No, SC is not being overly cautious, but they want to protect themselves from the rush to the help desk from customers with WiFi problems. The waiting times are already high enough. And explain this to a frustrated customer who is on 180 and has TV problems that the WiFi can work but doesn’t necessarily have to…

The speed of 100 Mbps or 500 Mbps is not important. Compared to Ethernet LAN, WLAN has…

- high fluctuations in speed

- Package Loss and Consecutive Losses

- Retransmissions

- higher jitter

- higher delay

-…

And all of this is suboptimal, especially for real-time transmissions (TV and VoIP). Therefore, WLAN and PowerLAN are and remain only best effort.

@hed

I fully agree with the recommendation that LAN is preferable to WLAN.

And not just for video streams, but for any data transfer.

But the question is, if I really don’t have a LAN cable, does a separate additional WLAN kit have an advantage over the AC WLAN router variant for TV-Box directly?

In my opinion not, because apart from the monopolization of the WLAN connection for the TV stream (which is replaced by IGMP snooping in the router direct solution), this is the same technology, namely the AC standard on the 5 GHz network, with the analog advantages and disadvantages of every radio connection.

So if I already have an AC WiFi router in use, I would definitely try the direct solution first and not invest additional money in a second AC WiFi router that would almost certainly lead to the same result, namely: it can do well work, or not.

And that’s why I would advise Swisscom to refrain from recommending an additional WLAN kit to customers with an IB2 in the future. The kit still made sense for a Centro Grande, but in my opinion it no longer made sense for an Internet box and especially for the IB2.

The connection kits have at least 4 antennas installed and work with MiMo. The TV box only has two antennas installed, at least the HD box which I took apart.
So it is to be expected that a connection in a problematic household via a connection kit (transmitter and receiver with 4 antennas each) will work better than a direct connection with the TV box (transmitter up to 4 antennas / receiver (TV box) only max 2 antennas) . You can philosophize so much and I understand the recommendation in the shop. “So it can, but doesn’t have to work 😉!” The connection kit is safer.

The connection kit has better performance, I’ve already tried this with a wall in between!

@madaley

If it already works perfectly with 2 antennas, then perhaps 2 of the 4 antennas are simply unnecessary. And MiMo doesn’t help with a single client operation like the TV-Box anyway.

But joking aside: Since the onboard solution of the TV-Box is already available and free, the sensible recommendation would be to try out the onboard solution first and then escalate to the kit solution if there are any problems.

And the restriction of only being in the same room and without a wall is just nonsense - in this case I’ll definitely use a LAN cable anyway, whose stability cannot be topped by any WLAN variant.

---

@Werner wrote:
@Werner

If it already works perfectly with 2 antennas, then perhaps 2 of the 4 antennas are simply unnecessary. And MiMo doesn’t help with a single client operation like the TV-Box anyway.

In your opinion, WLAN clients should only have 1 antenna. Because MIMO 2×2 3×3 4×4 wouldn’t be of any use.

Can you then explain to us how MIMO works on the client side if additional antennas are unnecessary?

Why does the current IPone 7 have MIMO 2×2?

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone-7-and-iphone-7-plus-review](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10685/the-iphone -7-and-iphone-7-plus-review)

And the Samsung Galaxy S7 even has MIMO 4×4?

[http://cellularinsights.com/samsung-galaxy-s7-the-first-4x4-mimo-smartphone/](http://cellularinsights.com/samsung-galaxy-s7-the-first-4x4-mimo- smartphone/)

@compa

Sorry, I didn’t express myself quite correctly, I meant that the Multi User MiMo kit doesn’t have any technical benefit, as a point-to-point connection from a single client is normally used.

The internal WLAN adapter of the TV-Box offers a maximum of 866 mBit, in my case (1 wall and approx. 8m) it reaches around 500 mBit (by the way, the reception strength can be checked on the TV-Box) and is therefore normally already more than adequately configured.

Otherwise, I would really like to treat everyone to as many antennas as they want to buy (Asus has real Star Wars routers with an impressive forest of antennas on offer).

Unfortunately, people often simply forget that this is of no use to most clients because it still requires two pages for each connection.

Well, what is the norm for the household then?
2 walls without steel reinforcement and 2 TV boxes and 5 clients on the WiFi?
A Point 2 Point connection is exactly the connection kit.
Not everyone is technical and can clearly see whether something works or not and then play through the variants.

Based on a current example, I can once again confirm that the TV Box 2.0 and Internet Box 2 constellation works perfectly under “normal” circumstances. A friend’s Internet box 2 was installed in the living room and supplies the television in the bedroom with a signal over a distance of approx. 6-8m as the crow flies through a brick wall.

As described above, an error message appears during the installation process stating that the signal quality is not sufficient, but in this case this could be ignored; after “try again” the picture and sound are available in perfect quality.

I recommend that anyone who cannot lay a cable, noting that this constellation is still not officially supported, should at least try using the Internet Box 2 before purchasing the 178 franc WLAN connection kit. If, contrary to expectations, this does not produce satisfactory results, you can always try the other (more expensive and complicated) solutions.

@ofaessler

You speak from my soul. Corresponds exactly to my own experiences.

It is clear that Swisscom simply does not love the WLAN adapter that is already built into the TV-Box, but a custom-made product that deviates from the norm would probably have been too expensive for Swisscom from the manufacturer…

By the way, a few months ago @GuidoT thought out loud in a forum post whether he was in favor of changing the support policy by replacing the old Centro Grandes (which didn’t have 5 GHz WiFi) and switching to the IB2 should be used regarding the direct WLAN connection.

Apparently it hasn’t caught on internally yet, or Swisscom simply still has too many WLAN connection kits in stock…