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Comparing metro-area cellular and WiFi performance: extended abstract

Published: 11 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Cellular and 802.11 WiFi offer two compelling connectivity options for mobile users. The goal of our work is to better understand performance characteristics of these technologies in diverse environments and conditions. To that end, we compare and contrast cellular and Wifi performance using crowd-sourced data from speedtest.net. We consider spatio-temporal performance aspects (e.g., upload and download throughput and latency) using over 3 million user-initiated tests initiated in 15 different metro areas, collected over 15 weeks. In these preliminary results, we find that WiFi performance generally exceeds cellular performance, and that observed characteristics are highly variable across different locations and times of day. We also observe diverse performance characteristics resulting from the rollout of new cell access technologies and service differences among local providers.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMETRICS '12: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
June 2012
450 pages
ISBN:9781450310970
DOI:10.1145/2254756
  • cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
    ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 40, Issue 1
    Performance evaluation review
    June 2012
    433 pages
    ISSN:0163-5999
    DOI:10.1145/2318857
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 June 2012

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Author Tags

  1. cellular
  2. latency
  3. throughput
  4. wifi

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