Having additional wireless competition will improve the quality of the wired options. They've been able to skate along in near-monopoly conditions for too long.
It's not appealing at all. No matter which 'g' it is, wireless will never beat wired. It's simple physics. Wired will always be higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more reliable - less dropouts and more consistent speed.
Wireless is already a 'good enough' wired replacement for areas where running fibre is uneconomical, though.
> While there are physical limitations to what wireless can do, over the last decades we've had groundbreaking research which repeatedly has increased the BW available to wireless systems by orders of magnitudes.
And they have been outpaced by the bandwidth improvements on wired networking.
Why settle for some increase in speed (maybe, assuming you don't have signal quality problems – which only grow worse as adoption increases), when you can have a much larger increase in speed (guaranteed)?
Sure, wired doesn't always make sense: Anything that can be sensibly battery powered is a candidate for wireless connectivity. But if you're stringing wires anyway, why not use much more reliable wired networking while you're at it? We're putting power delivery into Ethernet and USB, and Ethernet into HDMI, so we're increasingly not even needing additional wires.
Going wireless used to be the luxury of those who were ahead of the technology curve and had access to a healthy budget. Fortunately, wireless technology has matured to a point where pricing is comparable to wired alternatives. Here we examine the evolution of two technologies that highlight some of the many advantages of going wireless.
Wireless is probably good enough. Wired is still much faster, more reliable, and has lower latency, but if the cost is unaffordable, none of that is essential.
I expect the future is that rural moves to mostly wireless and inner city areas continue to be connected to fiber.
For most people, wireless is a superior product. I don't know if you have noticed, but the 1990's futuristic ideal of a big fat desktop connected to a fat fiber pipe isn't what people actually ended up wanting. They want a thin light tablet connected to wireless internet they can take on the go. Demand for that "inferior technology" is increasing much faster than demand for wireline technology.
I think the key is that wired networks were ideal in the situation where customers would pay off the investment. Wireless is way cheaper - one station could be 20+ people and take far less investment upfront.
It is intrinsically better though. Wired sound infinitely nicer sounding, and with much lower latency. Will we ever have a day when wireless will be sufficiently low latency?
True. But quality metrics differ and no wireless connection that i have seen is an upgrade in terms of jitter and reliability overall a wired one (even dsl)
The problem with wireless is that it's like sharing a single cable with everyone else. Yes, there are a lot of innovations to make that workable, but you're never going to get the same bandwidth and reliability as a cabled system.
thanks for the informative post, the only qualm I have is that "wired" is an objective improvement. Obviously it is easier to get better quality with wired, but for many people,the benefits of wireless are a huge win over wired.
If that requires a lot of processing, so be it, but that is value added to many people.
Wireless has become much better and robust in recent years, but I've honestly never been exposed to a wireless solution that was completely without issues. That's why I'll always prefer cables (as in fiber).
Not knowing much about Philadelphia, surely a city like that offers fiber to most houses in 2019, and it's probably not going to cost more than $50-100/month for an entry level package? I could be wrong.
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