Faster Speed Wireless then Wired?

FusionFury

Anyone know why I'm getting broadband speeds of around 15-20 MB when I'm on my desktop computer through a ethernet cable, but through wireless on my laptop I get 30MB

(My Virgin Broadband is 30MB)

Isn't it meant to be faster when it's wired??

is there anything to help?

Hammyman

Yes it is supposed to be faster but it depends on how you are measuring the speed. If you are using a Java tester such as the one on Thinkbroadband.com, an old version of JRE can skew the results.

What are you using to test and how are you testing?

jadziad

Depends on a lot of things. Possibilities:

- rubbish miswired network cable
- poor device drivers
- faulty hard drive on the desktop (yes, i know a lot of testers do all this in-memory)
- how the test is done (or different Java versions)
- odd tcp/ip settings or misconfiguration
- bad timing & intermittent congestion
- weird settings on your router, giving wifi priority
- other people using your connection at the same time
- windows updates started downloading on the desktop

All sorts.

gaming_guy

...........

macman

Your wireless 'g' connection can theoretically (I stress that part) support up to 54Mbps, which is likely to be much faster than your internet connection can provide. So it's not usually the wireless that is the bottleneck, even at half that speed.

almillar

Good advice above. First thing you can do yourself to isolate the problem better is to plug the ethernet cable into the laptop instead of the desktop, and perform the test with the laptop wired (turn off wifi so you know it's wired). If the laptop gets a slow result, it's a wiring/router problem, if it's as fast or faster than wireless, it's a desktop software/hardware problem.

kwikbreaks

macman wrote: »

Your wireless 'g' connection can theoretically (I stress that part) support up to 54Mbps, which is likely to be much faster than your internet connection can provide. So it's not usually the wireless that is the bottleneck, even at half that speed.

In practice 802.11g tops out at around 22-23Mbps so the test with WiFi is either using 802.11n or is flawed.

One common problem causing reduced speeds with wired connections is that the adaptor is set up as half duplex rather than full duplex. Exactly how you check that varies with the version of windows but control panel/system/device manager/network adaptors/the wired one/properties/advanced is a general guide.