Err, usually the slowest part of connection is WiFi. I never use wifi if I want to get reasonable throughput or ping. I don't even live where the WiFi band would be unreasonably congested. (connection 1/1 Gbps FTTH)
I'm what you would consider a "Knowledge Worker" and I haven't connected an ethernet cable to my laptop for Internet Access in 18+ months. With 802.11ac now available, the slowest part of a connection is almost always going to be the speed of your internet connection.
I just came back from Singapore, and, between our Corporate Office down in the PSA building, the WiFi at the St. Regis, the various hotspots I had to work with on a client site, tethering to my iPhone, and the 2 mbit/s proxy on the client site - I can tell you I would have paid upwards of $20/day to get a solid 20 mbit/s connection if I could have - I never once saw a sustained connection of > 10mbit/s - my WiFi was never close to being the slowest part of the connection.
Public Wifi is near-universally terrible. Take WWDC this year. On the wired download stations you could get 300-600 MBit downloads. On WiFi you were lucky to connect at all. Heck, my experience is that wherever WiFi is available, 3G is usually both more reliable and faster.
At home, living alternatively in Japan and Sweden with 100 MBps connections in apartment buildings (=everyone has their own WiFi access point trying to squeeze in 100 MBit/s of BitTorrent uploads), WiFi is a continual pain in the butt and is often hampering my download speeds. I can't wait for 802.11ac, but I just got this fully-decked-out laptop last year and am not looking forward to spending another $3000
How many days were you in Singapore? Probably the best way for a traveler to get a solid unwired connection would be to buy a new phone (unless you're lucky enough to already have a device with compatible LTE bands) and then enjoy the wonders of prepaid LTE and tether ($7/week/GB).
Maybe it is just because most people haven't upgraded yet, but I have a 4G connection over 90% of the time on my phone (with good latency) and I can't remember a speed test under 10 Mbps down (20-40 typical). It's good enough that it takes my home WiFi (backed 200 Mbps fiber) working near-perfectly on the 5GHz band to beat it.
I'm not sure having a synchronous 1Gbps connection really counts as "usually" in most of the world, but I guess in that case you'd want to avoid wifi to get the best out of it.
For the rest of us, wifi is far from the bottleneck. I'm currently working from a holiday home in the country where I'm sharing 2Mbps down with 4 other houses.
I'm not sure having a synchronous 1Gbps connection really counts as "usually" in most of the world, but I guess in that case you'd want to avoid wifi to get the best out of it.
You must be American. :)
Seriously, most of Europe has had gigabit fiber, flying cars, and robot maids for nearly a decade now and in South Korea they're slowly phasing out the government in favor of a benevolent AI.
I guess that would make a difference if you wanted to transfer a few hundred gigs of video from an SSD array while at Starbucks, but for the rest of the world I think the improved speed of this free WiFi is a good thing.
