[masraum]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

WIFI is not wired.

There are a whole host of things that come into play with WIFI.

First one is backhaul. Traffic is bidirectional. Wired is like a 2 lane road where traffic flows unimpeded in both directions. WIFI is a one lane where traffic needs to alternate to flow in both directions so your effective theoretical wireless speed is already half.

You can mitigate wireless backhual bottleneck a couple of ways, carry backhaul over a cable which if you are going to do that may as well forget wireless anyway. Or, dedicate one frequency to transmit and the other to backhaul. Many of your newer systems have a dedicated frequency to handle backhaul.

WIFI operates a the speed of the slowest connected device. Meaning, letting your kid attach that decades old a/b radio iPod to your network is like being on a one lane country road in your 911 and farmer Joe pulling out in front of you in his tractor hauling 100 bails of hay into town. You're stuck going 15 mph till he gets off.

Noise. Everyone has a WIFI router these days, open your WIFI and if you are seeing your neighbors networks they are creating noise.

Most consumer WIFI routers default to using the same channels. I've never seen a routers auto channel assignment work. You need to grab a utility to scan nearby networks, see what channels they are set to, probably 1 and 11, then pick channels for yours that are (if possible) 2 hops away from the congestion.

Then there is router placement, distance, walls, plumbing, glass, mirrors etc... to deal with.

Always go wired whenever possible.

Everything he said with extra emphasis on the last line. Wireless is rarely going to end up being faster than wired in reality.

It is possible that wireless can be REALLY fast, and then can slow down over time, but that's usually due to the things that SM mentions above.