It's quite interesting to see some of the weird arguments people bring forward for declaring this a complete non-issue by claiming there's no reason for wired ethernet anymore.

Thing is: WiFi does have disadvantages compared to wired ethernet. For video games, the most important disadvantage is iFi's bigger latency, which is a concern especially for online multiplayer games where fast reactions are important, like Egoshooters. The effect may be moderate and is also influenced by the general speed of one's internet connection, but most people who often play multiplayer shooters online will want the best prerequisites, and that includes wired ethernet.

And of course there are people who don't have or simply don't want WiFi because of security or electric smog concerns.

In the end, this indeed is a non-issue - but not because nobody needs wired ethernet anymore, but because people who need or want it will simply be able to buy a wired ethernet USB adapter like the one that already existed for the Wii.

Congratulations on having a 350mbps connection, which provider is this through, the vast, vast majority do not. The country with the highest average speed, South Korea is at 15.7Mbps, you really kick their @, especially for console gaming.

It'll be funny if PS720 doesn't come with an Ethernet port either!!! WiFi all the way for me!!!

If you are getting an extra 20ms of latency, you need to work on your Wi-Fi set up.

Try pinging your router.
Here's mine and I run 802.11 G.  
3ms

You already have plans for all 4 USB ports or something?

But there will be an issue with Wii U's Wi-Fi?

21 ms latency?  You have a problem with your set up.

And your download speed problem is irrelevant.   Not only do the overwhelming majroity of people have a download speed far, far slower than their Ethernet ports transfer speed but latency is by far the bigger factor in online gmaing.   You won't find an actual differnce in the online experience from an 8 Mb connect  with low latency and a 500 Mb with low latency.

Absolute waste of bandwidth.  That's a fantastic download speed for just that, downloads.   For online gameplay, it's  50 times more than actually needed to sustain a solid connection.

Here's my macbook speedtest on Wifi 802.11n



O NO a ping of 8ms.. now i will never be able to play multiplayer... damn my wireless printer, network hd, 2 ipads, 2 iphones and my gf computer for hogging all the Wifi space up!

yeah uh...... tablets are not good benchmarks, they are not fast enough to cap out the wireless capabilities of your home network much like older computers can't even cap out a 100Mb connection sometimes and a lot still can't cap out 1000Mb connections with lowest possible pin, you need a real computer to do that, not tablets.

It's a 10/100Mb connection, the Wii U can probably cap that one out if it works, you are only talking about 12.5MB/s here, the ping time would be about the same as any gigabit network since it's on a hardline, and most ISP in the US don't even go over 3MB/s yet

Editing your post was interesting...

I get 1ms almost all the time with pinging my router from the same room, 1-3ms from next room and 1-54(lol) from third room. That has been the case always, but when I play a game online, my ping is 20ms higher than on my wired connection. That is with my laptop on the same room and playing on the same server with ethernet connection.

It isn't just about online gaming, it is also about downloading games from internet and in few years maybe streaming 4k movies. How much bandwith would a decent quality 4k stream take?

Funny, I don't feel that my bandwith is going to waste but if you say so...

I used the tablet because it gives the best results on speedtest.net.

Makes sense. Nintendo wants the Wii U in the living room first and foremost, not in the computer room. Unless you've got your whole house wired for ethernet, this is a trivial matter.