Why is VM Broadband different?

[Mike Watterson]

As Mike correctly states, there are many things that will slow down wifi. I was making the point that under some conditions wifi can be faster than "vanilla" 100Mb/s ethernet and that 100Mb/s is now inadequate or marginal for some fast internet services.

Though on many computers, especially older ones, you might find 1Gbps ethernet only runs at 200Mbps to 400Mbps.
You need pretty fast special disks to max out 100Mbps continuously. Copying between two 7200rpm SATA drives on cheap servers on my LAN, it's often 5Mbps to 10MBps (40 to 90 Mbps). Even ON the server, copying 50Gbyte, the average speed is 37MBps, so barely more than a third of 1Gbps. Big systems I set up in the 1990s had multiple identical RAID sets in different racks and then these were striped across the SCSI channels. Used in a cluster for up to 500 workstations.

My WiFi can do 108Mbps burst, but sustained speed copying Gigabytes of files is about 24Mbps. My Internet is only 8Mbps down / 1Mbps up anyway ...