Jagtiger - you make practical points about one vs t'other.
Rouxenator - you also make a good argument for wireless...
BUT - you are all forgetting a very important point. Sometimes WiFi subscribers just don't have a choice of technologies. Most of you are talking from the privileged position of actually having a selection of technologies AND providers to choose from! That's a very blinkered and self-centred view in my opinion.
If you knock a technology because of the difference in performance vs another technology, then you deserve to have been burnt if you made the wrong choice by not researching the limitations of each.
Clearly fibre is king - so if latencies and availability are your criteria for measuring your service - don't be a cheap-ass, stop moaning and cough up for the rolls royce. Providers will dig a channel to your doorstep if you don't already have one...
If you are lucky enough to have an existing copper line to your premises, and can tolerate cable theft/flooding/lightning taking your line out for days or weeks and possibly not replaced if it is a persistent pattern, then Copper/ADSL is the cheap-ass alternative to fibre. Good luck trying to get Telkom to lay a cable to your doorstep in 6 weeks....
Wireless fills a very big gap in the supply of telecoms services to under-serviced areas and areas with high incidences cable theft. There are definitely good and bad operators out there, and not all have been trained properly, but to make sweeping statements like none of them have 'spectrometers' (spectrum analysers?) or RF training (wirelessvsadsl!!) is just presumptuous and wrong.
Ditto the statement that they all run off bundled ADSL lines - total b.s.! Some do, it is true, but equally some run their networks with telco-grade 5.8GHz backbones with 100's of Mbps capacity installed by professional RF technicians. What makes you think ALL the bandwidth of EVERY wifi provider goes down a single chain of backbone links? Ever considered that 10 or 20x4Mbps ADSL lines may be feeding diverse paths? (where DO you get 20xADSL = 17Mbps???)
So what if the WiSP's source is fibre or bundled ADSL's? if you are getting a 'broadband' service that you never had, and it's reasonably reliable within the expectations of wireless as a technology, then what's really at issue here? WiFi can supply a very good service for the average subscriber. In some cases, it may even be a superior choice (assuming you have a choice).
Service providers are just that - and now you have freedom of choice of service providers - so let everyone know who the bad ones are, give the good ones their due and please let's quit this pointless 'ADSL is better than wireless' debate!
We should rather debate religion or politics - it's less subjective...