Wireless Just Works

Application by application, category by category, wireless is taking over wired connections. Anyone remember WiFi around year 2000? It was hardly working... Today? It is really rare to find a hot sport that has connectivity issues. And almost nobody uses wired LAN in an office. Same with mobile phones. Remember land line phones? Remember choppy mobile calls quality? It is all rock steady and crystal clear today. Especially when high quality, wideband  audio codecs kick in on both ends of the connection.

High speed Internet was one of the remaining applications ruled by wired. It still is where the "wire" was changed from copper to glass (fiber). But not everyone is lucky to get fiber to the home. Those stuck with copper DSL could only sit and wait. I was among them. Until I decided to try wireless, the mobile wireless offered by mobile carriers.

It is simple - go to a shopping mall, visit T-Mobile or Vodafone or whoever is your mobile carrier and ask them for a WiFi router. Bring it home, plug the thing in to a power outlet. Done. Simplicity of installation has always been the strength of any wireless. Especially in retrofit scenarios - like me retrofitting my DSL-connected home to wireless 4G+. But usually that simplicity was offset by less than stellar performance / throughput. It no longer is. I am getting steady 50Mbps downlink / 15Mbps uplink with pings averaging at 25ms. Enough for high definition Netflix, gaming and other activities.

This is the moment when I can say wireless Internet is on par with wired, at least for an average consumer. It just works.