http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031024S0011
Urban Wi-Fi Gridlock Predicted To Arrive in 2004 October 24, 2003 (5:54 p.m. EST) By W, David Gardner, TechWeb News The Wi-Fi world has always had the interference bogeyman lurking in the shadows, threatening to tie hot spot users in knots. In a report entitled "The Urban Wi-Fi Crash of 2004," Peter Kastner of market research firm Aberdeen Group says interference in urban Wi-Fi nets is close at hand. With 300,000 to 400,000 Wi-Fi access points sold every month, Kastner says it's just a question of time before urban users of the wireless technology feel the pain. "Even if you are six feet away from your access point," says Kastner, "some other access point within football field-wide sphere can ruin your Web surfing or work at home... Nearby access points can spoil the business access to wireless LANs just as easily as personal access." Kastner, who is senior analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen, says the more powerful or advanced flavors of 802.11 won't be a help to users, because they are automatically "dumbed down" by other access points. "New purchases are going to 802.11g because of the improved throughput," says Kastner, "but there's absolutely no improvement in the interface." There are potential interference problems galore due to 802.11b and g technologies residing on the 2.4-GHz band along with cordless phones and microwave ovens. Adding to the problem is that fact that faint distant signals on the band can interfere with access points. There are more channels on the 802.11a GHz band but that technology's -- more costly to begin with -- consumes more power and range access suffers beyond 20 feet. Kastner has some personal experience on the issue. Set up with a Wi-Fi laptop in his Boston apartment, he suddenly experienced interference problems in September. "The event I can point to is in September when the college kids came back to go to school," he said. "All of a sudden my laptop got confused by four access points." The experience got him to thinking so he researched the phenomenon and wrote the report. He believes a sort of critical mass of Wi-Fi interference will be reached in 2004 in many urban areas. "In my neighborhood," he said, "we've already exceeded the critical mass." So what's the solution? The idea of more powerful antennas is a non-starter simply because it doesn't address the interference problem; reception in outlying areas might improve but antennas and repeaters only worsen the interference problem by proliferating the number of Wi-Fi access points that can interfere with each other. Theoretically the measure of having all Wi-Fi users in a given area using the same SSID (service set identifier, like "Linksys or WLAN") might work, but security would be negligible and thereby defeat this approach. That leaves a political solution -- convincing politicians and government agencies to open more wireless spectrum. Says Kastner: "The long-term solution is to allocate more bandwidth -- and hence more channels -- to the 2.4 GHz unlicensed radio band." -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
