Physical Networking Week 1 Lab
Geoffrey Gwyn

Advantages of a landline system:
• Greater reliability of service; since calls are coming and going over physical lines, calls are clearer and more stable.
• Ease of Maintenance: corded phones are easy and relatively inexpensive to repair over the complicated cell phone/smartphone.
• Greater Security: much more difficult to listen or break in on landlines over radio waves.
• Data speed of landline: 256kbps (Landline DSL)
• Speeds are dependent on the ISP.

Advantages of a Cellular system:
• Portability: able to work from (almost) anywhere
• Not as easy to repair/more expensive as well
• Less secure: radio waves are easier to intercept than landlines
• Current data speeds for cellular data: 4G can deliver download peak speeds of 100Mbs and upload speeds of 50Mbs. 3G currently provides data transfer speeds of up to 384kbps. EDGE currently provides data transfer speeds of up to 170kbps. GPRS currently provides data transfer speeds of up to 56kbps. So depending on where you are located this can be very good or not so much.
• Cell phones offer GPS data for tracking
• You would need less equipment: with the landline system you would need phones, computers, routers and all the wires. With cellular you would need a phone and maybe a tablet or laptop. Much less expensive in start-up.

In my opinion, when considering all the progress made in cellular technology in the past few years it is still prudent to conduct a business that relies on a constant, stable network a landline system is still superior to the cellular system. First, it is less prone to outages for arbitrary reasons; anymore (depending on the company you use) it takes a massive act of nature to kill the phone and data lines, and even then it is usually never down very long. Second, it is much easier to repair a broken five line phone or a busted