A few years back the world of wireless networking hit the mainstream. Originally used in situations where running cables were too expensive or not possible many people starting using them in their homes to avoid having to run cables all over the house. Not being very handy ourselves we cannot really blame people, it beats the alternative of either cutting holes in your walls or leaving cables laying all over your carpet. If you just use your home or work network for browsing the web in most cases going wireless is just fine. There are 3-4 primary drawbacks to using a wireless connection for your network, reasons why we still recommend sucking it up and running the cable.

The performance problems come in when you want to start moving large files around, play games, or have an unreliable signal. Wireless has not and doubtfully will exceed the speed and reliability of a physical cable. There are also security and cost issues to keep in mind. While we understand if you live say in an apartment, an old home, or an office where you cannot easily run cables wireless may be your only option, we want you to think a while before committing to it simply because it is the easy and quick solution. Below are 3 such reasons to give it a second thought.

Security
The first and most obvious reason we prefer physical cables to wireless connections is security. When you use wireless connections all of your personal data, connections to your computer, and any files you may be storing are all wide open for people to access. Sure you can secure your wireless but it isn’t 100% secure and for the most part the vast majority of people never actually do this step properly

Speed
Even with all the advancements to wireless connections they are still far slower than a standard cable connection. Even the old style standard category 5 cable will move data at 100Mbs and the fastest wireless available to most people is just 54Mbs. Again, if all you do is browse the internet, do some emailing and downloading this is more than enough. However, if you want to move large files around, say backup your files to another computer, download movies, or anything else like that you will be sorely disappointed how long it takes. For example, we recently updated our laptop to Windows 7, we wanted to do a fresh install so we had to back everything up, roughly 60GB, it took the entire night!

Reliability
Because wireless connections are just that wireless they are unpredictable. Certain factors can interfere with the quality of your connection, maybe your neighbor just got their own wireless and it is on the same channel as yours for one simple example. Nothing is more frustrating than losing your connection, or having to stay in a certain area of your home or office to stay connected. If you want to see something really frustrating how about losing your connection in the middle of a large download or file transfer and having to start over! You almost never have to worry about these sorts of issues when you keep your network using cables.

Of course this post is sort of one sided but other than being able to use your laptop outside on the porch there really isn’t that many reasons why we like wireless in situations where it isn’t totally necessary. To be honest you could always install a network outlet outside if you want to have internet that bad, we did.