I never wanted a long-ass cable through my hallway in the first place.


Non-issue for me.

In all seriousness though, why is this an issue?

I thought in 2012 we all use WiFi? I've been WiFi only for well over 5 years now.

You know what he meant. Disingenuous replies aren't helping the forums progress, let's just put it that way.

If your questions were answered by Viper, if you still have a legitimate concern with latency in Wifi, then share. But if you're just being negative, why not just spare us all the bs?

He meant that if someone was going to buy a console or not. Two options, either buying or not buying.

For the latter part of your post, none of my views on this matter are bs even if you don't like them. Let's just put it that way, even though there would be a better way to voice my thoughts of your post.

This whole debate is about Wii U not have an ethernet port so online gaming would have latency issues comapred to a wired option.

We may get some low bit rate 4k streams but that would be largely pointless.  Nobody owning a 4K capable TV would want to stream a 4k image with the image quality of VHS.   But again, buffering makes the whole thing a moot point anyway.   Video feeds get buffered before and during playback.  So even if your latency fluctuated because of your WiFi signal, you'd never see it during playback.

And let's not forget data caps, like Mike mentioned.

Wii U has an 801.11 N Wi-Fi system but even older standards can gain some of the benefits of newer router technologies.  You also might want to look into beamforming, channel bonding, MIMO and 3x3:3 arrays.  

I think that much is confirmed. I also use the dongle cause too much wireless is unnecessary and never as good as wired in stability and throughput. Wireless for me makes sense for wireless devices or if its too much of a hassle to get a wired connection on location.

Actually the debate started with people defeding nintendos honour with phrases like "nobody needs ethernet" and "are you people still using 802.11b or what", when nintendo could have easily put that one ethernet port on their console. It is not like it costs a lot and it does offer advantages over wifi.

We may also get decent quality 4k streams, in fact I think that it is likely before the end of next gen. If moderately compressed 4k stream would be around 300-600mbps, I would not want to buffer it with  50mbps wifi.

Do you think that wireless-n will be available to do 300mbps or higher during next gen? I am very interested in that, care to provide me with a link?

And since you edited your post, what is a data cap?

I usually get much better results on a powerful enough laptop with wireless, my tablet and phone usually lags behind by a lot, I'm talking like 1-2MB/s bad on new Tegra 3 or S4 devices vs like 4.5MB/s on full fledged laptops when using the internet, the gap widens as we start to do file transfers over wireless N. Tablets are fine for browsing, but I think they'll keep sucking due to power restrictions on that front.

"A bandwidth cap, also known as a bit cap, limits the transfer of a specified amount of data over a period of time. Internet service providers commonly apply a cap when a channel intended to be shared by many users becomes overloaded, or may be overloaded, by a few users. Implementation of a bandwidth cap is sometimes termed a Fair Access Policy or Usage-based billing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_cap

Most European countries have these and USA cable companies are semi following.  Comcast had data caps up to 250GB before they started throttling your speed or perhaps charge more (some one else can fill this in).  They suspended it yet reintroduced it within a few months.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/comcast-suspends-data-caps-for-now/

http://www.webpronews.com/comcast-begins-capping-data-in-the-u-s-2012-09

"Under the Nashville plan, customers who exceed their 300GB monthly data allotment will be charged $10 for every subsequent 50GB of data they cross into."

So that is something which I don't have. Too bad for you if your connection has that, get another one.