Interesting… the new Mac mini is the only device in the house that is connected both via Ethernet and WiFi.
Possibly significant: Wifi is an Eero mesh.
So I fired up SpeedTest and discovered…
The answer is “No different”.
Now, the Ethernet goes through the Eero base station to get to the ISP modem, but I checked and it isn’t slowing things down. On a Sunday evening (probably lots of people in the neighborhood online) we were getting 310 down, 15 up.
What’s actually interesting is the Ethernet is 25-year-old Cat5, I was wondering if that’d be able to keep up with the reasonably-modern Eero mesh.
@timbray
I guessed "no difference", mostly because if the answer were the obvious one (wired faster), you wouldn't have had the poll.
The detail that your bottleneck for both is your ISP makes this result fairly obvious. I suspect for local networking (to a file or media server), even your old cat5 can push 1Gbps, and your modern wifi between 200 and 800 Mbps (depending on location and random factors. I usually blame sunspots.).
