What’s the reason behind wireless being slower than wired? will it ever overtake it?
In: Technology
You know how sometimes someone says something wirelessly (through sound) to you and you didn’t quite hear it because some other sound interrupted them, so they have to repeat it and it takes longer? Like that, but with radio waves. If they could inject their words directly into your head you’d be able to talk a lot faster probably.
There’s also some things like wireless audio that purposely add a delay so that when that happens it doesn’t stutter the music. It can resend the messed up signals again before the lag catches up so you don’t notice that the signals got messed up for a bit.
Wireless communication is like talking to a friend out loud. If you’re in the same room, you can have a normal conversation. If your friend is outside the house, you can still talk to him – you’d just have to yell. If he’s across the street, you’d have to scream at him and maybe at that range, you wouldn’t be able to understand some things he’s saying. Keep going further and not only is your communication slower, but more inaccurate as well. And because of all those misunderstandings, you have to slow down your speed of communication.
Wired communication is like talking on a phone – landline, if you prefer. You pick up the phone and can have a normal conversation regardless where your friend is in the world.
So, at current tech and the foreseeable future, I’d say there’s no way that wireless ever beats wired. Physically, air is just a worse conductor of electromagnetic waves than copper wire and there’s not much we can do to change that. Perhaps in the future, we can communicate through methods that ignore the transfer medium – gravity waves, perhaps? in which case wireless would be fine … but for now, no.
signal integrity, frequency limitations and signal strength.
You get no interference with wires, you can go as high frequency as you want, and signal strength is much higher.
It is less a question of faster/slower than it is about how it connects. A wire gives you a direct path to transmit information and does not require much power, does not get a lot of interference/noise; it has its own road. Wireless requires broadcasting generally and receiving generally, and typically has a road shared with challenges of security, distance, penetrating walls, and interference from other signals broadcasting. Once connected, speeds can be great on either option. Wireless may be capable of equal speeds but suffer from poor signal and therefore feel slower (having to retransmit information or reconnect, etc).
You can get packet loss when some of the data is lost when travelling through a wireless connection
Simple answer.
Wireless signals are kind of a garbled mess. Theres so much that happens between producing a signal and receiving one.
To send something wirelessly, the computer takes your message, turns it into a completed sudoku puzzle (not literally, but it serves my analogy), and sends that. The majority of the puzzle can be lost, but you can still use the remaining data to figure out whats missing. Both ends take effort and time.
Wireless has a lot of redundancies that help, but the quality is so low and theres so much correction going on that it just slows things down. Its not something that can be overcome with better hardware, its a fact of life of sending things wirelessly.
Wired signals are much cleaner. Less junk to interfere.
Be warned this explanation is an oversimplification of concepts that take years of study to properly grasp.
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