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Wired LAN connection and USB wireless connection?

squelchy451

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Would connecting my desktop using the usual 10/100 LAN cable and a USB wireless N adapter yield better internet speeds?
 
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No. You use one or the other.
 
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twilyth

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You might be able to bridge the connections, but I'll leave that to one of the network gurus to sort out.

If you have a wireless N router, you might be better off just using the wireless USB connection. It will depend on a variety of factors.

Your cabling might be able to handle data rates much higher then what they are technically rated for, so I wouldn't assume that you're limited to 100baseT. It will depend partly on the cabling and partly on the router.

However even in that case, if your main concern is internet access, that obviously is limited by your ISP. The odds you have something that is 100mbps or higher are pretty slim. But if your main concern is transporting data over your lan, then you should get better than 100mbps speeds over your existing cabling - assuming that the router is rated for higher speeds.

Wireless N speeds also depend on the router and the dongle. Here is a list of the various data rates you can get with wireless N. As you will see from that link, they can vary from as little as 6.5 to as much as 600mbps.
 
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I highly doubt his rig is going to even touch the 100Mbps. 12.5 MBps from an ISP? Get real, I had a 80Mbps cable connection, it wouldn't didn't even make the Ethernet break a sweat. Either one you choose is fine. Bridging may be possible, but yield no real performance from an internet standpoint. I'd have to use the N if you are going to be doing LAN file transfers. If your on a HDD, you won't even come close to flooding that connection. SSD, closer, but I doubt it in any real life situation.
 
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twilyth

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Why then did my data transfer times drop by something close to an order of magnitude when I migrated from 100/10 to gigabit? I see what you're saying about the drive speeds, but I can tell you for a fact that transfers of hundreds of gigs took hours on my Buffalo Airstation and literally took a day or more on my dlink. Thanks. :toast:
 
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Why then did my data transfer times drop by something close to an order of magnitude when I migrated from 100/10 to gigabit? I see what you're saying about the drive speeds, but I can tell you for a fact that transfers of hundreds of gigs took hours on my Buffalo Airstation and literally took a day or more on my dlink. Thanks. :toast:

so you have faster then 100mbps internet connect? (12MBytes per second)
transfering files Via lan are not what this thread is about.

i would go wired 100 over wireless N... wireless shares bandwidth for a start... and its not always going to be 100% signal strength.
 
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Why then did my data transfer times drop by something close to an order of magnitude when I migrated from 100/10 to gigabit? I see what you're saying about the drive speeds, but I can tell you for a fact that transfers of hundreds of gigs took hours on my Buffalo Airstation and literally took a day or more on my dlink. Thanks. :toast:

I assume your speaking about transferring on a LAN? You will see a change with LAN if your NIC is gigabit (on destination PC as well) HDD/SSD speeds are way faster than 12.5MBps. As far as internet speed...don't be silly, unless your rocking some serious interwebz. Even then, whatever your trying to access will probably never allow you to use your bandwidth to its full potential, thus making your 100Mbps speeds fine.
 
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so you have faster then 100mbps internet connect? (12MBytes per second)
transfering files Via lan are not what this thread is about.

i would go wired 100 over wireless N... wireless shares bandwidth for a start... and its not always going to be 100% signal strength.

Correct, Ethernet uses CSMA/CD whereas wireless uses CSMA/CA. Major slow down if you have multiple devices that need to transmit.
 
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twilyth

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I assume your speaking about transferring on a LAN? You will see a change with LAN if your NIC is gigabit (on destination PC as well) HDD/SSD speeds are way faster than 12.5MBps. As far as internet speed...don't be silly, unless your rocking some serious interwebz. Even then, whatever your trying to access will probably never allow you to use your bandwidth to its full potential, thus making your 100Mbps speeds fine.

so you have faster then 100mbps internet connect? (12MBytes per second)
transfering files Via lan are not what this thread is about.

i would go wired 100 over wireless N... wireless shares bandwidth for a start... and its not always going to be 100% signal strength.
I'm not sure why you guys are bringing up internet speeds. Aside from specifying that I was talking about LAN speeds, my original post said in part:
However even in that case, if your main concern is internet access, that obviously is limited by your ISP. The odds you have something that is 100mbps or higher are pretty slim. But if your main concern is transporting data over your lan, then you should get better than 100mbps speeds over your existing cabling - assuming that the router is rated for higher speeds.

edit: I should have added that you also need a gigabit NIC, but I guess on some level I figured that was obvious. Even so, I should have made that clear.
 
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???


this thread has nothing to do with lan transfer speeds as per the OP's post.


for all we know OP only has 1 device connected.
 
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Yes you CAN bridge your LAN and wireless network and will probably see some improvement. I have done it and it did seem to help a bit but, now my net is very fast and don't need to bridge.
 
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Yes you CAN bridge your LAN and wireless network and will probably see some improvement. I have done it and it did seem to help a bit but, now my net is very fast and don't need to bridge.

???

how could this possibly improve his internet connection?

yes he can do it but its useless.



it dosnt mater how big the straw is if the cup is out of liquid.

replace Straw with Ethernet + Wireless and liquid with his internet connection.
 
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???

how could this possibly improve his internet connection?

yes he can do it but its useless.



it dosnt mater how big the straw is if the cup is out of liquid.

replace Straw with Ethernet + Wireless and liquid with his internet connection.

I saw improvement in peer 2 peer file sharing first off.
Also he asked if it is possible and it is possible and it can improve transfers in some scenarios.
 
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"Would connecting my desktop using the usual 10/100 LAN cable and a USB wireless N adapter yield better internet speeds? "


only says internet as far as i can see.




if you could please describe how adding more bandwidth with higher latency will help his internet connection if Ethernet is not being utilized 100%.... if anything it should slow him down due routing over wifi.
 
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I highly doubt his rig is going to even touch the 100Mbps. 12.5 MBps from an ISP? Get real, I had a 80Mbps cable connection, it wouldn't didn't even make the Ethernet break a sweat. Either one you choose is fine. Bridging may be possible, but yield no real performance from an internet standpoint. I'd have to use the N if you are going to be doing LAN file transfers. If your on a HDD, you won't even come close to flooding that connection. SSD, closer, but I doubt it in any real life situation.

Several ISP's here (including my current one) are actually upgrading the whole network to 200MBit, two other large ISP's are aiming at 500Mbit. These are actually obtainable speeds.

As for harddisks, they easily saturate 100Mbit, even if they're 10 years old. MB != Mb.


To answer the OP's question, mostly no. Multithreading can improve bandwidth utilization a bit. But you can do this using a single NIC. Configuring your NICs in the way you propose is impossible, you'd have to mess on the software side. Definitely not worth it.
 
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Several ISP's here (including my current one) are actually upgrading the whole network to 200MBit, two other large ISP's are aiming at 500Mbit. These are actually obtainable speeds.

As for harddisks, they easily saturate 100Mbit, even if they're 10 years old. MB != Mb.


To answer the OP's question, mostly no. Multithreading can improve bandwidth utilization a bit. But you can do this using a single NIC. Configuring your NICs in the way you propose is impossible, you'd have to mess on the software side. Definitely not worth it.

:( australia has only just started building our 100mbps fiber to the home connections, upgrade able to 1gbps however :D (if you has the cash to pay for it)
 
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If you have cash you can get anything of course. Upgrading the 100Mbit networks to anything above 100Mbit basically means hardware is upgraded to 1Gbit hardware. They just limit it for the time being to save their backbone from exploding. In the feature they upgrade other parts and customers will get speeds up to 1Gbit.
 
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our system will be split between 32 homes providing enough bandwidth for 31 to have 100mbps and 1 user with 1gbps.

lowest plan speed is 12mbps. but now where getting off topic :D
 
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Several ISP's here (including my current one) are actually upgrading the whole network to 200MBit, two other large ISP's are aiming at 500Mbit. These are actually obtainable speeds.

As for harddisks, they easily saturate 100Mbit, even if they're 10 years old. MB != Mb.


To answer the OP's question, mostly no. Multithreading can improve bandwidth utilization a bit. But you can do this using a single NIC. Configuring your NICs in the way you propose is impossible, you'd have to mess on the software side. Definitely not worth it.

The only places i've noticed speeds close to that is are college and k-12 networks. I suppose knowing his internet connection speed would have helped answer the question properly. You can't get those kinds of speeds here (unless your filthy rich).

edit: and your right about the hdd speeds, sorry OP, I shouldn't answer questions after my bedtime :eek:
 
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