Every single device you can use a wire for will help out your entire network just a little bit. Having fewer wireless signals flying around in the air helps to reduce interference, and having fewer devices fighting to use your router’s wireless radios means the line that they’re all waiting in is shorter.
Second, having more devices connected with wires will improve the performance of your wireless devices, too. And lower latency is especially helpful for online multiplayer games, where a momentary hiccup in your connection can make the difference between winning or losing. Higher, more consistent throughput is especially useful if you’re moving large files over your network, uploading and downloading large files, or streaming video. For example, with your computer or game console connected directly to the router, there’s less that can interfere with the signal, and that device doesn’t need to wait in line for your router’s wireless radios like your phone or tablet does. First, for the device you connect to your router with a wire, the speed of your connection will go up, while your connection’s latency will go down. Wires can help with both of these problems. These throughput numbers, from an older version of our networking guide, demonstrate just how much faster a wired connection can transfer data compared with a high-end Wi-Fi 5 mesh network. A newish feature called MU-MIMO (Multiple User, Multiple Input, Multiple Output) tries to address this problem, but your router and a majority of your devices need to support it for it to be useful, and that still isn’t the case for most people. But as you add more and more phones, tablets, computers, streaming boxes, and smart devices to your network, the radios can become overwhelmed, and devices can even lose their connection to the network. With just a few connected devices, the wait times are short enough that you probably don’t notice them. The result is increased latency-the amount of time between when your device makes a request and receives a response-and it’s the likely culprit if a Web page is taking a long time to load.
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Requests to load Web pages or to download files are dealt with in the order they are received, and just as with an overwhelmed call center, this can create delays.
In most cases, each of your router’s wireless radios-most modern routers have two, newer and pricier models sometimes have three, and old routers have one-can communicate with only one connected device at a time. But it has limitations of its own, including a shorter maximum range and difficulty passing through a home’s floors and walls.Įach device you add to a wireless network also needs to compete with every other device on your network for your router’s resources. The 5 GHz band solves some of these problems because it doesn’t need to compete with as many other devices for the same chunk of the wireless spectrum, and it offers higher maximum speeds, too. Especially in a city or a large apartment building, your router’s 2.4 GHz radio might be competing with so many other devices that it just doesn’t work. The 2.4 GHz band has a longer range and is better at traveling through floors and walls, but it has to compete with a ton of other signals that also use the 2.4 GHz band, including other Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth, most cordless phones, microwaves, and baby monitors. Most modern Wi-Fi networks operate on two wireless-frequency bands.
Why does wireless lag behind wired? Wi-Fi’s biggest problems are interference and competition between devices. Because here’s the thing: Wired Internet is almost always faster than wireless Internet. And using wires in your network when it’s possible, even if it’s only on a couple of devices, can also improve performance for your entire wireless network, not just the things that you connect wires to. Wires are reliable and consistent, which is ideal for online gaming or streaming 4K video without buffering.
But there’s still a role for the humble wire to play. Wi-Fi is great-modern routers and mesh-networking kits save you the trouble of running hundreds of feet of cabling through your walls to let your devices talk to each other and share a single Internet connection, no matter how big or weirdly shaped your house is.
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