Algebra proves useful after all, boosts Wi-Fi speed by 16x

Listen up, kids: stay in school. Learn algebra. It may seem utterly useless, and 415.8 / x = 4.2 percent of the time, it is. But just wait until you’re trying to play a game or stream a video over a terrible wireless connection, ’cause with the magic of algebra, you can boost your Wi-Fi speed by a factor of 10 or 20 or more.

The reason that terrible Wi-Fi connections are terrible isn’t usually related to slow speeds inherent in the connection itself: most of the time, the thing to blame is packet loss. Packets are individual little chunks of data that are flowing all the time between your wireless router (or a cell tower) and your smartphone or laptop or whatever.

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