Wi-Fi vs Internet

 

With the popularity of wireless networking, the term Wi-Fi is often synonymous with access to the Internet. Most times we use "Wi-Fi" as a shortcut to mean our home broadband Internet connection.

Wi-Fi vs Internet

Among other things, knowing the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet connections can help you troubleshoot problems at home and purchase the right equipment for your home network.  

Wi-Fi 

This is an alternative to network cables as the way to connect devices of a local area network (LAN). Prior to Wi-Fi the only way to connect devices together was to run the physical network cables between them, which is very 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.  

Wi-Fi is basically just another frequency of radio we can use to wirelessly connect devices to each other. To use it for Internet access, your laptop or tablet or smartphone connects (over Wi-Fi) to a wireless router just like the one you have installed at home or the one at your favorite cafe that allows customers free Internet access. (The router itself typically plugs into the wall to connect to an Internet service provider.) 

With a Wi-Fi network, you have total control and can change the name of the network, the password, the number of connected clients, allowing them to exchange data with one another or not, and so on. Even the Wi-Fi router or access point itself can be changed or turned on or off any time.

A home Wi-Fi network, which is almost always hosted by a router, is independent from the Internet. To connect a home Wi-Fi network to the Internet, the router needs to be connected to an Internet source, such as a broadband modem, via its WAN port. When this happens, the Wi-Fi signal of the local network will also provide the connection to the Internet for its connected clients. So Wi-Fi is just one way to bring the Internet to a device. And this also explains the fact that sometimes your Wi-Fi connection is at full bars yet you can't access the Internet at all, as such your Web page won't load, emails are not sent etc. This is because the host device of the Wi-Fi network you're connected to, itself, has problem connecting to the Internet.

While 

Internet

Is generally known as the wide area network (WAN), the Internet connects computers from around the world together. In reality, as far as the current state of how the World Wide Web is run, the Internet actually connects many local networks together, via many routers. With the Internet, your home local network is no longer secluded but becomes part of one giant worldwide network.

The Internet is generally beyond the control of the users. The most they can do is pay for the desired connection speed and hope that they get what they pay for. The Internet's speed has progressively increased in the last decade. Ten years ago, a fast residential broadband connection generally capped somewhere between 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps; now it is between 20Mbps to 50Mbps and even faster.

Sometimes 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 (access point) and the connected clients, and can sometimes be slower than a fast broadband Internet connection.  

The combination of Wi-Fi and Internet

With a smartphones or laptop, you can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi. At home or at the office, this can be done via a Wi-Fi-enabled router that connects to a residential broadband Internet connection. Even on the go, you can connect through either mobile hotspot or bring your router.