Quote:
Originally Posted by Demisis_P2P
In Australia "Wireless" is its own type of internet, served straight from the ISP. I just did a Google search for "wireless internet" and all the results on the first page are from Australia so I guess it's not a popular option overseas?
Basically you get a USB thumbdrive sized wireless modem with a SIM card in it, and you plug it into your PC to connect to the internet via 3G cell phone towers, which currently have a max speed of 42mb/s (getting upgraded to 80mb/s soon) so about comparable to fiber internet speeds at a fraction of the cost of laying hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber cable. It seems like it'll become the popular option for internet here in the future, but generally the upload rates are very poor because of the nature of the service.
Some people here call it "wireless cable" or "wireless broadband" (including the ISPs themselves) because they associate those terms with the speed of the service, not the infrastructure.
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.
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Sorry, don't live in Australia. Point nullified.
However, I do know what wireless internet is... but it is never referred to as "wireless cable" or any of the sort here. It's typically called satellite. Cable is reserved for actual cable internet, DSL is reserved for DSL, broadband is for general high-speed terminology, and most of the time if you hear any sort of combination of those terms with wireless, it means "I've got cable internet hooked up to a wireless home network". Satellite just isn't popular enough over here to claim the "wireless" term yet.