Why is wifi slower than LAN?

Hey guys!!, I am back with an answer to a question that has haunted all of us every once in a while, and that is Why the heck is your wifi so slow? Why is my LAN or ethernet (so to speak) faster than my wifi, regardless of both being from the same service provider. So, today I'll try to tell you the appropriate answer to this question. 

So, imagine you just wired your PC to some super fast internet connection which is like every gamer's dream because surely this will be no more lagging on your favorite game. Everyone is eager to experience this kind of speed on their laptop or mobile device, so they buy a fancy looking Wi-Fi router, key in their password and tadaaa!! your speeds aren't even half of what you're getting with the wired connection or LAN. Well unfortunately, Wireless is pretty much always going to be slower than Wired and it's almost as true as the fact that earth is round (pretty much!) and it becomes more and more obvious the faster you try to go even if you spend tons of money on high-end wireless router and Wi-Fi extenders or any other fancy wireless gear.

But wait, we know waves do move faster through the air then electrons do through a wire so why is it that you wifi is slower than your LAN connection? 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 a hundred meters that's about the size of a football field this is because the signal inside the cable doesn't deteriorate much until you have a very very long cable but radio signals on the other hand 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 for interference. Wi-Fi signals are just blasted everywhere which means that they have to compete with all kinds of evils on their way, the walls, you yourself and other network traffic unlike Ethernet where your device gets one dedicated tunnel 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.

• Collisions (Packet Loss)

Yeah, yeah! I know some you might argue, you 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? True, but Wi-Fi and Ethernet have different strategies for prevention and detection of collisions or packet loss which is exactly what it sounds like when a chunk or a packet of data doesn't reach its destination often times 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 deploys a hold and wait algorithm, in which it introduces a small delay once the path becomes clear the idea is that since a wireless router can't magically detect a collision in midair this delay reduces the risk of collisions but it also adds to more latency and although much progress in Wi-Fi technology have been made over the years it still resembles much old school communications protocols. For instance, it is half duplex meaning that a Wi-Fi gadgets 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 practically being the same this should not come as a surprise to most of you that your Wi-Fi connection always seems just a bit slower even if you do walk around with your smartphone and your router stuck with each other (somehow!). That's pretty much it for now, please let me know if you find this useful and also feel free to check out my other posts on the blog, they are really exciting and can help you with more technological stuff. Also, follow us on our social media handles, subscribe to our newsletter to never miss an update! Thanks!