Wire or Wireless - which is faster?

Interesting question.

All things being equal, which is faster.

I have someone telling me that his wireless laptop goes faster than his Destop accessing the internet using his DSL line.

Knowing that the internet goes at about 10 Mbs (if I am not mistaken).

How can a wireless connection (even with optimum setup 802.11g running at 54Mbps) beat out a wired connection running at 100 Mbps?

Now, I could see it if it were competing against a card that was running at 10Mbps.

Just curious.

I don't think that can be true in any case. Wireless links will always be of lower quality than wired mediums and will yield lower performance and reliability. If there was an exception, that would be because of exceptionally bad equipment -though all of today's fast ethernet adapters I have tested are decent- or exceptionally bad medium -such as an abused or oversized UTP cable.

Did he present you with any statistics or he simply speaks from his own "real-life" experience? And what exactly was that pointed to what he considered lower performance (i.e. larger ping-reply delay, lost packets, etc.)?

I agree. I have both connection methods available on my laptop and the wired connection is definitely snappier. And the more distance I put onto the wireless connection the jerkier it gets.
One thing I noticed though - "I have someone telling me that his wireless laptop goes faster than his Destop accessing the internet using his DSL line". That means there are two different machines here, so it's not a fair test. The laptop might have a faster board or the desktop might have a bloated registry or precious little disk space

I agree.

I was talking to a friend who used to work at Microsoft, and he mentioned that "if wireless were faster - why would all the people at MS that had laptops immediately plug in a wire if it was available?"

Just trying to get other opinions.

I also agree . Because, i have both desktop & wireless laptop. While i m working with desktop and via wireless . i can able know abt the different. But, wireless cost very high.

"if wireless were faster - why would all the people at MS that had laptops immediately plug in a wire if it was available?"

if wireless was indeed faster, that would make some extra sense though :lol:

-- j/k