Talk:1865: Wifi vs Cellular

I'm not sure it applies in my country. While I have access to cellular internet that is somewhat faster than my home wifi, it is not nearly as reliable for important downloads and definitely several magnitudes costlier when it comes to, say, a Gigabyte of data. Xenos (talk) 05:39, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Heck, it doesn't even apply in my area of the US (rural Maine). We have no cellular connection at all (well, if you stand at a window at the farthest end of the house, sometimes you can make a call), and the Internet connection for our computers is so slow that upgrading a new-to-me laptop to Windows 10 last week took 36 hours. Now I'm trying to add several thousand jpg images to my Google Drive; that takes about 75 minutes per 100 photos. While they're uploading I don't dare visit any other website. Something about keepalive pings not being able to get to the modem, which then shuts down the link altogether. MaineGrammy (talk) 08:59, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Panamax is probably a reference to 1632. 172.68.10.88 09:51, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure that home wifi was even a thing that could be used widely by the public in the early 2000s. OldCorps (talk) 15:06, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Apple's AirPort was introduced in 1999. So while it may not have been used widely, it was in use at my house. The graph mentions reliability, not ubiquity. Neopanamax (talk) 15:27, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough. I wasn't talking at all about reliability, I genuinely didn't know home wifi was available that early. OldCorps (talk) 17:18, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

The explanation says something about ubiquity, which seems odd in relation to HOME wifi - either you have it or you don't. The performance issue Randall mentions might be the WiFi itself, or might be down to the network; it's common for broadband solutions to be marketed as "up to", while never achieving close to the advertised speed (either through sharing the connection or range-related drop-off). Case in point, I have an ancient (~2004) ADSL connection that was supposed to be 8Mbit/s, and barely reaches 2; my home wifi (which as it happens I've just updated) isn't the sticking point - the upstream connection is. At some point I'll go optical and fix this, but my ADSL router is currently doing complicated things with IP translation and a fix isn't a trivial drop-in. I can't be the only one with iffy home data. Meanwhile, my cell phone's connection has healthily outperformed my ADSL from the moment it went 4G; I'm actively annoyed that my cell provider recently added a 12GB cap on tethered data, because operating system updates are appreciably faster if I link to my phone. Cellphone connections do have to share the available bandwidth across more users, but on the other hand they're less likely to suffer interference and poorly-implemented devices. Fluppeteer (talk) 18:43, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

802.11n can go up to 600 Mbps, and the routers and cards that support it are very reasonably priced with the advent of 802.11ac. That's not to say that LTE isn't sometimes faster, but it's disingenuous to suggest that WiFi is always slower now.[[User:Stephonovich|Stephonovich}} (talk) 18:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)