Close
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
Read Down
Sign in
Close
Welcome!Log into your account
Forgot your password?
Read Down
Password recovery
Recover your password
Close
Search
Menu
Search
  • Latest News
  • Cybersecurity
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Mobile
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
More
    Home Latest News
    • Mobile

    Breaking Wi-Fi Gridlock

    By
    Guy Kewney
    -
    September 10, 2003
    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Linkedin

      Cynicism is underrated in the technology business. Any fool can look at a new tool and imagine the utopia it will usher in. It takes a rather special type of cynic to look at the phone and predict the engaged tone, the irritating ring tone, the “network congested” sign and the phone-theft gang.

      Even so with Wi-Fi wireless. This week, I notice, Sharp is announcing its “first wireless TV”—something of an odd sobriquet, given that broadcast TV is as old as the hills. Its really a 15-inch LCD display with the ability to stream video over a Wi-Fi network.

      Or you can look at PC Magazines review of RoomLink—a system for distributing video around a home either over Ethernet cable or over high-speed 802.11a WiFi at 2.5GHz.

      And if thats not enough, theres more wireless enthusiasm from Linksys with its Wi-Fi Webcam.

      When you see these things, you wonder if people read the news. Wireless snafus at TechEd in Barcelona and CeBIT in Hanover have been well-documented. Both incidents had the same simple cause: An expert network installer failed to produce a working network because there were too many wireless units.

      Speech is a wonderful thing, too; but when we invented speech, as a species, there were no cocktail parties. Go into a room with 100 people in it, and you cant hear yourself think. You certainly cant hear what anybody else is trying to say, which is probably why young people resort to embraces and dancing in situations of high background noise (and probably why they arrange the high background noise in the first place!).

      The same applies to situations where there are too many Wi-Fi devices in one space.

      Im not suggesting that this is a question that can be solved simply by using more channels. Channel overlap is a known problem with Wi-Fi. There are only 11 Wi-Fi channels in the USA (13 in Europe) but in either case, there are probably only three usable channel bands. If you use a channel right next to someone else, then you get interference; everybody knows that. What Im talking about is simple background noise.

      In a room with two Wi-Fi clients, each gets around 5 Mbits of bandwidth of its own (2.5 Mbits of “payload,” as the experts will quickly tellyou). Take it up to 20 clients, and you have to cut that down to 250 Kbits of data per second. Still OK, mostly.

      But put 3,000 clients into a big hall, or in a city square, or a shopping mall—easily done!—and the amount of sheer wireless noise reaches the level that you cant actually punch a signal through.

      In Hanover, at CeBIT, people recorded network speeds of 9,600 bits per second. You wouldnt use a fax that slow. In Barcelona, one of the worlds most competent Wi-Fi engineers, marshaling the combined resources of Microsoft, HP and Proxim, spent five days struggling to find out why throughput was down to 40K most of the time and completely dead the rest of the time—and failed.

      If youre going to start pumping video over Wi-Fi, then youre going to chew up huge amounts of bandwidth. If you start providing universal Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi phones, PDAs, banjos and sponge-buckets all talking to cars, gas pumps and TV tuners, then youre going to clutter the airwaves.

      In some large cities, you now have to pay to drive your own vehicle. In London, for example, the surcharge is five pounds per day. Thats because anybody can use the road—and so everybody did until it became unusable.

      Wireless, license-free, is in the stage of the small boy walking in front of a Model T Ford waving a red flag. Traffic jams are unimaginable … or are they, really?

      What is almost certainly going to have to happen is a congestion charge. Well have to evolve social mores to say who will provide the access point for an area, and what rights the rest of us have. Well have agreements about turning off clients that arent being used. Well have a shift from private wireless transport to public infrastructures.

      Or does someone have a magic answer?

      Guy Kewney is among Europes best-known IT writers, having covered the PC and communications businesses since the mid-1970s in print, on TV and radio, and latterly on the Web. He has regular columns for Personal Computer World, IT Week, and The Register, and is editor of www.NewsWireless.Net—and has more portable and mobile bits and pieces than anybody could carry, including his own portable Wi-Fi access point and three different cellular data cards. His objective is to be omnipresent on the Internet.

      Avatar
      Guy Kewney

      MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

      Android

      Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro: Durability for Tough...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 5, 2020 0
      Have you ever dropped your phone, winced and felt the pain as it hit the sidewalk? Either the screen splintered like a windshield being...
      Read more
      Cloud

      Why Data Security Will Face Even Harsher...

      Chris Preimesberger - December 1, 2020 0
      Who would know more about details of the hacking process than an actual former career hacker? And who wants to understand all they can...
      Read more
      Cybersecurity

      How Veritas Is Shining a Light Into...

      eWEEK EDITORS - September 25, 2020 0
      Protecting data has always been one of the most important tasks in all of IT, yet as more companies become data companies at the...
      Read more
      Big Data and Analytics

      How NVIDIA A100 Station Brings Data Center...

      Zeus Kerravala - November 18, 2020 0
      There’s little debate that graphics processor unit manufacturer NVIDIA is the de facto standard when it comes to providing silicon to power machine learning...
      Read more
      Apple

      Why iPhone 12 Pro Makes Sense for...

      Wayne Rash - November 26, 2020 0
      If you’ve been watching the Apple commercials for the past three weeks, you already know what the company thinks will happen if you buy...
      Read more
      eWeek


      Contact Us | About | Sitemap

      Facebook
      Linkedin
      RSS
      Twitter
      Youtube

      Property of TechnologyAdvice.
      Terms of Service | Privacy Notice | Advertise | California - Do Not Sell My Information

      © 2021 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

      Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

      ×