You could really argue that wired LAN speeds should be added to that. Yes there is the ability to run link speeds at many-many tens/hundreds of gigabits, but from a consumer point of view, things have only just started moving away from 100mb to 1gb, and is still likely to be another 5-10 years before 10Gb starts to become the norm in homes.
Why did WiFi speeds mature so slowly?
- Thread starter HangTime
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You could really argue that wired LAN speeds should be added to that. Yes there is the ability to run link speeds at many-many tens/hundreds of gigabits, but from a consumer point of view, things have only just started moving away from 100mb to 1gb, and is still likely to be another 5-10 years before 10Gb starts to become the norm in homes.
Id agree with that notion
1g was around 1980
2g was around 1990
3g was around 2001
4g was around 2009
5g was 2019.
With those things it obviously takes years and billions to build them out. I’d say we are starting to hit diminishing returns on faster speeds though. The list of things you can do on 5g that you can’t do on 4g is a lot smaller than 4g to 3g and so on.
As mentioned a big factor is demand - earliest use of WiFi tended to be low powered laptops and a bit later phones which struggled in many cases hardware performance wise to get past around 40MBit/s and/or just didn't have much use for faster speeds even if they could do them with much of the use simple web-browsing and light file sharing such as word documents.
There just hasn't been the pressure/necessity there.
There just hasn't been the pressure/necessity there.
I think the benefits of 5G are more keenly felt by the operator, high capacity, lower cost. The user mostly benefit indirectly.
The difference in my eyes was that wired LAN was at 100mbit ages ago, before most people even had internet connections. So it matured quickly enough in the early days to hit high speeds (12.5meg/sec wouldn't have been far off the throughput of some HDD in that era). I agree that it hasn't advanced super-quickly in recent years, but there are severe diminishing returns past 1gbit anyway and you start to run into disk limitations on physical hard drives.
I probably could have phrased this post better, maybe a better way of putting it would be "WiFi has been proven in the modern era to be cable of delivering hundreds of mbit using consumer setups. Given some consumers were running 100mbit LAN in the previous millenium, why did it take so long for Wifi to reach those sort of speeds?". To which there are some answers in this thread.
Demand is probably the key driver, tech companies don't plough money into R&D without there being a demand for something.
The next 5-10 years will be interesting with WiFI though, as more homes become smart and connected, the majority of things can't or won't be connected via ethernet and will rely on WiFi. I can already see in my home that i've got 40-50 devices connected through WiFi, and i can easily see that doubling in the next 5 years.
Speeds is good enough for a lot of people now, the issue now is congestion especially in crowded places. All that interference means you end up with significantly lower speed. WiFi 6 had higher priority trying to adapt to this instead.