How much faster my internet connection will be with USB to Ethernet adapter vs USB-C to Ethernet adapter?

Question

Is there any interest to use USB-C in that case. I have fiber internet connection so I don't know if usb-c will make any difference.

Answer 1

The answer depends on the speed of your internet connection, not the speed of the USB-c bus.

The by-now extremely prevalent USB2 bus has a max transfer speed of 480 Mbps. That's already ~53x more than the world's average internet speed of 9.1Mbps. Now where I live fiber is usually faster than that but it still comes no where close to good old USB2's max speed. Let alone the 5Gbps of USB3 and the 10Gbps of USB3-c.

So, it all depends on your internet subscription. Do you have a 1Gbps subscription? Then you must use USB3 or greater to get the most out of it as USB2 simply has too little bandwidth. Do you have less than 480Mbps on your subscription? Then you won't notice a thing with any type of USB port found on any computer made in the last decade or so.

Answer 2

Fundamentally, it depends on a few things:

• The speed of your "Fiber" internet connection (try speedtest.net or similar, or refer to your paperwork)
• The USB to Ethernet adapter you're already using (100 Mb/s or Gigabit?)
• What else your USB tree is doing (e.g: high resolution webcam?)

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All things USB depend on the overall utilisation of the bus. If you are trying to connect a Gigabit Ethernet adapter and a high resolution webcam (for example), then they will potentially be competing for bandwidth. This will either present as lower throughput / frame rates, or as devices "failing" to operate correctly.

A USB 2.0 Fast Ethernet (100 Mb/s) adapter should be able to saturate the Ethernet side without the USB 2.0 side being the bottleneck.

A USB 2.0 Gigabit Ethernet adapter can see real world throughput of around 200 Mb/s (not the full 1000 Mb/s Ethernet throughput), so if your internet connection is less than this, you should still be fine... bus utilization depending.

If your Internet connection is faster than ~200 Mb/s, and you can actually make use of the extra bandwidth, then you may benefit from a better adapter.