What are the advantages and disadvantages of wireless vs. wired networks?
Each medium has its own characteristics and advantages. The biggest advantage of a wireless network is that it does not require cabling and can be implemented quickly. The disadvantages are the networking equipment is more expensive and there can be problems with reception and range depending on the type of building materials in your home or apartment. There is all the matter of speed or throughput. Wireless technology is currently limited to a maximum speed of 11 Mb/s for the 802.11b standard and 54 Mb/s for the 802.11a standard (which also typically has more limited range and a higher price for the equipment). For many applications, most notably Internet connection sharing, this is plenty of speed, especially given that most broadband connections are currently in the 1 – 3 Mb/s today. Wired networks do not have this speed limitation. Out of the box, wired networking equipment (Ethernet cards, Ethernet switches) have a speed of 100 Mb/s. The same cable (CAT5e) can already support 1,00
