Topic: Wired internet speed LESS than wifi (help?)

I bought the Nintendo USB ethernet dongle because my wifi router is too far away from my U to get good signal. My wired speed was crap, so I temporarily moved the wifi within 6' of the U just for testing. Using www.testmy.net here are my results:
Linksys Wireless-N gigabit router: 10.2 mbps
Wired USB thing: 5.4 mbps
(I have Time Warner cable with supposed 30 mb download)

1. Why on earth would Nintendo's wired USB device be worse than wireless? Crappy drivers? Who do I complain to at Nintendo?
2. Any solution?

EDIT: BTW this is the USB device I'm talking about: http://store.nintendo.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...

My only thought (mind you i dont have one), is that because the ethernet adapter goes through a USB port that it slows down the top speed.

The USB adapter may be USB 1.1, not USB 2.0.

I had one but stopped using it because I needed both of the USB ports on the back for an external HDD. When I tested it away from the Wii U I was getting at least 50Mbps using iperf over my local LAN and that was over powerline which didn't go over ~50Mbps anyway. I'd test it again but I don't know where it went.

I think it might be worth testing a few times and testing on other machines, it might be your internet connection. It could also be the way the Wii U handles that particular speedtest website, I know of other one where it was telling me 0.5Mbps. Either way both of those above numbers seem odd and I wouldn't pay too much attention to them. They're probably not measuring what you think they're measuring.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/wi-fi-vs-ethernet-has-...

If you really want a wired connection, I think there are outlet relays you can use.
My router is like 3 ft. away from my Wii U, and it gets 6.4 mb/s average.

four things SCAR
1. People do more with their LAN than simply connecting to the internet
2. This thread is about the Wii U's options and so 802.11ac, 5Ghz radios and Gigabit are not on the table
3. There are more ways to measure performance than simply average throughput
4. Unless you've got a really bad connection generally, which the OP doesn't, the bottleneck will be on Nintendo's side

I was trying to imply that a wired connection doesn't really enhance performance in this case. I looked into a LAN connection as well since my devices are so close, and wired actually made things worse on 1 of the devices I had, and wireless can connect to more than one thing at a time as well.
I didn't get a LAN connector for my Wii U because of articles like that.

My A/V receiver has LAN(for Sony Entertainment Network, Pandora, etc. internet radio), and it didn't work as well over LAN as it did wireless.

Another issue might be the length of the cord. I think that every 6 feet or something creates lag in a connection or something like that. That's how it is for speaker wire anyway. Wireless can allow more freedom of the bandwidth in some cases, because it isn't restrained to the threshold of a wire.

EDIT: Also, it depends on the cords your using. http://compnetworking.about.com/od/broadband/f/modeminterface...
Ethernet by itself is fine, but that USB part of the chain cuts off speed.

I would either get the router closer, or just deal with the ethernet/usb speed if you can't get the router closer.
I don't have anything besides the phone and power cable hooked up. Everything that uses internet is wireless in my house.

Wireless isn't better and the more devices you have using wireless the worse it performs. If that's not the case for you then your router is buggered and you should probably get a new one. Sitting here at my desk with a good 10m of cable I can get 800Mbps solid real world throughput, <1ms ping and just general snappy responsiveness. With a very good wireless adapter (not ac but still dual-band n) with one brick wall I get 1-2ms pings and 80Mbps. That's with a good adapter, I have some non-dual-band adapters (which are pretty common) which do closer to 30Mbps from that distance. iPads and more portable devices for example.

So you're basically talking nonsense... but as I said this thread isn't about wireless vs wired in general (where wired will ALWAYS win unless mobility is important) it's actually about the Wii U. Where it's tied because it doesn't really make a big difference given how undemanding it is and how many other bottlenecks there are.

[edit]
oh, and before you go all "solid brick wall" on me. No, with one brick wall and the distance I'm from it I've tested it. It's about as good as I get with my router and most of the house has more distance (and walls) to the router. It's basically best case. Also I'm in the outer suburbs of Perth so there isn't much interference at all. Other than my router I can only see one other access point and it has a very weak signal. So bam

@skywake
So I SHOULD buy an ethernet to usb for Wii U? Like I said, I was considering it, but I just didn't see much benefit with the speed I have in the first place.
According to you, I would get less lag going wired, but faster speed as wireless.
So latency is the real difference.
An ethernet connection at 10mb/s, is better than a wireless connection at 10mb/s.

That would mean a wireless speed that is faster by 14.28% in comparison to the wired connection is equal. So a wireless connection that is about 11.4mb/s is equal to a wired connection of 10mb/s.
That would make sense, wouldn't it?
There's still alot at play, because if the cord isn't responding to the speed tests as fast as wireless, wouldn't that be better off since he's gaining 50% more speed over wireless?

EDIT: Also, I looked at USB speeds, and USB 1.1 maxes out at 12mb/s, while 2.0 maxes at 480mb/s. USB uses the CPU instead of the wireless signal hardware(which is what the USB 1.1 to ethernet adapter is). So the Wii U CPU is probably cutting the speed in half so it can keep it CPU at a regular use level it would have when by using the included wireless hardware.
Latency still comes into play. So the question is speed vs. latency. It just proves both are better in different ways, as far as the USB goes.
As far as we know, the speeds are the exact same. The number isn't there, but it could very well be just as fast.
That 5.4 on the speed test is in exactly the same ratio as USB 2.0 compared to ethernet.
480mb/s over USB 2.0 compared to 1000mb/s over ethernet. Narrow that down to 4.8/10.
10.2 - 4.8 = 5.4, coincidence?

Wow, lots of information.
Would you guys mind posting what your Wii U test speeds are, connection method, and the testing site you used? My wired USB is consistently posting half the speed of wireless which seems really goofy.

EDIT: BTW this is the USB adapter I'm talking about: http://store.nintendo.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...

With my wireless, I'm getting only about 7Mbps tops, but the adapter I've used is probably about 3Mbps. I can understand the adapter if it isn't USB 2.0, but my internet connection is a good 30Mbps minimum. Even my S3 Galaxy reaches that speed when within 10 feet of my router, and my Wii U is sitting within 3 feet of it. Maybe it's the Wii U forcing a limit, or maybe it's my router (it is decently old but works nonetheless)

The is the speed test Nintendo officially recommends: http://www.speedtest.net

You have to check it with your PC. I was getting 6.74 with my PC, and 6.4 with the Wii U. They are both wireless.

Everyone in my house uses wireless and there are about 3 other computers on right now, as well as smart phones and other thing connected. We have a dualband N/G router so we use N on the devices that support it, and G for everything else. However it doesn't affect the Internet speed because it's not fast enough to take full advantage of N anyway, lol. However with transferring files locally over the network (or streaming from one device to another), N has a noticeable speed increase. ANYWAY..

Laptop wireless: 13 ms ping, 14.63 Mbps download, 1.63 upload
Laptop wired: 12 ms ping, 14.93 Mbps download, 1.62 upload
Wii U wireless: 15 ms ping, 14.30 Mbps download, 1.62 upload

I don't have the LAN adapter for my Wii U so I can't test the speed wired, but from what I'm seeing my Internet speed/latency seems pretty consistent whether it's wired or not.

When I turned off every device using the Internet in my house, I got about 30 down, 2 up, and 9-10 ms ping for everything. The router is about 15-20 ft away (I'm not good with estimating distances so it may be closer or further..who knows), and the connection is going through one wall. I don't know if this will be helpful to any of you but I figured I might as well post my results

@PloXyZeRO
Those are pretty good speeds. That just means it's what service you have.

The culprit of slower speed records for the OP is probably the USB 1.1 LAN adapter, but I would bet he's still getting the 10.2mb/s recorded as wireless. It either can't record his speed through USB, or the USB is actually slowing it down, but again, I'm betting it just can't convert the actually performance from USB to ethernet.
Technically, any speed up to 12mb/s is supported by USB 1.1, but that doesn't apply when you're converting it from ethernet, because they are different cords to begin with.

So the only speed being lost by the USB adapter is how long the USB cord is, and how long it takes to convert the ethernet format to USB, if that even applies. The USB adaptor is connected straight to the CPU just as much as the wireless transmitter within the Wii U. In this case, I would say wireless is just as good as wired. The figures are just different.

@OP
I would test what speed you get from wireless and wired by actually downloading something. It could very well be identical in performance, but the numbers are different, if that makes any sense.

Just to put this thread to bed I dusted of my Wii LAN adapter and plugged it into an old laptop, ran iperf on my local LAN. No barriers at all with the laptop sitting ontop of my Wii U.

Wii LAN adapter:
93/21Mbps when doing a simultaneous bi-directional test. Pings at <1ms with 0% packet loss. Minimal variation.

Native 100Mbps LAN:
93/23Mbps when doing a simultaneous bi-directional test. Pings at <1ms with 0% packet loss. Minimal variation.

Wireless g (less than the Wii U):
~32/8Mbps when doing a simultaneous bi-directional test. Pings at ~3ms with 0% packet loss. Quite a bit of variation in speed and latency.

[edit: dualband N600 test (eg, better than the Wii U]
87/5Mbps simultaneous, 4ms pings, no packet loss, less variation than g

But as I said earlier the Wii U uses non-dual-band n, which I could test but can't be bothered, and is usually bottlenecked by other factors. In general wired should be better but in this scenario, because we're talking internet sharing only and it or Nintendo's side is the limiting factor before this will be an issue, there's only a small practical difference. One thing is clear though, the Wii U LAN adapter is NOT limited by its interface. Also SCAR's posts in this thread are full of it.

@skywake
How are my posts full of? You still didn't answer the real question that anyone had, which is why he's getting a slower connection through the LAN vs. wireless.
There are some cases where a numerical value can't be assigned, because the process that something operates could be completely different than what you're comparing it to.

That just leads me to my original point that having wired over wireless doesn't matter for anything under 12mb/s, and anything over that can't be directly measured(wirelessly), because there is no cord to observe.

EDIT: Do you think that an ethernet connection of 10mb/s is faster than a wireless connection of 11.4mb/s?

Read my first post and read my actual measurements of the sort of hardware we're talking about here. Those measurements measure the differences between them. So no the LAN adapter isn't USB1.0, it isn't limited to 10Mbps and the Wii U doesn't have a CPU bottleneck because one of the machines I used for those tests was an ATOM. Wired is empirically better.

However I don't think it makes a huge difference in the case of the Wii U. I have said this multiple times in this thread if you bothered to read them trying to answer the "real question" as you put it. There are bigger bottlenecks than the type of adapter you use. Your internet connection and Nintendo's servers for a start. Maybe they have some firmware bug that makes the LAN adapter perform horrendously for some unknown reason. Maybe the sites people are using to test it don't work very well with the WIi U browser.

Whatever the bottleneck it's not the LAN adapter because, as I have shown, it performs no worse than 100Mbps LAN which is better than even fairly decent 802.11n.

If that wireless connection varies in the way that wireless does and is sometimes 13Mbps, sometimes 9Mbps and has pings that vary between 1ms and 5ms then probably yes. In general though that's not the choice. The choice is usually 100Mbps LAN or even Gigabit vs some variation of 802.11n. However if you're getting 10Mbps solid on wired your bottleneck isn't LAN vs WiFi and probably won't make a huge difference.

With the Wii U I don't use the LAN adapter because those USB ports on the back are valuable. For every other device that's sitting in the same cabinet I do and for local traffic, streaming over my LAN not the internet, I notice a large difference vs WiFi or Powerline adapters. If possible and practical always go wired.