Wi-Fi is the most-improved technology in the building. Each generation — Wi-Fi 5, 6, 6E, 7 — has gotten faster, more efficient, and more capable. Each generation has also failed to close the gap with ethernet. A wired connection in 2026 is still the difference between "this video call is fine" and "why does my video keep freezing." The reason isn't bad Wi-Fi gear; it's physics. Wi-Fi is shared spectrum. Ethernet is a private wire. Shared resources have failure modes that private resources don't.
The practical implication for a small business: any desk where someone spends most of their day in video calls should be wired, not wireless. The investment is small — a $30 cable, a $50 USB-C dongle if the laptop doesn't have ethernet — and the difference in call quality is large enough to notice immediately. The team member whose Zoom drops every hour, whose screenshares stutter, whose colleagues say "you're cutting out" once a meeting — they're probably on Wi-Fi that's bumping into spectrum congestion. Move them to ethernet, the symptoms vanish.
The mistake we see most often isn't a lack of wired ports; it's a lack of dongles. Modern laptops don't ship with ethernet ports. People don't run cables because they don't have the dongle, the dongle is in a drawer somewhere, and nobody made it easy. The fix is to put dongles on every desk that has a wired drop, so that the marginal effort of plugging in is zero. Apple sells USB-C to gigabit ethernet dongles for $30. Other vendors make similar ones for $15. The cost-per-desk for this is rounding error compared to the productivity loss of bad video calls.
When it's not feasible to wire a desk — a hot-desking floor, a temporary office, a coworking space — the next-best move is a Wi-Fi 6E or 7 access point dedicated to the area and a laptop that supports it. New laptops do; older ones don't, and they'll bottleneck on the older Wi-Fi standard regardless of how good your AP is. The cycle: replace laptops, then APs, then laptops again. Both ends of the wire matter.