WiFi or Ethernet?

I'd say stick with WiFi if you have good network speed on it.

It wouldn't increase your download speeds from the internet, but it may well affect your transfer speeds between the tv and the ma/pc running itunes.

In theory wifi is the fastest, the tv is able to use dual band 5 Ghz settings in 'n' mode and achieve transfer speeds of 270/300 Mbps.

More usually people will use 2.4 Ghz in either 'n' mode (144 Mbps), mixed mode (130 Mbps) or 'g' mode 54 Mbps, which are all easily compared to ethernet at 100 Mbps.

Ethernet is more stable and distance can easily reduce the efficiency of wifi, making the answer to which is fastest depend very much on each application of the network.

I have tv's running on ethernet, 'g' and 'n' and don't notice much difference between any of them.

Jim Dever wrote:
Winston -

Thanks for your reply. I have to run in "G" because some nodes on my network only support "G".

You could run a mixed mode. 'g' devices will act as normal but 'n' devices while they won't run at full 'n' speeds they will be faster than 'g'

So if I connect my ATV to my Apple router via ethernet, will I get 100 mbps downloads from the router to ATV regardless of my WiFi speed?

That's a theoretical maximum, as are all the other quoted speeds, generally though you can rely on ethernet whereas efficiencies of wifi networks will vary.

You can likely get close to 100 Mbps between your router and your tv, but between itunes and the tv it will depend on what type of connection you have between the mac/pc and the router.

I've been working on this issue at my house for about a month. I just bought a the netgear wireless n router with gigabit ethernet today and plugged it in. I've got 2 apple tvs in different locations in the house.

Caveats:
1) Apple TV supports 10/100 ethernet, not gigabit and it supports wireless n.
2) Though I have the router set to max n throughput, my macs say the wireless link speed is 130Mbit/s.... so maybe I have a setting wrong.

I just did a timed test pushing a 3 GB movie over to the AppleTV from one of my macs, once wired and once wireless.

Wired: 4 min 49 sec.
Wireless: I stopped it at 13 min at about half way done. Before I had the wired network setup, it would take between 30-60 min to transfer a 3-4GB file.

Based on my experience, I'd punch the hole.

sorry, in my description below, when transferring, i was hooking the mac into the wired network vs going wireless. The AppleTV was hooked into the gigabit ethernet for both trials.

Tomorrow, I'll try where the mac is hard wired and switching the AppleTV between ethernet and wireless n.