Or maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have to compete on quality as well as price.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.
> WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband
> Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi
So after you upgraded your WLAN it was faster than your WAN until you bothered upgrading your WLAN.
That's a personal deployment decision not necessarily a matter of what was or wasn't' available at the time. >1G WiFi existed years before ultra-wideband was a thing.
The first phone to ship with ultra-wideband was the iPhone 11 in 2019, and the first phone to ship with 6GHz was the Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021. The Intel AX210 was the first wireless card to ship with 6GHz at the end of 2020 and the first laptop to include it from MSI shipped in 2021.
Calling WiFi 6 >1G is a pretty far stretch. I don't think I've seen a real world test that breaks that barrier in favorable conditions, even with today's routers:
Whereas ultra-wideband was capable of pulling 2Gbps in 2020, something I have not even seen Wi-Fi 7 able to do. Ultra-wideband still has quite an edge:
> I've also tested 160 MHz channels, which quickly run into the ~930 Mbps TCP throughput limit of a gigabit Ethernet connection, but perform worse at range. I'll cover 160 MHz channels and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet in more depth when the U6-Enterprise leaves early access
So yeah, when the author limits the tests to <1Gb none of the results were >1Gb. Who would have expected those results.
I've had >1G WiFi 5 networks in operation since 2018. It didn't require 6Ghz.
Your equipment or your environment may not have enabled it, but it was around.
When Verizon laid down fiber optic cable in my (former) neighborhood, it was so much better than Xfinity’s service, and everyone I knew switched.
Not to say that the type of physical cable matters as much, DOCSIS 4.0 is in the cards, but latency and bandwidth will always be better on a (good) wired connection.
One quirk worth mentioning, though, is that WWAN did leap-frog WLAN with 5G and especially with ultra-wideband (which isn’t everywhere). Until I installed 6GHz Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless speeds I saw were on ultra-wideband connections to my phone.