In this Letter we present conductance histograms built with thousands
of conductance curves of simulated nanowires, where the conductance va
ries due to the change of the Fermi energy. The results show that inte
rnal disorder in the nanowire leads to a shift in the conductance peak
s in good agreement with experimental results. Our results explain the
origin of the residual resistance used in statistical experiments on
conductance quantization in order to place the observed peaks at integ
er values of 2e(2)/h.