Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:46:51 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:

If you need a really long cable, you might consider WiFi instead.

Ethernet will run out to 100m in an single segment. How long is your
"really long cable"? I think you'd be pushing WiFi to work through
100m of building, at least at a sensible speed. That ethernet would
be 100Mbps full duplex.

Does the lower speed of WiFi compared with ethernet become relevant
when dealing with TV (video) data?

Depends what you mean by "TV (video) data".

If you mean iPlayer type stuff that only needs about 2Mbps but is
only just watchable, OK for catch up of something you missed but
otherwise it's not that good.

If you mean streaming a ripped HD bluray disc from a local media
server then you need not far short of 50Mbps.

If you mean watching stuff as it come out the back of a broadcast HD
camera you need over 1Gbps.

BBC HD i-player/internet stream is about 4Mbps for comparison.

And its very watchable - I managed to catch one of the formula one
practices. Very nice EXCEPT when they were panning past loads of
spectators..the spectators sort of turned into a smear of multicoloured
vomit. I guess the picture was simply changing too fast for the
compression algo to do a decent job...