A typical WiFi chipset consumes about 4-8 watts of power in order to produce a 200-400 milliwatt signal. That's pretty inefficient and the reason that you can't get a WiFi signal more than 300ft(LoS) away from the best devices available today. There have been recent a recent call to arms to increase the efficiency of WiFi and therefore the penetration and distance needed to make it truly useful.

I like how the "author-man" here has been lambasted with specialised (i.e. Googled) technical knowledge from someone going under the pretentious moniker of 'Bleeding obvious' - and whom we can safely assume has no appreciation for the ironic.

For the hard of understanding: this piece is not claiming that one technology is superior to the other, and in fact highlights the fact they compliment each other. The use of the word "whisper" to which you took peculiar objection refers to comparative transmission power.

THAT'S IT. OOPS SORRY FOR SHOUTING.

Jeebus author-man, Wi-Fi does whisper. The link you provide to ARM quote is about the efficiency of Wi-Fi chipsets and implementations, not the air interface.

In fact the Wi-Fi air interface is hugely more advanced than cellular. 802.11g uses 20MHz wide OFDM channels and 802.11n already uses 40MHz channels, and it took years for cellular to implement OFDM (WiMAX and then LTE). Wi-Fi already throttles down power based on signal strength and the first MIMO/beamforming technologies are already being used to precisely target radio energy where it's needed. Again cellular is years and years away from that.

Maybe next time some research before typing out a femtocell PR piece?

I was using BT fon in Singapore airport the other day.