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this you just wired your desktop pc up to some uber fast internet connection
which is like super exciting because surely this will be no more lagging out
of your favorite games or thrilling skype dates then eager to experience
this kind of speed on your laptop or mobile device you buy a fancy looking
wi-fi router you key in your password wait what
your speeds aren't even half of what you're getting with the wired connection
what gives well unfortunately wireless is pretty much
always gonna be slower than wired it's a
near universal truth that becomes more and more obvious the faster you try to
go even if you spend tons of money on high-end wireless gear but then okay now
bear with me here because em waves do move faster through the air than
electrons do through a wire so why is it well let's start with the
most obvious signal range if you're using an Ethernet cable and you want
gigabit speeds you can have a cable run of up to 100 meters that's roughly as
long as a football field this is because the signal inside the cable doesn't
deteriorate appreciably until you have a longer cable run but radio signals
flying through the air such as wi-fi are much more prone to signal degradation
unlike a physical cable which has a copper wire inside that only carries
network traffic and is wrapped up in materials to shield the signal from
interference wi-fi signals are just blasted everywhere meaning they have to
compete with walls your roommate's microwave and other network traffic you
see unlike Ethernet where your device gets one dedicated pipe that runs to
your modem or your router there's only so much spectrum available for your
wi-fi enabled laptop and your phone and anything else and what that means is
that your device will often be broadcasting on the same frequency or
channel as others which can lead to more interference that can further degrade
the signal and give your router more work to do to sort it all out but okay
hold on a second Linus you can hook up lots of wired devices to a router as
well so doesn't your router have to figure out where all those different
signals are supposed to go yes
but wi-fi and Ethernet have different strategies to combat packet loss which
is exactly what it sounds like when a chunk or a packet of data doesn't reach
its destination oftentimes this can occur due to a collision when two
devices try to transmit it at precisely the same time and if this happens the
packets have to be resent so the way that an Ethernet connection avoids
collisions is that once the sender determines that its path to the
destination is clear it sends the packet immediately if the path is busy the
sender will send the data as soon as the path is clear again
wi-fi on the other hand introduces a small delay once the path becomes clear
the idea is that since a wireless router can't magically detect a collision in
mid-air this delay reduces the risk of collisions but as it does so it also
adds more latency and although many leaps in wi-fi technology have been made
over the years it still resembles much older school communications protocols in
one important way it is half duplex
meaning that a wi-fi gadget's antenna can only be sending
or receiving at any given moment not both
now full duplex wireless is in the works but it's still experimental and suffers
from its own special kind of interference that results from the
antenna trying to deal with both inbound and outbound signals at the same time by
contrast Ethernet has been full duplex for quite some time now as it's not
difficult to simply put one wire in for transmitting data and another one for
receiving it on the same cable so all other things being equal
don't be surprised if your wi-fi connection always seems just a bit
slower even if you do walk around with your smartphone neurotically duct taped
directly to a router just please please
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