It's tempting to assume that a good WiFi hotspot
will outpace modern cellular data, but that's not necessarily true --
in some countries, WiFi might be more of a pain. OpenSignal has conducted
a study showing that mobile data is faster on average than WiFi
hotspots in 33 countries, including multiple African, European, Latin
American and Middle Eastern nations. And the differences are sometime
gigantic. You'll typically have an advantage of 10Mbps or more in places
like Australia, Oman and the Czech Republic, while multi-megabit
advantages are common in places like Austria, Iran and South Africa.
There
are many countries where cellular and WiFi links are roughly
competitive. And not surprisingly, WiFi has a clear advantage countries
where home broadband is relatively fast, such as Hong Kong, Singapore,
South Korea and the US. However, LTE provides a consistent edge for
download speeds in some areas -- in Lebanon, your downstream speeds tend
to be 25Mbps faster than on WiFi.
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| © OpenSignal Countries where mobile data is typically faster than WiFi |
The findings led OpenSignal to suggest that users and device makers
alike need to rethink the assumption that WiFi is usually best. While
that might have been true when smartphones were young, it's not so true
any more in the LTE era -- and WiFi has its own problems, such as
overcrowded networks. This is before 5G promises gigabit-class speeds
for some users, too. While WiFi has its purposes (both for local
networking and for places with data caps), you might find yourself
sticking to cellular access more often going forward.
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