I agree with your overall point but not so sure on this specific piece:
>If you're talking about something that runs over WiFi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.
Signal propagation speed (velocity factor) over air is only a bit slower than cat7 copper, and on-par with fiber optic. From memory:
In a vacuum: VF = 1 (equal to speed of light)
Over copper: VF = .75 (one quarter speed of light)
Over air or fiber: VF = .66 (one third speed of light)
Wi-Fi is measurably slower than wired copper cable for a few reasons but I don't understand physics to be one of them. With the distances relevant to last-mile connectivity like we're discussing here, that difference in VF appears to be immaterial.
Then again, you could argue that the air being a contended medium is by it's very nature a physics problem, and that does seem to be the root of most of the drawbacks of running low-latency workloads over wireless. Not necessarily an insurmountable physics limit though, with spectrum allocation, code division, and beam forming already doing a lot to mitigate the issue, there's the potential for further developments that might bring things to parity.
Still, you're not going to get past the VF limit I described above but again, if we're only talking about in-home WiFi rather than across the entire service-to-consumer run, it doesn't play a large part.
>If you're talking about something that runs over WiFi you're fighting against the laws of physics and no back-end infrastructure is going to save you.
Signal propagation speed (velocity factor) over air is only a bit slower than cat7 copper, and on-par with fiber optic. From memory:
In a vacuum: VF = 1 (equal to speed of light)
Over copper: VF = .75 (one quarter speed of light)
Over air or fiber: VF = .66 (one third speed of light)
Wi-Fi is measurably slower than wired copper cable for a few reasons but I don't understand physics to be one of them. With the distances relevant to last-mile connectivity like we're discussing here, that difference in VF appears to be immaterial.
Then again, you could argue that the air being a contended medium is by it's very nature a physics problem, and that does seem to be the root of most of the drawbacks of running low-latency workloads over wireless. Not necessarily an insurmountable physics limit though, with spectrum allocation, code division, and beam forming already doing a lot to mitigate the issue, there's the potential for further developments that might bring things to parity.
Still, you're not going to get past the VF limit I described above but again, if we're only talking about in-home WiFi rather than across the entire service-to-consumer run, it doesn't play a large part.