With the world moving on to Wifi connections, the more tradional Ethernet connection is losing its importance. But we disagree! Read on to know more.
You might not be able to connect your smartphone to an Ethernet cable, but can you compare the speed of the Internet on your cable-connected laptop to that on your phone? Obviously not. Yes, we all know that Wifi offers the flexibility of walking around with your device all around the house brushing your teeth, making breakfast, and doing all those mundane activities while also simultaneously checking what your friends are up to on Instagram, read the day’s news, and listen to some fresh, wake-up music.
In the traditional Ethernet world, all your activities on the Internet would keep you chained to one that one corner of your house that has the modem, the router, and the laptop/desktop devices. It does hamper mobility, we agree, but here are few of the many reasons we think that an Ethernet connection might just be the right thing for you:
Incomparable speed: The maximum speed that your Wifi connection can achieve is 866.7 Mbps or 150 Mbps, depending on your router standard. While these are pretty numbers, in the real world scenario, you will obviously not be able to achieve such optimum speed on your Wifi router. Behold, the Ethernet! With a cat6 cable, an Ethernet connection has up to 10 Gbps to offer to you. And even if that number won’t be applicable in theory, you still have so much more Gbs to play around with. Imagine the amount of work you can get done with that kind of speed. Even if you have a cat5 cable, it will support Internet speed of up to at least 1 Gbps, which is still way more than what your Wifi connection will ever have to offer. What’s more! The speed delivered by your Ethernet cable is always consistent, which is not the case with a Wifi option. You can check the difference yourself by performing this tiny experiment: transfer a huge file across two computers via Ethernet and you will see that it is much faster than doing it on a Wifi connection. However, the thing to keep in mind is the speed received from your Internet Service Provider. If that speed isn’t great to begin with, the type of connection you are using will cease to matter. To check the speed of your Internet, visit mywifispeed.
Latency issues: Latency is best described as the time taken in transferring signals from the device to their destination. It might not sound like that great a deal, but when you are playing an online game where quick response time is the most important factor, having less latency is always favorable. We do agree that you wouldn’t mind latency issues while streaming videos or downloading content from the Internet, which would be perfectly fine if you are using a Wifi connection. Of course there are other factors that interfere with the latency between your device to the destination device, but you know that having a connection with least latency to begin with helps every bit of the way. Again, we have a small experiment for you that you can perform in order to check the latency in your connection. Open command prompt and type ping followed by your router’s IP address; once while you are connected to the Internet via an Ethernet cable and once over a Wifi connection. The difference in the response time will make the picture clearer.
Reliability: There is no argument when it comes to reliability in this case; Ethernet of course wins hands down! A wireless connection is subject to a lot more interference than a wired one would ever be, don’t you agree with us on this? The location of the Wifi router, interference from other electronic devices, and most of all, interference from your neighbor’s Wifi network (unless you are one of those lucky ones with an isolated home), everything does and will interfere with your Wifi connection. None of these problems will ever have to be faced if you have a wired connection. Unfortunately, because interference cannot be quantified, we will be unable to create an experiment that you can carry out to test it yourself.
In conclusion, having an Ethernet connection rules! But we aren’t entirely against Wifi. The world is using it, and so are we. However, the thing to keep in mind is that a Wifi connection is great only if you need convenience. For everything else, there is an Ethernet connection.