Originally Posted By: Russ
Yep, IME wireless is good for about ~50 Mbps while Ethernet is good for 100 Mbps. I keep my laptop wireless radio turned off and use Ethernet exclusively.


Wired Ethernet is good for anywhere between 10 Mb/s half-duplex and 1 Gb/s full-duplex with most laptop NICs. With reasonably recent devices you're most likely going to see 100 Mb/s full-duplex. Those are nominal connection speeds; the switch, cabling and PC will limit actual throughput to 90% (ideally) or much less of the negotiated or configured speed.

Wireless Ethernet tops out at about 250 Mb/s, but that's a rare speed to get. Much slower speeds are more common, down to 1 Mb/s. Most wireless access points share a very limited pool of bandwidth with all connected devices, and don't do that well.

In most home networks wireless and wired speeds are much greater than Internet connection speeds, so which you use doesn't matter from a speed perspective unless your traffic is going between devices on your network, rather than from your PC to and from servers on the Internet.

Wired Ethernet almost always consumes less power. While this is unlikely to matter for your power bill or if you're running a generator, it could easily start to matter if you're running on battery power.