Real world maximum wifi transfer speeds?

A question out of curiosity, not need or a problem.
It seems to be pretty well known that the fastest internet transfer speeds come through a connection using an ethernet cable, and for various reasons including signal processing overhead, a wifi connection can not reach wired connection speeds.

The question is how do you reach the fastest wifi speed? There appears to be a combination of wifi adapters, routers and routers which result in speed that approach the so-called claimed maximum rates which appear to be unattainable.
Some say that wifi overhead will result in internet wireless speeds that can be no better than half of the wired transfer rates, but is this always the case?
Does anyone really know the hardware and setting combination that leads to really fast wifi, or is this a mystery or a secret?

What you are referring to is local Network speed(Wired or Wireless), not Internet speed.
There is no mystery about it.

The Wireless connection has much greater errors in data transmission which have to be corrected thus a much greater overhead.

What the manufacturers quote is the maximum connection speed both for Wired and Wireless, not the real world data transmission rate.

Real world data transmission rate it is something vaguely like ~90% for Wired, and ~50% for Wireless of the connection speed.

Be careful about your meaning.
In a wired star configuration you'll get 100%.
If you mean to exclude packet overhead and only count the data payload, then 90% is about right.

khl said:

A question out of curiosity...

Last time I got curious I found this....

802.11n - 40-50 Mbps typical, varying greatly depending on configuration....

What is the actual real-life speed of wireless networks ? :: SG FAQ


...and recently got curious again as, until recently, I didn't have a source capable of sending data at a rate where the WiFi would be the limiting factor. Now I do, and without doing anything special get ~45Mbps on 2.4GHz, double that on 5GHz.



(2nd screenshot is a Hyper-V host machine, but despite what it appears to say the virtual switch IS using its WiFi adapter).