Member Avatar for radman2020

I have a direct ethernet connection to my router.. my computer also is enabled for wireless which is active in the house.

should I shut off the wireless...or will it potentially add to the speed of the ethernet connection?

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For : having both Ethernet and Wi‑Fi enabled at the same time will not make a single transfer any faster. As noted, the operating system picks one interface for each outbound flow based on the routing table and interface metrics, so a single TCP connection will travel over one path only. True bandwidth aggregation requires special support (NIC teaming/link aggregation on both ends, or multipath protocols) and is not automatic on a typical home PC + router.

's warning about a "link‑back" issue is on point but needs a bit of clarification. Problems happen if the PC is set up to bridge the two adapters (Windows Bridge, Linux bridge) or if the network equipment cannot cope with the same MAC appearing on wired and wireless ports; that can cause MAC table flapping or, in the worst case, broadcast storms on gear without Spanning Tree. Static IPs duplicated on both interfaces can also cause address conflicts.

Practical guidance:

  • Disable Wi‑Fi when on a stable wired connection to reduce interference, battery drain, and attack surface.
  • Prefer Ethernet by lowering its interface metric (Windows: Network Connections -> Advanced Settings or set manual metric; Linux: check ip route and set interface metric via NetworkManager/ifmetric; macOS: adjust Service Order in Network prefs).
  • Verify which interface is used with route print (Windows) or ip route / netstat -nr (Linux/macOS).
  • Do not bridge the wired and wireless adapters on the same subnet unless the switch/router supports STP or link aggregation.

For higher throughput on large local transfers, use wired Gigabit links or properly configured link aggregation on switches and NICs. For redundancy, multi‑homing to different networks/gateways is useful, but it requires deliberate routing and configuration.

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Member Avatar for hughv

It won't add anything, but it won't hurt, especially if it's encrypted.
If you don't use it, turn it off.

Member Avatar for arnoldb

If you are referring to having both connections between your PC and your Wireless Router active then no, you really shouldn't do that. You could bridge them to create a link with more throughput but in a home environment I'm sure you won't be generating enough traffic to fill the 100Mbit ethernet connection.

Having both connected could cause a link-back type of issue that would slow your network performance tremendously. It's rare with home routers but can happen.

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