I have an wireless router, that share wireless but also LAN cable on my computer. My question is if I turn off the wireless signal will it affect the upload/download speed on the LAN cable?
Giving an example:
Wireless On: 3 persons are using the wireless Internet and I test my LAN cable speed:
Wireless Off: 0 persons are using wireless Internet and I test my LAN cable speed:
Wireless radio signals from your router will do not utilize any bandwidth by themselves. Turning off wireless communications if there are no users will not increase your bandwidth. Wireless communications use RTS (Ready--to-Send)/RTR (Ready-to-Receive) signals and are therefore not as efficient as a wired communication, because the device cannot send and receive information at the same time.
The router and the device have to “take turns.” This is why a wired connection to the router will always be better, even if the bandwidth is not particularly higher, the wired connection can make use of more of it. Additionally, wired connections are able to take advantage of what is called full-duplex in which a device can send and receive information at the same time. WLAN connections are half-duplex, in which they cannot send and receive information at the same time.
To summarize, your LAN connections will have more effective bandwidth/utilization than your WLAN (wireless) connections.
My question is if I turn off the wireless signal will it affect the upload/download speed on the LAN cable?
As presented in your example, yes. If—as you state—three people actively using the wireless Internet they are not “magically” connected to a different Internet than your wired LAN. A four (4) users—the three (3) wireless users and the one (1) LAN user in your example—will be sharing that same WAN Internet connection. So it will naturally be slower since they would all be competing for bandwidth.
So when you disable the wireless signal, three (3) users would be knocked off. So whoever remains on the wired network would get the benefit of not having to share that WAN Internet connection with three other users.
But the wireless signals don’t have anything to do with anything unless someone is connected to them and actively using them. So if the wireless was enabled but nobody was connected, you would effectively have the same exact speed as if you disabled wireless since nobody would be using the connections.
