[imitchellg5]

I put an Airport Extreme card in my iMac today. I've noticed that the internet is so much faster than it was via Ethernet? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? Of course, the iMac is right next to the router.

[ghporter]

Even right next to the router a wired 100BaseT connection should be at least twice as fast as an 802.11G wireless connection. Check your "built in Ethernet" adapter's settings-there may be something odd about it.

[Simon]

802.11g is 54 Mbps (in reality it's less though), Ethernet is either 100 or 1000 Mbps.

The speed your router connects to your provider is likely below 20 Mbps. The bottleneck between you and the internet is usually your broadband connection and not your local network connection.

[ghporter]

Simon's right, but there should be no reason for either the wired or wireless connection to appear to go at a different speed from the other. The first place to look is the settings for the built in ethernet adapter.

[Sherman Homan]

The wireless connection should be slower than cable and even worse (slightly) with any encryption turned on. However, the reality is that even with hard wired gig ethernet there shouldn't be any perceivable difference because the real bottleneck is your ISP's modem. Very few internet connections (cable, FIOS, DSL) are faster than a G speed wireless card.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

I put an Airport Extreme card in my iMac today. I've noticed that the internet is so much faster than it was via Ethernet? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? Of course, the iMac is right next to the router.

Something else is going on in your setup.
Do the download speed test with both connections and see if there is a difference.

PC Pitstop Tests: Download Bandwidth

There shouldn't. How fast is your broadband downlink speed ?
It might just be perception.

-t

[David Lee]

I have two friends with iBook G4 laptops that swear their machines run faster on wireless than with the ethernet cable. I have had a constant fight to get my Ibook g4 up to speed running Tiger too (see "slow ethernet on iBook g4" thread). The poor speed I had on the internet was mitigated by running BroadbandOptimizer1.5 (download available on download.com) and reducing the MTU to 1488 (DSL ISP related I think). However, there were still issues under Tiger for between machines under file sharing. That was completely solved running Leopard on another machine and copying to the iBook G4 (still running Tiger) so I think there is 1 a problem in Tigers implementation of AFP connections or 2 a problem with the iBook G4s. Your machine may be completely different, but it is posssible that your perception of greater speed on wireless is correct, even if ethernet is faster. If you have the time a little testing should show some interesting results. First try reducing the MTU in the ethernet system preferences pane and test again.
Best regards

[imitchellg5]

Well, Airport has been slower the last day than Ethernet, but just for grins:
My download speed over Ethernet is 8132 kbps. Airport is 5281 kbps.

Also, I forgot that I had just installed Safari 3.1, which is much faster than 3.0.4.