Wired vs. Wireless

**Sentral** · 12-05-2005

Can someone tell me the pros and cons of these two ways to network your home. Such as, how much speed would i lose between the 2. I have a wired connection now, but it's a little annoying trying to wire the whole house, especially going through a second floor. Just wondering how much speed i lose, i have 2 computers and a Xbox (xbox is on first floor, 2 comps are on second) I know that wireless is a lot more expensive, but the speed thing sways my decision whether to switch to wireless. Thanks !

**JaWiB** · 12-05-2005

From my experience, wireless is never too slow. Granted, there's plenty of factors, such as interference or the material that the signal has to travel through, but I hardly had any lag problems on Xbox Live over the wireless as opposed to wired. Probably, the only time you'll want wired is if you are transfering huge files over the network, and even then, it might be fast enough.

And wireless routers/adapters might not be as expensive as you think--my router was about $70 when I got it, and I imagine you can find much cheaper ones now.

**B0bDole** · 12-05-2005

Going to a second floor is going to require an extender (~$95).

**JaWiB** · 12-05-2005

I have access to my wireless network pretty much everywhere in my house (two floors). I guess it depends on how large is the house, where the access point is, etc.

**kungtotte** · 12-06-2005

Originally Posted by B0bDole

Going to a second floor is going to require an extender (~$95).

This may or may not be the case, it all depends on the circumstances.

I have a LinkSys WRT54GS which has a really good range, I get full signal strength in my entire house.

I had a D-Link AP before which gave me full signal strength in about a five meter radius around the AP, in the other end of the house I was down on 40-50%.

Going to a second floor may require an extender, or it may not. It depends on the AP and the house (how much interference there is).

For me, W-LAN is just as fast as my wired LAN (I run about the same amount of wired clients as wireless). I only have a 2 Mbit downstream bandwidth from my ISP, so even the "slow" 11 Mbit/s W-LAN gets full download speed from the net.

Transfer speeds inside the LAN are slightly slower from my W-LAN clients, but those are all laptops with 5400 RPM harddrives as opposed to the 7200 RPM ones in the wired clients, which I think accounts for some of the speed differrence.

**itsme86** · 12-06-2005

To answer the original question, current wireless technology (802.11g) is 54mbit/sec with a good signal. Your typical wired network is 100mbit/sec. Latency remains about the same...it's not like the packet has to bounce off a satellite or anything. You probably won't notice any speed difference unless you're transferring large files.

**Jaqui** · 12-07-2005

the only thing to worry abot with wireless, make sure you secure it from unauthorised use.
I know people who download 80 + gb on other people's wireless connections.
and by securing it I mean going into the router settings, changing the default password and making it so that only specific devices can use it. anything else and you are in effect telling people they can drive your data transfer bill through the roof.

**Govtcheez** · 12-07-2005

It's really sad how many people don't know that wireless routers are super unsecure by default. It only takes a few minutes to lock it down, people!

**dimirpaw** · 12-08-2005

With our growing tech. wireless and non-wireless have really no speed diffrences besides haveing a cord hanging out or having no cord hanging out.

**CrazyNorman** · 12-08-2005

Unless you do lots and lots of internal transfer of large quantities of data, you really won't notice. I have a split level house, and one Netgear router covers it all reasonably.

I leave my router open. If someone really needs an internet connection, I have some bandwidth to spare. Not many war drivers in my area either.

Jaqui, where are you from and what is your ISP? I don't have a data transfer bill.

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