One of the things that I often see stated is that wireless internet connection will always be inferior to a wired connection. It seems rather intuitive. For the longest time I insisted on connecting my computer via a Cat6 cable to my router for this very reason.
At one point, logistics betrayed me, and connecting my computer via a wired connection wasn’t feasible unless the router hung in a precarious position. So I decided to try the wireless. I did a few quick tests and couldn’t see any perceptible difference so I switched to a wireless adapter and have been pretty much using wireless on all my PCs ever since.
This leads me to the common question, whereby for example people are having network troubles- their games have a high ping or they have high latency or slow downloads. While wired connections can diagnose wireless issues, I don’t think there is anything inherent in wireless technologies that actually leads it to always be slower. Since I had no data, I decided to gather some. Still less than scientific, I decided to use speedtest.net and test with my wireless and my wired connections on my laptop (which, since I can move it easily is the best option for testing wired)
Tests were done using my Toshiba Satellite L300 Laptop. This has a 10/100 Ethernet adapter and a Wireless N wireless adapter. My internet speed is advertised as 80mbps or so, which should be well within the abilities of 10/100. The only other option would be to relocate one of my desktop PCs with gigabit, which was more effort than I wanted to put in for this sort of one-off experiment.
| Ping(ms) | Download (mbps> | Upload(mbps) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 62.86 | 3.06 |
| 13 | 64.25 | 3.03 |
| 20 | 44.01 | 2.65 |
| 13 | 63.61 | 3.16 |
| 15 | 43.07 | 2.60 |
The wired results were pretty good. I am unsure what causes it to be 44mbps in one test and 60+ in another, though.
| Ping(ms) | Download (mbps> | Upload(mbps) |
|---|---|---|
| 14 | 63.89 | 3.11 |
| 11 | 43.32 | 3.06 |
| 10 | 42.50 | 3.09 |
| 10 | 57.67 | 3.13 |
| 11 | 58.97 | 3.15 |
Interestingly, the wireless results prove faster. It is also notable that using speedtest.net I chose a single server for all the tests, rather than using the “Select best server based on ping” as I found that using that option the results varied rather wildly. I’m not entirely sure what conclusion to draw from this, but it certainly appears that a wireless connection is not inherently slower in terms of speed or worse in terms of latency. Chances are that observations to the contrary may be due to mitigating factors such as a noisy environment.
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