Is Wired Really Faster Than Wireless?

NewYorksFinest

Senior member
Mar 27, 2014
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I have an Ethernet cable lying around in my "Computer Bin." It reaches my router and my computer. But is wired really THAT much faster?
 
Feb 25, 2011
16,970
1,600
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Yes.

You can get almost sort of nearly gigabit performance from top of the line WiFi 802.11ac gear. If everything is perfect and nobody tried to pop any popcorn.

Or you can run a $10 cable and plug it into an $15 NIC.

10Gb Ethernet over Cat6 is doable with $350 NICs and a <$1k switch. WiFi can't touch that at any price.

What's important is use case. If you rely on centralized file storage, or need a really reliable and/or fast LAN for some reason, then wired is the way to go. If you're like most home internet surfers, WiFi is fine.
 

JackMDS

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 25, 1999
29,517
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Not just faster.

Also much more stable and secure.

Optimized wire Giga connection can yield 110MB/sec. LAN transfer.

I am not sure what would come first, Armageddon or Wireless performing the same.


:cool:
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,200
765
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What everyone else said is correct. However, there is a situation where wired would not be faster than wireless. If your wireless is working well (good signal without significant interference) and you don't use your connection for anything except general web browsing, then a wired connection may not give any improvement over wireless. But for any significant file transfers, connections that require stability, and anything that benefits from extra speed, wired is always better.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,570
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I get 1Gbit from my server to my switch/router/htpc in the other room. I get 50Mbit over wireless N to my laptop. In the other room, I get 1Mbit or less, over wireless to my router.
 

Harlan211

Junior Member
Apr 9, 2014
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Yes, wireless is subject to interference than wired so this affect the speed of the connection.
 

smitbret

Diamond Member
Jul 27, 2006
3,382
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At normal distances, I have a hierarchy that looks like this:
Gigabit Wired









Wireless AC





100Mbps Wired


Wireless N







Wireless G

On the rare occasion that a good Wireless N is faster than a Tbase100, I would still take the wired because of stability. Wireless AC is really pretty fast, but since it is 5GHz, the range just sucks if you have to penetrate walls or floors.
 

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
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A wired connection will always be faster ultimately. Within 5-10 years tops I doubt we will see copper at the client-side for the most part. Wireless will be able to provide gigabit speeds or better.
 

azazel1024

Senior member
Jan 6, 2014
901
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I highly doubt that. Even with MU-MIMO coming, wireless is pratically limited where wired is practically limitless. A basic wired NIC is less than a buck to include on a board, for a cheap PHY anyway. Its a lot more reliable than wireless, even super high speed.

Wired speeds will only increase with time. With the increase in the internet of everything, you have increase wireless usage, which adds contention and slurping up a limited medium. Onloading "everything" because no clients have wired connections anymore would make the situation infinitely worse.

As for wireless versus wired, once 1.7Gbps 4:4 APs become the standar high end, especially with MU-MIMO, I hope we see a move towards allowing link aggregation on routers. Right now the theoretical limit is around 60% payload versus link rate on a very good connection (the rest is eaten by beacon, preamble, error checking, etc). So a 1.7Gbps AP could possibly hit slightly north of 1Gbps...not including the 2.4GHz radios. Allowing any single client to exceed 1Gbps isn't a big deal, but as you have multiple clients and MU-MIMO the use case where you can exceed >1Gbps of total throughput from the router is substantially more likely.

Allowing LAG on a router seems like a trivial add in the firmware to me, and especially consider that for the time being, 4:4 MU-MIMO 11ac routers are going to be the high end, seems like it makes sense to me.