Cat5 or Wireless faster?

T

The Saint

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....I'm just wondering if I will loose bandwidth ( not use full 3Mbit) if I will use a Linksys Wireless PCI card instead of using a Cat5 cable....

or the speed in this case will remain the same?

:)
Thank you.
 
either option will be faster than your 3Mbit ISP line.

Personally I'd go with wired
 
cat5 FTW!

You can actually get clost to theoretical rates with ethernet. Wireless has all sorts of environmental issues which decreased bandwidth and increase latency, so you won't get true advertised rates.
 
In regards to surfing the web or doing anything that requires ISP interaction, under normal circumstances you should not see any difference. Also, "Cat5" cable itself is not what determines your speed it is the rate at which your interface is configured, 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T, etc...
 
For your 3Mb broadband (or much higher bandwidth packages for that matter) you will not see any statistical differenc in wired or wireless IF (and that is a good size if) you set it up right and have the right wireless environment in place. In other words, not an apartment with 10 other AP's within your cell coverage, 2.4Ghz phones all over the house, etc..

In a general sense there is no difference whatsoever when talking about internet connectivity.
 
ktwebb said:
For your 3Mb broadband (or much higher bandwidth packages for that matter) you will not see any statistical differenc in wired or wireless IF (and that is a good size if) you set it up right and have the right wireless environment in place. In other words, not an apartment with 10 other AP's within your cell coverage, 2.4Ghz phones all over the house, etc..

In a general sense there is no difference whatsoever when talking about internet connectivity.
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I must humbly disagree...... while wireless technology is getting better and faster all the time, it still doesn't match the speed of a hard wired setup yet.
 
Wireless is more than strong enough if all you're doing is communicating witht the internet. 54Mbit (in practice, less than half that) is more than enough to keep a 3Mbit pipe full.

Wireless has its problems, but so does amateur run Cat5, and with wireless, you don't have to cut holes in the walls :)

If you're connecting machines and streaming, moving videos, etc, its another story. Mpeg2 tops out at 10mbit (I think) and is about the most bandwidth hungry storage medium (besides DV, etc) - which may push your wireless to the limits depending on the situation and what you use it for.
 
Wireless is not a bad choice for browsing the net, you will have more latecny however. Therotically a wired setup is faster due to the lower response time and in most cases more bandwidth. You will most likely not notice any diffrence in browsing the net with wireless.

Now, transfer speeds are a diffrent story. A 700mb file will take 10-15min to copy at 54mbps, versus the 3-5min for 100base-tx. (i shudder at the thought of a hub)
 
GTCOBRA1 said:
I must humbly disagree...... while wireless technology is getting better and faster all the time, it still doesn't match the speed of a hard wired setup yet.
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And of course I never said wireless could match wired LAN's high end throughput. For a 3Mb cable connection it doesn't have to. If you have found different you've either got bad gear or just don't know how to set it up. A ping on a consumer lan from workstation to gateway should be 1ms. Same with wireless. But yet again, you have to have decent to good equipment and know what your doing.

If you want to transfer large files then wireless is a poor choice. If you want to have the optimal internet experience (and you don't have a T-3 or better at your house) then wireless is plenty capable. Those who don't experience this have shitty gear or they put their WLAN's up in the vicinity of other WLAN's.

Disagree if you like. Dems da facts. If your not seeing that then you might want to keep trying or get someone in that can make it happen for you.
 
Latency won't be much of an issue, good wireless with few users generally only adds 10ms latency under traffic. Single user, ping only increases under file transfers, which happens to a lesser degree over ethernet.

Considering the topic of this post is whether 3Mb internet will be slowed down by 54Mb wireless, the answer is no, as long as it is working properly. Ethernet is faster, yes, but 100Mb ethernet will not speed up 3Mb internet.

As for convenience, I'd give my left pinky toenail before I'd give up my wireless.
 
If you are doing any gaming and your god goes by the name, 'ping' then wired is the only way to go right now. People mention how 'good' wireless won't be a problem for gaming and such - but I'd argue that getting 'good' wireless is the problem. There are simply too many variables and it goes beyond which router to buy.

If you have a bunch of clients (family members for instance) who do nothing but surf the web... then those clients should have no problems with wireless at all. But if you plan on gaming, swapping files (on the lan), etc - then go wired for the throughput.

Wireless technology is getting better by the day... but aside from hotspot applications I don't think it is quite 'there' yet.

Just an opinion based on my experience... take it with a grain of salt. =)
 
For the record, I game on 54Mb almost daily without issue. I will confess they are LAN games, dial up sucks in the woods. The only time I have any issues with wireless gaming was when my Intel 2200BG driver bug kicked in and dropped my transmission power to nil.
 
Wireless LAN and Wired LAN, they will both give you teh same browsing speeds unless your connected up with something 80MBps + (Which I'm sure you are not).

Like it was said earlier, Ping is your God, then go with wired.

Or if you do any gaming, go with wired.
 
Wired is still best for reliability, It just works. Sometimes wireless can drop the connection.
 
I prefer wired but wireless is a decent option. My internet connection is currently running through a wireless connection to a router and I've had no trouble with gaming. I rarely have a ping above 100 and that's not bad. I should also mention the router is a bit of a distance away and I don't have the strongest signal. It is a steady signal, though.

Something to remember with wireless is that the more wireless devices you have running, the slower and more latent the network will be since all the connections are shared.

 
0ldman said:
Latency won't be much of an issue, good wireless with few users generally only adds 10ms latency under traffic.
Click to expand...

Good wireless will add 1 ms to a ping. Average will add 10. Poor, well doesn't really matter. A poorly setup WLAN or shitty gear will render gaming inoperable. If you do it right, have the right environment and know what your doing then 1-3 ms should be all you see added to a ping to the gateway and beyond.

I'll agree there are variables with wireless that don't exist with a wired connection. You need a controlled environment and knowledge/quality equipment to assure yourself a quality WLAN setup.

For instance, if you live in a house on a large piece of property and you don't have rebar in your walls, don't have a fridge or large aquarium (etc.) in the path from the client to the AP, and your house isn't huge I can assure you I could put a wireless network in there that would be completely and totally reliable, fast as it possibly could be and gaming hiccups would never even enter the conversation. That's alot to ask however. So it's a grain of salt kind of question/response. Can you have a wireless network where gaming is reliable and the equal of a wired network? Yep. Can you have one that makes you want to pull you hair out? Yep to that as well.
 
You quoted me, but didn't catch what I was saying. Under pretty decent traffic, ie: moving files, gaming, etc, add 10ms. As in run ping in a DOS Window in the background the entire time, ping is 1ms with no traffic, about 10-12ms with a 3 PC IPX LAN game.

Latency does increase a tad under traffic, but nothing that will make or break your game, unless the wireless is not working properly.
 
No argument there. Shared bandwidth. Each node accessing the AP will affect the ping.Significantly if there is alot of traffic
 
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