How fast is …
Housekeeping:
- For consistency, I’ll track everything in Mb/s (being one million bits per second).
- I’ll distinguish between NOMINAL speeds (which you never achieve due to overheads) and ACTUAL “usable to shift my data” speeds.
And some notes on technology:
- Wifi: is half-duplex on a given frequency/channel; needs to do “listen then transmit” on each frame for collision avoidance; freq range for channels on 2.4GHz overlap whereas 5GHz do not overlap; unlicensed 2.4GHz is more congested than 5GHz but suffers less attenuation due to walls etc.
- I’ll look at Wifi (through walls!), wired ethernet, spinning HDD and SSDs, USB2+3 -
Onto the speeds: