Wifi and Wired Port Speeds

[tekkiddo]

When looking to purchase a new wireless router, I am confused about wifi and wired port speed specifications. For example, one dual band wireless router boasts 300 Mbps for 2.4Ghz wifi band and 433 Mbps for 5Ghz wifi band but its WAN and LAN ports are only 10/100Mbps (non-Gigabit). So if the broadband speed coming into the WAN port is limited to 100Mbps, then what's the point of having a wifi speed which is so much higher than this?

 

[Anonymouselite5]

Well having such high wifi transfer speeds is meant for if you sync files over wifi, or send gigabytes of data over your wifi.
Say if you have your own server you could back up all your pc's to it at once over wifi and sync your phones over wifi.

Also your broadband is limited to 100mb because of the system you obviously can never download 100mb per second from a normal server (unless fibre or like next door cable). So the wifi has it's purpose but the cables do not need to be as fast.

 

[bill001g]

For the same reason you see everything in the store marked "new and improved". You have marketing guys involved rather than the engineers.

The marketing guys would call call a 100m ethernet port 200m because it can transmit 100m and receive 100m at the same time. They would say since it has 4 lan ports and each can run 200m than makes it a 800m router...right?

It is the same reason they call routers 600m and then in the small print say 300m+300m because they know they would be outright lying to say a single machine can use both radios.

So those 300m/433m numbers are total bandwidth both up and down. Unlike wired this is shared between all the clients. You would be very lucky to get 100m of actual data transfer on ether of these.

 

[tekkiddo]

Well having such high wifi transfer speeds is meant for if you sync files over wifi, or send gigabytes of data over your wifi.
Say if you have your own server you could back up all your pc's to it at once over wifi and sync your phones over wifi.

Also your broadband is limited to 100mb because of the system you obviously can never download 100mb per second from a normal server (unless fibre or like next door cable). So the wifi has it's purpose but the cables do not need to be as fast.

Thanks for the explanation. Good for a simple internet user like myself to know other things one can do with the wifi router other than just straight internet access.

 

[tekkiddo]

For the same reason you see everything in the store marked "new and improved". You have marketing guys involved rather than the engineers.

The marketing guys would call call a 100m ethernet port 200m because it can transmit 100m and receive 100m at the same time. They would say since it has 4 lan ports and each can run 200m than makes it a 800m router...right?

It is the same reason they call routers 600m and then in the small print say 300m+300m because they know they would be outright lying to say a single machine can use both radios.

So those 300m/433m numbers are total bandwidth both up and down. Unlike wired this is shared between all the clients. You would be very lucky to get 100m of actual data transfer on ether of these.

Yes, seems like a lot of these don't live up to any where near their claims.