Solved Ethernet cable vs WiFi

[tonyvella]

I have two laptops in the same room connected by wireless to my cable router. Is there any advantage to connecting them by ethernet cable instead? And if I do use a cable, should I turn off the wireless connection?
Thanks in advance.

 

[johnhoh]

No there is no reason to disconnect wireless in order to use wired, as the win7 default is to prioritize wired if its present. If you find that it does not, you can manually set wired to be a higher priority than wireless by giving it a lower gateway priority metric, by doing this:

1. Start > Run > ncpa.cpl
2. Right click the desired connection adapter
3. Click Properties > Internet Protocol Version 4.
4. Click Properties > Advanced.
5. Un-check "Automatic metric".
6. Enter a number for the "Interface metric".

You might put in 10 for your lan adapter and 20 for your wireless adapter.

Also, an ethernet cable wired connection will have higher speed, less delay, and higher security. To test the difference, transfer a very large file between the two computers using wireless, then using wired. You will see a difference, if you time it. However, since both wired and wireless connections are so fast nowadays, in your day to day use of the internet its very possible that you will not notice a difference at all between wired and wireless. For this reason, I use wireless on my laptop at all times just to avoid the minor hassle of plugging in the ethernet cable.

 

[tonyvella]

johnhoh: Thank you for your reply. I followed your instructions and as you predicted I noticed little difference. Even in visiting websites (Times of Malta, Times of India, La Nación, Buenos Aires) I noticed no difference at all in connecting/opening.
Thanks again. I shall mark this topic as solved.

 

[Alejandro85]

However, since both wired and wireless connections are so fast nowadays, in your day to day use of the internet its very possible that you will not notice a difference at all between wired and wireless. For this reason, I use wireless on my laptop at all times just to avoid the minor hassle of plugging in the ethernet cable.

You're mixing two completely different things here. OP is asking about connecting computers within his LAN, and you're mentioning accessing internet. It's also incorrect that wired and wireless are "so fast", in fact wired always had a big speed advantage over wireless, difference that nowadays is still here (just search for specifications of both).

Switching from wireless to wired will, therefore, have a great improvement in network performance within his LAN. This will be evidenced, as you said, in data transfer between both computers being much faster.

Another completely different topic that you seem to be mixing is internet access. Download/upload speeds depend mainly on the plan contracted with the ISP much more than the LAN speed. Like in all networks, speed is based on the slowest fragment, and the bottleneck is almost always the ISP rather than the local connections. It's also not what the OP asked.

So, while it's true that the switch is unlikely to have an effect in internet speed, it's not due to wired being similar to wireless, but due to the weakest link in the chain, the ISP, remaining unchanged.