Wireless internet speeds.

[vict0r]

Okay, so I just got very confused.

Looking at this, there is said things such as

802.11a and 802.11g WLANs offer theoretical bandwidth up to 54 Mbps. (In contrast, typical wired Ethernets run at 100 Mbps.)

and

The performance of Wi-Fi networks in practice never approaches the theoretical maximum.

So as I'm not too big on stuff like this, I would guess that this would mean that the internet speed on the wireless units in the house are slower than the wired ones. About 50% of the speed. But when I show this to my friend who supposedly knows more about this than me, he says that

if you for example have your PC hooked up to a server, it's slower with wi-fi, but the internet speed stays the same.

But to me, this makes no sense! Please, can someone enlighten me on this issue?

[monkey0506]

Now I personally know very little about networking and things, but the way I'm calculating this is like this: 54 Mbps / 8 = 6.75 MBps (megabits vs megabytes (1 byte = 8 bits). So, theoretically, the maximum speed for a wi-fi connection would then be 6.75 megabytes per second versus the maximum speed of a wired ethernet connection would be 12.5 megabytes per second (100 / 8).

So, we can clearly see that the wired connection is faster. However, regarding the internet, most pages, including all images, data, etc. are measured in kilobytes or maybe just a few megabytes (sites with lots of images (i.e., your pr0n) excluded). So, theoretically then, a wi-fi connection should be able to receive all the data for a single page in a single second. Granted the computer will take time to render the images on screen and whatever, but as far as the connection goes, the data should be transferred in a single second.

So, in theory, unless the total page data (including all images, text, sounds, embedded objects, etc.) exceeds 6.75 MB the page data could be transferred across a wi-fi connection in a single second. And although the wired ethernet connection is a faster connection, it would still transfer the data in one second.

If my calculations are correct then, "the internet speed" would indeed stay the same (as a general rule).

Of course, once again, I do know very little about networking, and I could be talking complete bullocks. 8)

[scotch]

Wifi will be a limitation if your connection is above 54mbit. Obviously most people aren't lucky enough to have some uncapped fibre going to their home, so it's not a problem. Standard home internet speeds won't be significantly affected by using wifi rather than wires.

What your friend meant was that if you have another computer on your LAN, then transfers between it and your computer will be slower over wifi (54mbit) than wires (100mbit). This is because in this case, the computers are able to utilise the full bandwidth. (By the same token, it'll be faster if you use gibabit ethernet, rather than normal ethernet, between your computers. But that won't make your internet connection any faster.)

[SSH]

Wireless networks don't achieve their theoritical speed becuase all the data has to be encapsulated in error-correcting/detecting, flow control, etc. etc. which adds a large overhead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11 has a table which shows the most common 802.11g to have a typical bandwidth of 19MBit/s.

Now, your ADSL or cable connection is unlikely to exceed about 8Mbit/s, so even if your network is only making half that, your ADSL is still the bottleneck. Plus packet overhead, contention ratios on ADSL, ISP traffic shaping, etc. etc is all going to cut down the rate you get there. So for most people wireless is fine.

[vict0r]

Aaaah! I think I'm alittle smarter now. Thanks everyone

[monkey0506]

Of course having read what scotch wrote, no matter how fast your network connection is it won't actually increase your internet speed; I simply took it to mean (in the original description) that you thought internet connection speed might be slower over a wireless connection versus a wired connection.