Wireless transfer speed difference - wired desktop to wifi laptop vs wifi laptop to wired desktop?

Plexman · 28 May 2016 at 17:11

Hi all,

My router is a linksys EA6900

My desktop is wired to the router and my laptop running wireless (intel ac 7260 card connected at 866Mbps)

File transfers from the desktop to laptop get 65MBps
File transfers from the laptop to desktop only get 40MBps

Is this normal or should they be the same?

bremen1874 · 29 May 2016 at 03:08

There are many reasons why a wireless connection could be slower than a wired connection. It's to be expected.

If you want a real comparison try the same laptop with both wired and wireless connections.

If you want sensible answers you need to mention what you're measuring, and how you're measuring it. Also make sure you do know the difference between MBps and Mbps.

Plexman · 29 May 2016 at 12:18

I think you may have miss read my post.

I'm comparing my wireless speeds in both directions. Router to laptop vs laptop to router.

If I wire the laptop I get 110MBps both ways.

I'm transfering files via windows shares.

bledd · 30 May 2016 at 09:12

If you disable Defender/AV, does this affect the speed at all?

Wireless is a wild beast.

paradigm · 30 May 2016 at 09:48

Difference in underlying storage read/write speeds?

bledd · 30 May 2016 at 10:06

^No, he says when it's connected via ethernet, he gets full gigabit speeds both ways.

asim18 · 30 May 2016 at 18:31

Plexman said:
File transfers from the desktop to laptop get 65MBps
File transfers from the laptop to desktop only get 40MBps

There's another vector you need to consider. The machine used to initiate the transfer is important. Try transferring from laptop to desktop from the desktop as well as from the laptop because sometimes you may get a difference in speed depending on what machine the actual transfer is initiated on because that is what determines which machine is the client and which one is the server, it's not simply about what direction the file is going.

This is because the client makes requests and the server responds to them, when you're testing both ways using SMB shares, either of the systems can act as a server or client. So a transfer from desktop to laptop initiated on the desktop is different to a transfer from desktop to laptop initiated on the laptop.

It sounds like the laptop's WiFi or the Wireless Access Point is not good enough in a certain direction where it needs to process lots of requests for new data at the same time it's processing the the received packets.