Ethernet vs. WiFi: Why WiFi is Way Zippier

Speedtest: 94 Mb/s on LAN vs. 314 Mb/s on WiFi

This week, I bought a new TV and hooked it up at home. The key differences between this model and the previous ones are changes to the remote control and the new tvOS App Store. I figured hardwiring it, on my LAN, would be better than WiFi. My thinking was two fold. First, I expected less of a chance of interference on a LAN connection, than wireless, and more importantly, I also thought the LAN connection would be faster.

I was half right. Of course there's less of a chance of RF interference, since wired is better than wireless. But my TV sits less than six inches away from my wireless router. Interference is unlikely.

I was also half wrong. Surprisingly, the new TV's LAN connection is Fast Ethernet, not Gigabit Ethernet. That means the LAN connection to the TV tops out at 100 Mb/s. But the Internet pipe into my living room is several times zippier than Fast Ethernet.

As I said nearly two years ago, Common Sense Can Be Misleading. Even simple theories need to be tested.

12/25/2015 Update from an Apple senior software engineer who contributed to the AppleTV:
The WiFi chipsets implement more of the protocol stack than ethernet chipsets (this isn't unique to the ATV by a long shot). Thus, using WiFi consumes *less* of the main CPU than ethernet, which is counter intuitive in that a wire is more reliable and requires fewer re-transmits. This also means that a wifi only device will idle sleep using less power than a wired device (if power management is of great concern).