What is better WiFi or Internet?

Wi-Fi and internet are two different things. Let me say it again: they are two different things.

For years now, the term Wi-Fi has often been synonymous with access to the internet. Most of us use "Wi-Fi" as a shortcut to mean our home broadband internet connection. And when you're traveling, free Wi-Fi is understood as free internet since that's the only reason you use Wi-Fi when out and about.

In this post, I'll clarify the difference between the two often-confused terms and provide answers to other connection-related questions. Among other things, knowing the difference between Wi-Fi and internet connections can help you troubleshoot problems at home, purchase the right equipment for your network, and most importantly, understand the risk of using a free Wi-Fi network.

Wi-Fi

As mentioned in the first part of this series, Wi-Fi is simply an alternative to network cables as a way to connect devices of a local area network (LAN). Prior to Wi-Fi the only way to connect devices together was to run physical network cables between them, which can be inconvenient. Wi-Fi allows devices to connect to one another the same way as when network cables are used, just without the actual cables. A Wi-Fi network is basically a wireless local network.

Internet

Generally known as the wide area network (WAN), the internet connects computers from around the world. In reality, the internet actually connects many local networks together, via a ton of routers. With the internet, your home local network is no longer secluded but becomes part of one giant worldwide network.

The internet connection is generally beyond the control of the users. Other than turning it on or off, the only other thing you can do is pay for the desired connection speed and hope you get what you pay for. Internet speed has progressively increased in the last decade. Ten years ago, a fast residential broadband connection generally capped somewhere between 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps; now it's between about 50Mbps to 150Mbps and even faster.

That said, most of the time, 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 (or access point) and the connected clients, and can sometimes be slower than a fast broadband wired internet connection.