Why is Wi-Fi Slower than Ethernet?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
988 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so picture
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this you just wired your desktop pc up to some uber fast internet connection
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which is like super exciting because surely this will be no more lagging out
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of your favorite games or thrilling skype dates then eager to experience
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this kind of speed on your laptop or mobile device you buy a fancy looking
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wi-fi router you key in your password wait what
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your speeds aren't even half of what you're getting with the wired connection
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what gives well unfortunately wireless is pretty much
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always gonna be slower than wired it's a
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near universal truth that becomes more and more obvious the faster you try to
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go even if you spend tons of money on high-end wireless gear but then okay now
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bear with me here because em waves do move faster through the air than
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electrons do through a wire so why is it well let's start with the
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most obvious signal range if you're using an Ethernet cable and you want
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gigabit speeds you can have a cable run of up to 100 meters that's roughly as
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long as a football field this is because the signal inside the cable doesn't
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deteriorate appreciably until you have a longer cable run but radio signals
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flying through the air such as wi-fi are much more prone to signal degradation
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unlike a physical cable which has a copper wire inside that only carries
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network traffic and is wrapped up in materials to shield the signal from
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interference wi-fi signals are just blasted everywhere meaning they have to
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compete with walls your roommate's microwave and other network traffic you
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see unlike Ethernet where your device gets one dedicated pipe that runs to
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your modem or your router there's only so much spectrum available for your
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wi-fi enabled laptop and your phone and anything else and what that means is
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that your device will often be broadcasting on the same frequency or
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channel as others which can lead to more interference that can further degrade
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the signal and give your router more work to do to sort it all out but okay
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hold on a second Linus you can hook up lots of wired devices to a router as
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well so doesn't your router have to figure out where all those different
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signals are supposed to go yes
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but wi-fi and Ethernet have different strategies to combat packet loss which
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is exactly what it sounds like when a chunk or a packet of data doesn't reach
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its destination oftentimes this can occur due to a collision when two
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devices try to transmit it at precisely the same time and if this happens the
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packets have to be resent so the way that an Ethernet connection avoids
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collisions is that once the sender determines that its path to the
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destination is clear it sends the packet immediately if the path is busy the
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sender will send the data as soon as the path is clear again
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wi-fi on the other hand introduces a small delay once the path becomes clear
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the idea is that since a wireless router can't magically detect a collision in
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mid-air this delay reduces the risk of collisions but as it does so it also
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adds more latency and although many leaps in wi-fi technology have been made
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over the years it still resembles much older school communications protocols in
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one important way it is half duplex
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meaning that a wi-fi gadget's antenna can only be sending
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or receiving at any given moment not both
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now full duplex wireless is in the works but it's still experimental and suffers
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from its own special kind of interference that results from the
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antenna trying to deal with both inbound and outbound signals at the same time by
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contrast Ethernet has been full duplex for quite some time now as it's not
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difficult to simply put one wire in for transmitting data and another one for
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receiving it on the same cable so all other things being equal
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don't be surprised if your wi-fi connection always seems just a bit
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slower even if you do walk around with your smartphone neurotically duct taped
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directly to a router just please please
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