Would my internet speed increase with direct ethernet vs AP Express?

Qwerty11 said:

So right now everything is connected to the internet via wifi from the airport express. I was wondering if I would see faster speeds on my iMac if I connected directly via ethernet?

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Depending on your imac, airport base station and internet speed it could, but proabley won't. It will only make a real difference (when talking about traffic between your computer and the internet) if your internet connection speed is over the speed of your wifi (which will most likely be 54mbp/s or 300mbp/s).

However it will dramatically increase internal network speeds, for example, transfering a backup of one of my xbox cames from the storage drive on my server (around 8gb of data) takes about a hour over 54mbp/s wifi, 20 - 30mins over 100mbp/s eth and 5-10 mins over 1gbp/s eth

You would see a difference. Wifi is shared and easily messed up by interferance, such as cordless phones and microwave ovens. Wire is always better, wifi is for conveniance only.

rwwest7 said:

Wire is always better, wifi is for conveniance only.

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Only if your wired network is at a higher speed than your wireless network. Wired network with 10mbps hub for example is not going to be faster than 802.11n wireless.

1 gigabit ethernet faster than 802.11n. yes.