Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so picture this you just wired your desktop PC up to some uber fast internet connection which is like super exciting because surely this will be no more legging out of your favorite games or thrilling skype dates then eager to experience this kind of speed on your laptop or mobile device you buy a fancy looking Wi-Fi router you key in your password your speeds aren't even half of what you're getting with the wired connection what gives well unfortunately Wireless is pretty much always gonna be slower than Wired it's a near universal truth that becomes more and more obvious the faster you try to go even if you spend tons of money on high-end wireless gear but then okay bear with me here because iam waves do move faster through the air then electrons do through a wire so why is it 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 roughly as long as a football field this is because the signal inside the cable doesn't deteriorate appreciably until you have a longer cable run but radio signals 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 meaning they have to compete with walls your roommates microwave and other network traffic you see unlike Ethernet where your device gets one dedicated pipe 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 but okay hold on a second Linus you can 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 yes but Wi-Fi and Ethernet have different strategies to combat packet loss which is exactly what it sounds like when a chunk or a packet of data doesn't reach its destination oftentimes this can occur due to a collision when two devices try to transmit it it 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 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 as it does so it also adds more latency and although many leaps and Wi-Fi technology have been made over the years it still resembles much older school communications protocols in one important way 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 being equal don't be surprised if your Wi-Fi connection always seems just a bit slower even if you do walk around with your smartphone neurotically duct-taped directly to a router please 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