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Android Can Now Tell You How Fast Wi-Fi Networks Are Before You Join Them (theverge.com)
Today, Google announced that Android 8.1 Oreo will now display the speed of nearby open Wi-Fi networks to help you decide whether they're even worth the effort of connecting to. The Wi-Fi settings menu will now display one of four speed labels: Very Fast, Fast, OK, or Slow. The Verge reports: The difference between Very Fast and Fast, according to Google, is that you can stream "very high-quality videos" on the former and "most videos" on the latter. Most coffee shop dwellers should be fine with the OK level, as that's enough for web browsing, social media, and Spotify streaming. Private Wi-Fi networks that require passwords don't display any speed data since it's really none of your business and Google can't randomly test them, but they do continue to indicate signal strength. Google says network administrators can also opt out of Android's Wi-Fi Assistant showing speed info by using a "canary URL."
The thing Maps does is just enumerate networks and signal strengths. Based on data from lots of users, Google knows the location of these APs so it can get a better idea of location by triangulating the networks it sees.
All that has nothing to do with speeds. I'm guessing they've also been collecting speed data for a while - either by speed testing or just monitoring the speeds that apps that move a lot of data like Maps and YouTube are seeing when connected to a network. I'm guessing it's probably the latter since nobody has been posting about hundreds of phones DDOSing their networks with speed tests, and because Google has no reason to waste people's bandwidth and battery doing it when they can just measure speeds of real data being loaded from servers they know can go faster.
Exactly how does one know how "fast" a WiFi network is without "joining" it? All you can tell is what the signal strength is (something already shown), the frequency, and the protocol (a/b/g/n/whatever). None of those will tell you how fast your actual Internet speed will be without connecting to it and trying it. It might indicate a cap on top theoretical speed, but how useful is that?
I mean, a 100% signal perfect signal on an N access point with nobody else connected to it that is on a saturated uplink which manages 0.1 Mb/s with horrendous latency is pretty crappy.
Are they saying that your Android device will, behind the scenes, actually connect to everything it can, without asking you, and TEST the link? What does that do for battery life? How much will that delay your connecting? How does that interfere with networks you have specifically chosen to automatically connect? How accurate is a quick test that might have touched the worst few seconds of use in the last hour?
Or is this based on Google "sharing" speed information from one user into a cloud database? I don't see how that is going to be very accurate either- things change constantly. And that speed rating will very much depend on your EXACT signal quality.
More questions than answers... the article doesn't help much, either.