How can my wireless connection be faster than direct cable connection

Question

I have a high speed cable connection. I have it plugged into a Belkin G router.

I noticed that my download speed seems to be faster than direct cable connection via my router.

This does not sound intuitively possibe to me.

Am I just imagining it's faster wirless than direct connection, or is it possible that wirless is faster??

Answer 1

The speed you get from your ISP determines how fast your connection can be, *but* technically speaking your wireless and router internal network *is* faster. Once it hits your router, which then routes it to the proper private IP address on your network, it does become faster for an extremely brief amount of time. But, this has nothing to do with your ISP, and everything to do with your adapter and router speeds.

You see, you can create a network, in your home, which does not have an external Internet connection. What this means is the speed which is provided by the 802.11g router and 802.11g adapter, determines how fast your internal private home network is.

So, transfers from your router to your system can be faster than your Internet speed, and usually is at 54Mbps, compared with a moderate subscription of 1.5 download and 7xx upload from your ISP. So, the packets travels at about 1.5 for a website, but an actual download of a file, (why I do not know) is usually about 150Kbps on average. Why web pages download into the browser far faster than a file is beyond my technical knowledge at this time, it is just true.

When your web page request hit your router it is now using the speed of your router and adapter. *But* this is for an extremely brief moment, perhaps just mere seconds. However, it *is* faster for those mere seconds or nanoseconds. lol

So, your seemingly faster file download speed is in your mind. It is just not possible for you to notice that short of a period of speed increase.

However, when transferring data or multimedia files within your network from system to system your connection speed is faster than your Internet speed. I was once confused on this when I first began learning in winter of '06 about routers, adapters, and network protocols. I once thought the advertised speed on the router and adapter translated to a faster Internet connection speed. I felt really silly when I was telling people this. Not anyone here at Answers, but when I spoke about this with friends and family, then found out I was so wrong. lol

So, yeah, you are imagining that it is faster.

However, there are certain applications which can take better advantage of the bandwidth and speed you signed up for. Firefox is a great example. When I first installed Firefox to see if I would like it better than Internet Explorer I was shocked to discover how much faster pages loaded, and I could browse. Additionally, my downloads are faster. I asked somebody with lots of technical experience why this was, and she explained that due to how light weight Firefox is, how little code is used to create it, that allows for faster browsing and downloads. That Internet Explorer is a heavy browser which hogs a lot of resources, including bandwidth. Makes since to me as I had the proof in front of me every day as I browsed and downloaded files. So, certain applications use less resources and manage what resources they do use in a more proficient manner.

Hope this helps, please have a nice weekend.