From the course: Help Desk Handbook for End Users: Mobile, Networking, Security, and Troubleshooting

Going high speed

From the course: Help Desk Handbook for End Users: Mobile, Networking, Security, and Troubleshooting

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Going high speed

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- The Barbie Dream House offers three different internet access options for computing devices: wired, plug the device into the wall jack, wireless, that's WiFi, such as 802.11, and cellular, using the cellular telephone network. Seven criteria determine what's going to be the best connection for Barbie and her friends to use: mobility, availability, reliability, throughput, connection delay, its latency, number of concurrent connections, and level of security. Mobility describes how far you can travel and still access network resources. Availability refers to the probability that a system will be functional. In other words, when you want to use a service, can you depend on it? Reliability refers to the quality of the data received and the error checking and correcting capabilities of the technology. Throughput refers to the data transfer rate. How quickly does your email download, and how long do you have to wait for a webpage to load? Latency refers to the connection delay between a request and the response to that request. Number of concurrent connections, in this context, refers to the number of simultaneous users who can connect to the internet. Level of security here means how resistant a connection type is to internet-based attacks. Before I go any further, let me state that wired always beats wireless and cellular, except for in the first category, mobility. There cellular is king. Wired always wins for availability, reliability, throughput, latency, number of connections, and level of security. Let's look at a few scenarios to see how things play out. Barbie and some friends want to download some huge files, like 4K video files, all at the same time. Which connection wins? Wired networks don't worry about signal loss or cloud cover, so they're available. Wired networks trounce WiFi and cellular in the quality of data received, so they're the most reliable. Data speeds again favor wired with land connections up to 10 gigabits per second. Wired connections offer the lowest latency. They don't wait for a signal to cross the air, bounce off of things, and so forth. Wired networks scale up quickly. Need to connect more devices? Add another switch to the network. Finally, wired connections offer great security as long as you don't let a bad guy plug into the network. Wireless or WiFi connections generally come in second place. The exception is in number of concurrent connections. WiFi networks support a dozen users or so. Cellular towers handle hundreds of users with no problems. When Barbie and her friends head over to the gaming convention in Anaheim, they connect via cellular rather than WiFi. (lively music)

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