFi are capable of, but modern day WiFi connections with a distance of 150feet should easily exceed this 5x over, most right around the 800Mbs mark. If your recording live TV, in a typical setup of Tablo your simply recording directly from on air to the Tablo so Wifi doesn’t play a role there, but even if your streaming to your TV and recording something from an internet service, your far from over subscribing your bandwidth. If you have good signal strength from your router, you’ll be fine. A direct connection obviously has less likelihood of environmental issues (radio interference) but these days there are even situations where a wireless connection could exceed that of a hard wired connection. Notice that some routers now have a 2.5 Gbs port on them for your internet connection. Your not going to find many switches offering 2.5 Gbs on LAN ports, and were seeing many WiFi 6 hitting upwards of 1,3 Gbs (under ideal conditions) which beats your 1Gbs LAN port. So either will be fine, there’s nothing gained by running a 100ft RJ45 Cat8, other than lots of tidying up of the cable.
The Tablo has an AC wireless card. It will not see any of the WiFi 6/6e/7 wireless speeds.
Streaming from my Tablo to my Roku, I see about 12-15mpbs. Between OTA recordings and or FAST channels.
You can find a lot of network switches with mgig ports (2.5 and higher).
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I stand corrected, I just did a search of 2.5G Lan switches and I see there are now many more to choose from.
The Tablo 4thGen appears to use 5Ghz WiFi (Max) connections which have a theoretical bandwidth of 1.3Gbs, but more likely you’ll see 400Mbs-ish, and that should be more than adequate for typical use, however you do need to take into account over subscribing wireless. This would hold true for wired as well, if you have multiple devices using the full available bandwidth (gaming/other streaming devices etc) your going to reach capacity quickly. So as mentioned, I really would not see a requirement for wired unless your dealing with environmental conditions that make wireless unreliable.
If mpeg2 max is 15 mbps and the maximum number of viewable streams is 6 how much bandwidth does the WiFi or ethernet require.
I’m curious, under what conditions would you be streaming 6 simultaneous connections at a time? When your talking about this sort of thing, I suspect that the Tablo itself may run into issues decoding, and the term viewable streams, could potentially mean as in live TV and using the same tuner? Obviously 6x15 would provide you with a guestimate there, but again the devices being streamed to could determine this as well. I mean, is the frame rate really going to be NTSC to a phone? I am not sure but I suspect since a phone is much smaller then say a true TV, and mpeg2 has a wide range of standards, just looking around I see it using 19Mbits/sec with ATSC, so. I am by no means knowledgeable in that realm but. Is everyone in your home watching the same thing on a phone? Why not gather around a normal sized Television? LOL
I always though tablo was sold as a DVR solution. There are other, maybe better, solutions if all you want to do is view linear TV. Now if you are married an have 3-4 children you just might use 6 streams. And while my wife might want to watch “The View” I don’t see everyone gathering around and enjoying that.
Of course an actual OTA RF has a limited bandwidth, so if a broadcaster is using a very high bitrate that reduces the number of channels they can carry.
There is negotiated air time speeds. Which is the 1.3 Gb. There is Real time air speeds, which is about 400-500mbps max on 5ghz AC band. In more I.T. technical jargon.
Matters on how advance your wireless router / AP’s ( I have 2 enterprise AP’s in my home) are, you can enable air time fairness to make sure every devices averages the same amount of air time bandwidth. Residential wireless routers are programmed different than Enterprise APs. SOHO/Enterprise AP’s are programmed for high amount of concurrent clients and stability under high load. Residential Routers are programmed for low concurrent client count and usually have cheap chipsets.
My Tablo is wired into my Core Switch in my rack. All my Roku devices are wireless. I had it connected wireless for a while. Since it was already in my rack, I wired it.
@zippy You make a good point… I have only looked at the specs when my wife has been using the Tablo. Since I’ve been recording Jerry Springer (old school episodes) the kids have been watching the Tablo more often. I will have to check the bandwidth specs this weekend.
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Agreed. I too have a rack and a half of “computer crap” as my wife calls it, but the location is in my basement and running an RJ45 directly to that would be difficult, so my options are limited. Since I have to have a roof antenna, and house not being wired for roof ant. the better option is my already existing WiFi solution so I kind of have to use that. But to your point, yes, tuning of such would be key to stability in this venue. 10G at my core really does nothing to persuade the Wifi, and I doubt I would see any difference with a directly connected device like this one, maybe a Plexserver, but not this for my simple solution with just a couple of smart TVs through out.
I was very lucky… that my home is new enough to have CAT5e ran for phone lines. So I swapped it over to data jacks. All my phone jacks are data jacks now. Every room has a jack and it all leads down my rack.
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There are other factors that affect wifi bandwidth. At least in my area, there is so much RF trash flying around the noise floor on most wifi channels in my home is quite high. The houses in my retirement neighborhood are quite close together, and almost all of them are max wifi devices and little or no hard wired ethernet devices. It’s a real RF train wreck. Just the available wifi routers on my iPhone list is shockingly long.
I have a business class access point in my family room ceiling, which is ethernet connected to my business class switch. I can get very fast (like 200mbit) wifi connections sometimes, and sometimes not so fast. Reliability for streaming can occasionally suffer.
I have much better luck with hard-wired ethernet, and nearly every device in my home that can be hard-wired is connected that way. For OTA gear, all 4 of my TV’s have hard-wired Fire Sticks, and my Tablo is also hard-wired. Streaming live OTA content or OTA recordings from the Tablo to these TV’s is very reliable.
My challenge has always been reliable OTA signal quality and/or stable Tablo software, not network connections.
Interesting point, but no, I did/do not see the marketing as only a DVR solution. Clearly they are targeting a replacement for the ridiculously expensive subscriptions for freely available over the air and a replacement to those items. The DVR solution is an added feature that most (if not all) provide as well. But where Tablo is shooting themselves in the foot regarding either is the fact that it has tied all of this to having an internet connection to do either. This is simply silly, and I see it as something that is entirely un-necessary. I’m interested in what other venues you have come across regarding linear TV as this is ultimately something I’ve been seeking. Since I live in an area that is quite rural, if the power goes out my generator only has the ability to power my home and not the internet providers equipment on a pole or platform somewhere. So while quite new to this realm my goal is two fold, 1. Watch OTA TV reducing cable/streaming costs and 2. This ability without internet dependance. The DVR stuff is a nice addendum, but what difference is there if the internet is a requirement, and I see no reason for this other than a potential money grab later on. The over the air RF spectrum is quite large and appropriately so due to the regulations put forth by the FCC, so I don’t see that as a limitation except for licensing use, but of course YMMV.