UK top dog for home Wi-Fi usage... almost
Ahead of all... except South Korea
Britain is second only to South Korea when it comes to the proportion of homes that have their own wireless network, we learned today.
While 80.3 per cent of South Korean homes have a WLAN in place to provide internet access to a range of stationary and mobile gadgets, so do 73.3 per cent of UK homes, market watcher Strategy Analytics calculates.
That puts Brits ahead of fellow European countries Germany (71.7 per cent), France (71.6 per cent), Italy (61.8 per cent) and Spain (57.1 per cent).
Even techno-fettishist nation Japan can only count 68.4 per cent of its homes among the world's Wi-Fi households. The US is well down the list with a 61 per cent score, behind Canada's 67.8 per cent, according to SA's numbers.
The best Australia can manage is 53.8 per cent.
Focus on the number of installations, rather than the percentage of homes with Wi-Fi, and China tops the list, followed by the US and Canada.
By the end of 2011, SA said, 439m households worldwide had installed home Wi-Fi networks - effectively a quarter of all households.
By 2016, that total will have risen to 800m, a penetration rate of 42 per cent. Almost 14 per cent of them will be in China. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Does wireless put people off with lower throughput?
"When the line between your provider and your modem is the slowest link, it matters not how fast your wireless connection is."
That rather depends on what else you might be using the WLAN for. Once you start adding multiple devices to the LAN, the ability to share data between those devices without ever crossing over to the WAN side of your router raises the question of how much bandwidth you'd like to have between those devices. Being able to stream HD video around the house, without needing to string cat 5 everywhere or rely on your electrical wiring being up to the job of powerline networking, is just one example where the speed requirements of your WLAN are potentially being set by something other than the speed of your internet connection.
"Once your pipe is fatter than your wireless signal, it makes less sense to be on wifi, yes?"
Yes/No/Maybe (*delete as appropriate)
Remember that most pipes into the home are asymmetric, so if you're a heavy uploader then you might be willing to spend more on a fatter pipe so that the upload speed is more closely matched to your WLAN throughput, even if it means most of your download capacity goes unused.
Remember also that a growing number of homes have multiple devices connecting to their LAN, some wirelessely, some wired - if you're able to move some/most/all of your heavy-lifting network apps onto the wired devices, then having a bottlenecked WLAN for your other devices might not be such a big deal when set against the convenience of having WLAN access.
So it would make less sense for some people, but by no means would it make less sense in general.
Re: Dodgy stats
Probably yes. It is very difficult to get a router that doesn't have wifi.
Re: Does wireless put people off with lower throughput?
But you are a 50mbit customer on virgin using the wirelss N superhub (of which there are onyl a few thousand). If you are a BT 2mbit ADSL customer (of which I expect there are 1million+), you won't get 50Mbps in any circumstance.
When the line between your provider and your modem is the slowest link, it matters not how fast your wireless connection is. Once your pipe is fatter than your wireless signal, it makes less sense to be on wifi, yes?
Re: Dodgy stats
It is today, but a significant minority of Internet connections will be through routers that are relatively ancient. As commented below, having a Wi-Fi capable router is not the same as using Wi-Fi.
