No, I live in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space.

Also, my phone company refuses to upgrade so I am on high-latency DSL. When a packet gets dropped in my local network, it takes a long time to get a replacement from internet based services.

You don't need high bandwidth to use the internet reliably, but you do need low packet loss, and the effects of packet loss and high latency multiply with each other -- local packet loss is much more painful if your internet is slow than if it is fast. Thus having a reliable local network helps experienced performance, even if you have a 2Mbps internet connection.

That's 99% by volume, not by population, right? Because I would estimate that at least 5% of the US population both chooses to live in high-density urban areas—so must rent apartments—and cannot afford large ones, precisely because of how high-density (and therefore high cost-per-sq-ft) the local area is.

> so must rent apartments—and cannot afford large ones

There may be a unit conversion problem here, but an apartment as small as 500Sqft apartment would be exceedingly rare - that's ~46.5Sq/m.

Many cities don't even allow apartments that small...

500ish sq ft is pretty typical for a 1 bedroom apartment in the cities I've been in.

Studios are usually around 400 sq ft.

According to the internet, the average size of a studio apartment in Manhattan is 550sqft.

Having a big house doesn't mean that you can't use Wifi, it just takes more planning and care in placement of the nodes.

I serve my 1200 sq ft condo with a single node, and it gets good coverage throughout the space, including the front/back patios.

My parent's 2400 sq ft house took 2 nodes in the attic + one in the back of the garage to cover the back yard.

They can hit their ISP's 150mbit/second cap from anywhere in the house or yard.

They use tablets almost exclusively and though dad still uses a laptop from time to time, he has no desire to plug it into ethernet, so a wired network wouldn't really be useful for them.

> No, I live in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space.

If I crunched the numbers correctly, roughly 2.5% of the US population lives in NYC alone. If you add in Boston, DC, San Francisco and other expensive cities I'd bet you can break 10% of the population in the core expensive cities alone.

80% of Americans live in an urban area.

I am also in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space. I just have a good router and fiber to the home. :)

I suspect that your biggest problem is really just your terrible ISP. I've had that problem before too, but my current one is great (and local).

Streaming is one thing. Gaming is another. Dropped packets and big outliers of latency are a huge pain for game developers.

I game on it as well. Granted, I'm not so big into FPS that a trivial increase in latency matters that much. The times that I do play FPS games, they are fine, though.

For everyone one of you, there seems to be someone who will be put out by the poor performance of a game over crappy wifi, then blame the game.