WiFi using more bandwidth than Ethernet?

My dad seems to be convinced that a wireless connection to the router will use more bandwidth than a wired connection whereas I'm not so sure.
His reasoning is that wireless connections have more address information contained within each packet. While the reasoning seems sound to me, I have trouble convincing myself that the extra information gets sent beyond the connection between the computer and the router; that is to say that the information never passes through the modem or the ISP to be recorded as bandwidth used. What do you guys think?

 

Wireless transfer has a higher probability that the data might get lost or miss their expected timing such that the wireless client has to call for a retransmit last request.

 

The OP's question is whether this has any impact regarding his internet bandwidth usage. In short i'd say the impact is completely negligible if there is even an impact to begin with, but i'm taking a blind shot on this one.

If i had to take a guess though, i'd say the information that you are getting from the internet will get stored for a short while in the router's RAM and that if you loose a packet it will be taken from the router's memory rather than downloaded again or if you prefer that everything network related is handled by the router alone and has no impact on your internet bandwidth usage.

If you father is concerned about going over your monthly bandwidth cap, then going wired over wireless instead of changing your download habits is a very ridiculous way to go about it. I'm just guessing on the situation here though.

 

I asked my cat and she said you're correct (one meaw ... )

 

My thoughts exactly.

His theory is that it may take a relatively larger amount of addressing information to transmit a relatively smaller amount of actual information. That is to say that of every X bytes of information transmitted, only Y bytes of pertinent information is actually transmitted where Y is significantly less than X. The rest of the packet is additional information that was added by the router and/or computer for communication between the two. As a result, more bandwidth is used than actual pertinent information transmitted.

However unlikely, I can accept that it's possible that the transfer of information is as inefficient as he argues. What I can't agree with is that it affects the bandwidth as I can't see this additional information tacked on by the router/computer being recorded by the ISP.

Nah, this is a completely theoretical analysis. There's no concern about actually going over as he's the only one who uses it. My mom doesn't really go online much.

 

I was thinking of possible packet loss or the payload comes way too late.

Depending on what protocol cause the client to send a retransmit request often until it reaches the expected sequence.

I never seen a router that stores a copy of the payload in memory in case of the client calls for a retransmit.

That is a significant huge performance hit if it does.

Router's ram are usually used to maintain routing information and as a queue buffer. Once its out of the queue, it's gone.

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Anyways, you can test it by loading on Wireshark on the wired and the wireless client.

Look at the behavior of how often it does request to certain parts.
(Don't remember if Wireshark can pickup the Wireless padding)

I forgot what was the minimum size of each packet has to be (20 bytes/ipv4?)

And I suspect my reading comprehension is failing.

 

@aznpos531

There is additional payload where local Wi-Fi transfers are concerned due to -data and re-transmissions however when the actual data reaches the router and is routed to WAN there's exactly the same amount of it that it would be if you used an Ethernet cable.