Ditching Wi-Fi on my smart TV solved more problems than I expected

Installing a smart TV is tedious, but it’s not complicated. You plug it in, turn it on, connect it to Wi-Fi, and log into your accounts. Right from the start you made your first mistake, I know it.

You see, high-quality streaming is one of the most demanding things many of us do at home, and it’s a bandwidth usage that doesn’t need to be done over Wi-Fi. Fortunately, the solution is simple.

Use the Ethernet port on the back of your TV

If a device doesn’t need to use Wi-Fi, don’t do it

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

Smart TVs come with various ports on the back or side. My Samsung Frame TV is a little different than most because it has a little wire that runs down the wall to a One Connect box in my TV stand where I can find all the ports instead. It has the usual HDMI for connecting DVD, Blu-ray players and games consoles, but next to it is an Ethernet port. Until recently, this port was empty. I knew I would use it one day, but I didn’t during installation and quickly forgot to come back to it.

This has since changed. I plugged an Ethernet cable into my TV and the difference was night and day. Not only does my TV benefit from being plugged directly into the wall, but so do the other devices in my house.

It’s less about speed and more about stability.

A direct Ethernet connection is not always faster than Wi-Fi.

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

A wired connection being superior to wireless isn’t revolutionary news, but some of the conventional wisdom is that a wired connection offers faster speeds. This is no longer necessarily true. Many TVs have a 10/100 “Fast Ethernet” port, which operates at 10 megabits per second or 100 megabits per second. These speeds are actually lower than the gigabits per second that modern Wi-Fi routers can support.

On the other hand, a 4K stream over the Internet only uses around 25 megabits per second. Most people aren’t streaming higher-quality 4K files locally from a Plex server or streaming games to their TV from a PC in another room, which are the kinds of use cases where a Gigabit Ethernet port might be more appreciated. Fortunately, in these situations, you can add a Gigabit Ethernet port to your TV yourself.

The biggest problem is that the Wi-Fi can be intermittent. We may not be able to see the signal, but it has to travel and it becomes cluttered as more and more devices all try to do things at the same time. I have two young children who both like to whip out their Android tablets and start streaming as soon as they get home from school. If my wife or I turn on a TV, that’s three devices competing to do the same thing live.

Our internet connection is fast enough that all three of us can stream videos at the same time. We just need to make sure we don’t overload the routers. Plugging in an Ethernet cable to provide the TV with its own direct line to the Internet frees up wireless traffic for accessing tablets. At the same time, the TV may seem more responsive because it is no longer competing with tablets for signal.

This is especially important in a smart home

My house is filled with dozens of WiFi-connected devices

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

Last year I bought 50 smart switches at a time. When you walk around my house, almost every switch on the wall is on. I can control my lights and turn on ceiling fans using a Matter connection.

When I started this whole project, my Samsung Smart TV served as the hub for my smart home. This meant it had to be on the same Wi-Fi network as my smart devices in order to manage them. If I plugged in an Ethernet cable, all devices would disappear from SmartThings. If you’re using your TV as a SmartThings Matter hub, Ethernet is not a solution.

Now that I’ve moved my home to local hubs like Home Assistant Green and Homey Pro Mini, this is no longer an issue. My TV and hub can both be plugged into Ethernet, and smart switches have less traffic to compete with. A home made up of devices using matter via Wi-Fi has more room to breathe.

A simple solution, even if your home is not connected to the Internet

I’m lucky that my house has Ethernet jacks throughout the house, but you’re out of luck if your house doesn’t have one. You can achieve a similar effect by investing in a mesh Wi-Fi router. Mine have ethernet ports on the back of each node. If you place the node next to your TV, you no longer need to run the cable to where your router is. Your router can access your TV.

Wi-Fi bands

Wi-Fi 6

Ethernet ports

6 (2 each)

The Deco X20 system provides cost-effective Wi-Fi 6 coverage throughout your home.