[LINK] FTTP soon normal

[Frank O'Connor]

Well, yeah ... but:

1. ANY form of networking causes 'slow-downs' simply by its very nature, irrespective of what the data interface is capable of. 

1Gbs hard wired Ethernet? Sure ... if you only have 2 devices connected, are running a single networked application ... and even then all you'll get is 300-500Mbs max due to error correction (huge overhead in Ethernet which increases logarithmically as nodes activate), data scheduling problems and lots of negotiations (e.g.ACK/NACKS, non-data packets ... ICMP for example, and other high level protocols inherent in TCP/IP) between the devices.

It doesn't much matter what network architecture you use ... the overheads persist (as they were designed to do by the network protocol inventors) and slow traffic way below the optimum. With networks its important that little numbers like error detection and recovery work ... especially in non-tolerant applications and devices.

2. Bottom line: WiFi is no more or less efficient than hard wired network protocols. Indeed, low level WiFi protocols are typically Ethernet protocols ... and hence subject to the SAME efficiency and effectiveness limitations as the wired protocols they emulate. The difference is that with WiFi you can overlay channels more easily than you can on an Ethernet connection ... which doesn't handle packet crowding very well at all.

3. On any WiFi network the slowest most obsolete device on the network has far more overheads than the newer faster ones. So, if I have a number of devices/computers in my cabinet that that connect at 802.11a-c (theoretically up to 1.7Gbs ... but I've never seen it get over 500Mbs), and a couple of phones or pads at 802.11g (54Mbs) and an old laptop that has an 802.11b (11 Mbs) card then the 802.11g devices slow the network to a crawl, and the 802.11b device can bring it almost to a stop ... that's the sort of overhead price you pay for trying to connect effectively obsolete devices to your supposedly 'real quick' 802.11a-c network.

That's one of the reasons I really dislike public WiFi ... it's a real performance drag compared to my user controlled home network.

4. That said, given that the REALLY useful bit of the network (the Internet) is tunnelled into the aforesaid router at between 5 and 10 Mbs ... what the actual network is capable of (and mine is pretty quick because I try to eliminate what bottlenecks I can, and, being retired, have nothing better to do with my time) tends to be irrelevant ... as the speed of the Net connection is the thing that brings the flow of information and content down to an effective crawl, and the upload speed ... sending my content back to the world ... is 10 times slower than that.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the speed of networks is a function of what a network is, of what devices are connected to it and in what configuration, of what network protocols you have working for you at Levels 3 to 5 (for our purposes 3 being TCP/IP, 4 being Ethernet and 5 being the bloody network hardware) and how well they are interacting, the number of devices you have connected, and the homogeneity of the network protocols and versions of same that each and every node of that network is running.

In other words it's probably a bit more complex than Scott makes out.

Just my 2 cents worth ...
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On 28 Apr 2014, at 5:36 pm, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Frank O'Connor <francisoconnor3 at bigpond.com> wrote:
> Most WiFi routers you buy nowadays are 380Mbs, or better, multichannel devices that can handle much more bandwidth than the old 54Mbs puppies. The default WiFi in any 'puter you buy nowadays can handle this no problems.
> 
> Don't confuse the marketing numbers with the truth.
> 
> In practice, if you can pull 100Mbps out of Wifi then you've probably bought yourself a reasonably high-end router, and you probably have line of sight to the basestation.
> 
> If you're using the "default WiFi" that comes in most routers/computers, you're getting far, far less than that number.
> 
> Ethernet is now hitting 10 Gbs (but I only have a 1Gbs port on the back of my 18 month old Mac) 
> 
> 10Gbps is still only in the world of server products, and will stay there for at least a few years to come - it's certainly nowhere near being a consumer product at this stage.
> 
>   Scott