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After preferring wired networking connections over wireless for many years, I am now finding out that modern wireless connections could be much faster that wired ones, for internet, TV, etc. Signal strength stability could still be an issue, but that too has improved enormously over the years.

My wired connection over about 100 feet of Cat 5 cable maxes out at about 4 Mbps, but the wireless connection, using a USB dongle with a pair of 6-inch antennas, delivers as much as 120 Mbps. My Amazon Fire stick buffers on the wired connection but not on the wireless, about 50 feet from the router.

I am amazed. Is this the general trend?

In reply to Norm

Is it the same router? Same computer?

Where are you getting the 4 and 120 Mbps numbers from?

What you are reporting is highly unusual, if not impossible, given the same router, PC and broadband connection.

In reply to JohnBull

Same router, same computer, same port on broadband modem, Windows 10.

Linux maxes out at about the same for the wired connection, and about 20 Mbps for the wireless. I am thinking of running 100 feet of Cat 6 cable directly to the computer to see if the throughput will increase.

In reply to Norm

You may see a difference using Cat 6 vs Cat 5 as Cat 6 is designed for higher speeds.

Wired will 100% give you better speed unless you have a bad port on your switch/router. Your posted speeds are weird. You can try switching the port you're plugged into to another as you may have a bad port.

In reply to Norm

Something is wrong with your wired connection. Wireless definitely has gotten more solid...but your wired connection seems very suspect

Cat5 or Cat6 will make no difference, there is something radically wrong here...could be a defective switch port/switch or defective ethernet port on the PC or bad eth driver. All things being equal, wireless throughput will typically be 30-40% of wired in the same network.

And again Norm, where are you seeing the speeds of 4 and 120 Mbps ...on a speed test site or in the mouse-over pop-ups in the network connection icon in the system tray?

The pop-up figures indicate your connection speed back to your LAN switch or WAP. If you want to see your throughput rate you have to visit one of the speed test sites on the web.

In reply to JohnBull

Probably a small one, for long runs (> 200 feet, according to some).

I substituted a usb-to-ethernet adapter, which raised download speeds slightly (from 4 to 6 Mbps roughly), but the upload speeds were still higher.

I use Measurement Lab (M-Lab), through my Chrome browser.

Further research into this odd problem strongly suggests that the VOIP (Magicjack) attached to the same router port is the culprit. The router apparently prioritizes VOIP traffic over other ethernet traffic, by slowing down the others. This article explains it, with a solution.

I will look into it asap.

Problem solved.

Turned out to be a setting under QoS Packet Scheduler->Advanced->Link Speed & Duplex. Set to "Auto negotiate".

Download speed about 96 Mbps now, with 100 Mbps switch. Upload about 12 Mbps. Speeds were much more with a gigabit switch - about 750 Mbps download. So, the Cat 5 ethernet cable did not make much of a difference for the gigabit speed.