Significant difference between wired and wireless speeds?

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m1ndkiller

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Sep 27, 2011
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I have an Asus RT-AC66U router and a 110/10 cable connection. After running a few speed tests, I noticed that only my desktop connected through ethernet was getting full speeds--my laptop (Lenovo Y470) only hit 40mbps down when connected wirelessly, and my Galaxy Nexus phone only hit 10. Both devices have N network cards IIRC, and my laptop received the full 110 down when I plugged in the ethernet cable.

I know that wireless is generally slower than wired but where is the bottleneck here? It doesn't seem to be the router or the network card.
 
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The bottleneck is almost always interference. On a wired connection the packets likely get close to 100% success between the router and your PC. On wireless you likely get some packet loss as well as substantial delays because unlike wired the wireless radios try to send the data over and over until the get a clean copy. At some point they give up and you lose the data but even on the times they succeed the delays incurred add up.

You have to remember that a ethernet cable has the ability to send 1g and receive 1g at the same time with no data loss. So this would be called 2000m if it was a wireless router number wanting big numbers. The so called 1300 is the combination up up and down but they are transmitted on the same path...
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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The bottleneck is almost always interference. On a wired connection the packets likely get close to 100% success between the router and your PC. On wireless you likely get some packet loss as well as substantial delays because unlike wired the wireless radios try to send the data over and over until the get a clean copy. At some point they give up and you lose the data but even on the times they succeed the delays incurred add up.

You have to remember that a ethernet cable has the ability to send 1g and receive 1g at the same time with no data loss. So this would be called 2000m if it was a wireless router number wanting big numbers. The so called 1300 is the combination up up and down but they are transmitted on the same path and interfere with each other. If you are on 802.11n you only get 450m again TOTAL but that also assumes you can transmit 3 overlapping signals and somehow extract the data. You are only going to get these perfect number in a shield lab with only a single device talking to your router. In the real world with neighbors and multiple devices talking to your router you only get a tiny fraction of these numbers. Your devices very well may also not be able to do the 450m if they do not have the proper antenna configuration so you then get only a fraction of whatever speed that is.
 
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jjm_1217

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Aug 13, 2014
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it's normal because your laptop has better wireless transmit speed that of the mobile. And wired connection has no interference compared to wireless since other appliances like microwave oven, wireless phones, etc are running in the same channel.but still there's a big difference between the wireless speed and wired and if you have only two wireless device it means router has a problem.it must be close to the wired speed.update router firmware or change it.
 
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