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Why do people confuse WiFi network with internet connectivity?

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Maybe I am generalizing regarding people. However, the confusion that may exist is because many people do not know the difference between Wireless Network and Internet Connectivity. In general, Wifi usually provides Internet access.

Wi-Fi and Internet are two very different things.

Wireless networking is very common and popular in our daily life. The term Wi-Fi often is synonymous with access to the internet. Perhaps it is because we normally connect to Wireless network to use internet access and most of us use ‘Wi-Fi’ as a shortcut to mean our home broadband Internet connection. Especially when we travel or when we pop into a cafeteria, the only reason to use Wi-Fi is to use the internet.

In this post, I will explain the difference between the two. So when you know, the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet connection will help to troubleshoot problems at home and purchase the right equipment for your home network.

 

Wi-Fi

You may remember not long ago when surfing the Internet from your bedroom, required a very, very long ethernet cable connecting modem which is in the living room. But with the introduction of Wi-Fi technology this problem we don’t have anymore. These days Wi-Fi seems to be everywhere, with inkjet printers, digital cameras, TVs, and even refrigerators connecting to home and office networks without the need for cables.

 

Wireless network diagram

 

Wi-Fi is just an alternative to network cables as the way to connect devices to a local area network (LAN). Before Wi-Fi, the only way to connect devices together was to run the physical network cables between them, which is very inconvenient. Wi-Fi allows devices to connect to one another the same way as when network cables were used, just without the actual cables. A Wi-Fi network is simply a local wireless network.

By accessing Wifi router, the owner can have the total control of the network. He or she can change the name of the network, the password, the number of connected clients, allowing who can access to which data and so on.

A home Wi-Fi network, which is almost always hosted by a router, is independent of the Internet. That means involved devices can always work with one another to provide data sharing, printing, local media streaming, local network backups, and so on.

Connection to the Internet, however, enables them also to access Internet-based services, such as Skype, browsing news, Facebook, etc.

To connect a home Wi-Fi network to the Internet, the router needs to connect to an Internet source, such as a broadband modem, via its WAN port. When this happens, the Wi-Fi signal of the local network will also provide the connection to the Internet for its connected clients. So Wi-Fi is just one way to bring the Internet to a device. And this also explains the fact that sometimes your Wi-Fi connection is at full bars, yet you can’t access the Internet at all, as such your Web page won’t load, emails won’t sent etc. This is because the host device of the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to, itself, has a problem connecting to the Internet.

 

Internet

Generally known as the wide area network (WAN), the Internet connects computers from around the world together. In reality, as far as the current state of how the World Wide Web is run, the Internet actually connects many local networks together, via many routers. With the Internet, your home local network is no longer secluded but becomes part of one giant worldwide network.

 

The Internet is generally beyond the control of the users. The most they can do is pay for the desired connection speed and hope that they get what they pay for. The Internet’s speed has progressively increased in the last decade.

The speed of the Internet is still slower than that of a wired local network, which is either 100Mbps or 1,000Mbps. For a Wi-Fi network, the speed of the local network depends on the standards used by the Wi-Fi router (access point) and the connected clients, and can sometimes be slower than a fast broadband Internet connection.

 

The most frequently ask question about this matter is;

 

Question: My Wi-Fi connection is very strong (full bars) but I still can’t stream YouTube video without long delays. I often even have to wait for a long time for a website to load. Why?

 

Answer: This is because the Wi-Fi speed has nothing to do with the Internet speed, which is what decides the quality of your Internet experience. For example, if you have a slow Internet connection that caps at, say, 1Mbps for download, and you share that connection using a high-end Wi-Fi router that offers a Wi-Fi speed of 100Mbps, a computer connected to this network will still access the Internet at 1Mbps at most. You should check your Internet connection.

 

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The post Why do people confuse WiFi network with internet connectivity? appeared first on BeON Blog.


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