The importance of wifi speed

[bgstcola]

Hey I noticed that my new moto x has about half the wifi speed of my sgs4 when testing with speedtest.net. But it doesn't translate to real world surfing advantage. Even downloading a 100mb file was faster on the moto.

I guess that there are bottlenecks in other places that makes speedtest results useless?

 

[zCypher]

in ideal conditions the speedtest will tell you the fastest speed that your device will download and upload. with wireless, there's never any guarantee, period, and it will fluctuate based on wireless conditions obviously. the network hardware and firmware in the device itself will of course have a factor to play.

as for real world usage, that's always something that can vary completely from one host to another. If you download a file from my computer you aren't gonna get it any faster than 10mbps since that's my upload speed. So it really doesn't matter if your connection is any faster than 10mbps to download (if you are getting a file from ME)

i'm sure you catch my drift... various places that you get files from, will have various different settings of what speed they are set to serve content - plus that will be impacted by whatever current load / traffic that server is experiencing. if you're talking about torrents or other peer to peer, then it will of course vary based on the combined peers sending speed

so you might speedtest one phone at 10mbps, speedtest your other phone and attain 20mbps, but both may feel identical (or like you said one case the 'slower' one was faster). most browsing doesn't even come close to utilizing 10mbps, or even 5-6mbps for that matter. you can stream most video content with a 5-6mbps connection just fine too. so the slower device getting content faster could be due to any number of reasons (the server it was pulling that content from happened to be sending it faster at that time, for example)

make sense?

 

[bgstcola]

Actually all the tests was done simultaneously on the two devices and every single time the sgs4 had much better speedtest numbers . I tried downloading some more files (simultaneously) and most of the time the moto was faster but a few times the sgs2 was much faster. It doesn't make sense to me. Maybe the sgs4 is less consistent? But wouldn't that show up in the speedtest results?

I guess the explanation why the moto is faster when surfing has to do with that it is only 720p and thus can render faster.

 

[Muse]

Please forgive me if this is a bit off topic. I'm getting my first smartphone, probably will receive it next week, a Nokia Lumia 520. I am researching what kind of plan I want for phone/data. I figure (please correct me if I'm wrong) that a post paid plan is apt to give me MUCH faster data than a prepaid plan. However, I don't think I'm willing (at least initially) to go post paid, and will probably at least start with a very modest plan, maybe an Airvoice $10 for 3 months using AT&T's network (this phone is locked to AT&T's network), at 10 cents/minute, 10 cents/text, 6.6 cents/MB data.

I figure the data will be slow. My initial reason to get a smartphone is for offline GPS navigation. That aside, I'd like to get my feet wet in smartphones. I will do my downloading (e.g. maps, maybe some basic apps), via wifi.

My question is will my wifi (using my home wireless network using a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 802.11b/g wireless router) on the Nokia Lumia 520 phone be similar to what I would experience with a fast post paid data plan, say a plan from AT&T directly? I'd like to know if what I'm experiencing using wifi at home is pretty is similar to what I could expect using internet connectivity away from a wifi zone. Thanks for comments, help.

 

[thedosbox]

My question is will my wifi (using my home wireless network using a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 802.11b/g wireless router) on the Nokia Lumia 520 phone be similar to what I would experience with a fast post paid data plan, say a plan from AT&T directly? I'd like to know if what I'm experiencing using wifi at home is pretty much what I could expect using internet connectivity away from a wifi zone. Thanks for comments, help.

You can use wi-fi even if you don't have a SIM card in the phone. In other words, the carrier (or plan) you use has nothing to do with wi-fi.