Why is my iPad wifi speed 40 Mb when I get 150 with a wire?

I have virgin wifi, getting 150 Mbps on the laptop through Ethernet but only around 35-40 on my iPad 3 wifi only model, and 40-45 on my iPhone 5s. I've tried changing the wifi channel on the router, am I missing a setting that would speed it up?

Welcome to Mac-Forums..

WiFi will not match the speed of wired, ever..

There are a lot of reasons for this, the most common ones are low signal strength, interference in the WiFi range/bandwidth and re-transmits..

The way to look at WiFi is that you are gaining the flexibility of not being tethered, but if you care about speed and fast transfers, you should go wired if possible.

In the case of iOS devices, that obviously isn't possible, so you live with it..

Going with 802.11N network will help with overall speed. Going with a dual-band router with multiple antennas and ability to boost its transmission power will help with signal strength and in turn, overall speed..

Thanks man, seems a shame losing all those bits, but I'll take it over a wire! Take it easy

I want to expand on part of Ashwin's answer. If you have a network set up that is b/g/n compatible, then the speed of the network drops to whatever the speed of the slowest connected device is. So if you have, let's say for example, an old "b" compatible device on it, then the entire network is at "b" speed.

As he mentioned, setting up either an "N" only or getting a dual-band router eliminates the issue by putting faster traffic on its own band. The new 802.11ac is even faster still.

chas_m said:

If you have a network set up that is b/g/n compatible, then the speed of the network drops to whatever the speed of the slowest connected device is. So if you have, let's say for example, an old "b" compatible device on it, then the entire network is at "b" speed.

Click to expand...

Is that slowdown basically permanent or does it only apply when the slower device is actually using the network? Last time I looked I found conflicting claims. I didn't spend a lot of time working on this since I essentially have the slower devices confined to

Sly, the slowdown is present when the slower device is active on the network, so it's a dynamic switch that happens on the router based on the devices that come and go..

Since I'm entirely wireless in my house, I made darn sure that all of the devices are at least 802.11N and that works well..

That's what I thought happened but I wasn't sure. Some of the comments were really unclear or didn't make a good distinction.

I sometimes find the dual band setup a little confusing. What can I say wireless networking gives me a headache.

Since I had the two wireless devices and the apartment is small enough not to have serious signal issues I put the slower devices on one network, handled by one device, and the N capable devices on the other network.