Wired faster than Wireless?

[jxyama]

simpler analogy...

let's say you and your friend are having a drinking contest. you can drink 5 cup of beer an hour and your friend can drink 10 cups of beer an hour.

what you are comparing is who can drink faster when the person pouring the drinks can only fill 1 cup an hour. then it doesn't matter who does the drinking, because there won't be enough beer ready to be drunk anyway.

you can replace "you" with airport/wireless and "your friend" with airport extreme/wired, respectively. the "person pouring the drink" is the broadband.

 

[gekko513]

I would really consider going to another pub in that case

 

[Westside guy]

I think you guys are ignoring something significant that also affects any comparison. When you transfer data over a wired or wireless connection, the data itself is only a part of the transfer. All electronic transfers carry significant "baggage" in the form of routing information, encoding overhead, etc. I believe wireless (802.11a/b/g) packets include significantly more of this overhead than wired (TCP/IP) packets.

You also have to realize that wireless is shared bandwidth - 801.11g is a 54mbps connection ideally, but that's the total available for all computers. If you've got a more complicated network, such as a WDS Airtunes setup, that part of the network is actually eating up a good chunk of your wireless bandwidth; even when there's no computer actively transferring data. Other devices such as wireless phones and microwaves can also impact your true transfer rate over a wireless network.

Aside #1: I realize that broadband wired connections are also "shared" - but that's in a different sense of the word. Your 3mbps cable connection is your guaranteed chunk of a much larger available data pipe.

Aside #2: Why are some of you being so insulting towards each other? Are you 12? Silly geek pissing matches aren't going to score any points with the girls...

 

[Calvinatir]

This thread is making my head hurt

 

[johnnyjibbs]

Reading this thread has been quite entertaining

As many have pointed out, the original poster is comparing apples with pears. Wireless b or g is slower than ethernet (100base and gigabit) but faster than basically any internet connection, broadband or otherwise. A simple error meant that he was comparing the broadband speed with the wirelesss signal capability, not the theoretical ethernet speed (such as file transfer between two computers on that network). By that logic, if I was still on a 56k modem internet connection, I would just stick that wire into a wireless router so I could get 54MBps download speeds instead of waiting 8 hours to download anything useful

Oh, and WiFi uses radio waves which are indeed part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic waves ALWAYS travel at the "speed of light", regardless of the wavelength/frequency. This speed is, of course, the maximum speed that any object in the universe can travel at (i.e. objects which have no rest mass). Although wires such as ethernet cables use electric currents to transmit data (unless they are optic fibres, in which case they use light (electromagnetic waves )), an electric current is also transmitted at the speed of light and so this shouldn't affect speed.