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)

ADSL is often limited by physical quality and length of the cable. Most other connections are limited by ISP's price and sharing strategy. -- Hkmaly (talk) 21:44, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Re: Ubiquity, when I'm at home, I connect to my home wi-fi. When I visit my mother, I connect to her home wi-fi. At my brother's, his home wi-fi. At my cousin's, his home wi-fi. At my buddy's place, HIS home wi-fi. Every bar I go to - like right this second as I post this - THEIR wi-fi. In this day and age everybody I know has internet-enabled wi-fi in their home, as do many businesses. So, that's what I understand by Randall's use of "ubiquity" here. :) Most places we go (at least in big cities like mine) there's some wi-fi available to connect to. NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:30, 21 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. Stephonovich (talk) 18:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

802.11n and 802.11ac are mostly not fully supported, manufacturers use them only as quasi standards for their own solutions often not compatible to others. But modern LTE is faster than 802.11b/g and the real 802.11n standard.--Dgbrt (talk) 19:16, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Note that if your home network is too stable for this effect, try wifi in some restaurant. -- Hkmaly (talk) 21:44, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

To get something to load on my computer, sometimes I have to turn on my phone's wifi hotspot (or tethering). ―TobyBartels (talk) 18:06, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

See https://www.maketecheasier.com/find-best-wifi-channel/#comments. One of the problems is that many WiFi routers have their power set to maximum, which means that they can interfere with WiFi networks at fairly large distances. I also have a suspicion that some ISP providers have misconfigured the routers they supply so that the range of their router looks better even though it causes problems. (They hope that you will blame the problems on someone else.) What I haven't decided is whether this is deliberate or simply due to incompetence and lack of diligence. The indication of this is a large number of networks in the display that won't even get to the point of requesting a password. I have also found that performance varies widely over time. BradleyRoss (talk) 03:02, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Right now the title text's explanation includes "Being "with HBO" would mean being able to stream TV shows made by HBO, notably Game of Thrones, natively rather than relying on piracy or an add-on service to provide them as most online viewers do.". It seems like whoever wrote this is unaware that HBO is an actual TV channel. The title text appears to be expanding on the low quality of the home wi-fi, implying that the wi-fi's internet is from the cable company. A CABLE COMPANY'S package being "with HBO" would simply mean that the CABLE TV channel selection includes that channel, that's all. Nothing about streaming (though people with HBO usually have access to stream it as well, such as with the HBO Go mobile app). And there's nothing "notable" about Game Of Thrones here, that is merely an example of an HBO show, there's no reference or even slight connection to GoT in this comic to make it notable. I'm looking for some consensus here but if there's no change or comments by Thursday night I'll try my hand at fixing it. NiceGuy1 (talk) 09:54, 26 July 2017 (UTC)