Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks And How It Can Be Helped, Part 1
Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks And How It Can Be Helped, Part 1“All you bloggers need to turn off your base stations,” an increasingly annoyed Steve Jobs told the crowd at the June 2010 iPhone 4 demo. “If you want to see the demos, shut off your laptops, turn off all these MiFi base stations, and put them on the floor, please.”
In a crowd of 5000 people, roughly 500 Wi-Fi devices were active. It was the wireless apocalypse, and not even a fleet of Silicon Valley’s finest backstage engineers could do a thing about it.
If this example of 802.11 extremity sounds inapplicable to your everyday world, refer back to August 2009, when Tom’s Hardware took its first look at Ruckus Wireless's beamforming technology in Beamforming: The Best WiFi You’ve Never Seen. In that story, we introduced the concepts of beamforming and examined some competitive test results in a big office environment. As enlightening as this was at the time, there is clearly much more of the tale to be told.
This literally came home to me a few months ago after setting up a nettop for my children and using a dual-spectrum (2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz) Linksys 802.11n USB dongle to connect to my Cisco small business-class 802.11n access point. The wireless performance was horrific. We couldn’t even stream YouTube videos. I assumed the problem was the nettop’s feeble processing and graphics capabilities. One day, I tried substituting the 7811 wireless bridge kit from that previous piece. The difference was instantaneous, and video looked perfectly fluid. It was as if I had plugged in a wired Ethernet connection.
What was going on here? I wasn’t in an auditorium filled with 500 live bloggers crushing my connection. I was using supposedly best-of-breed small business Cisco/Linksys gear that I’d personally tested and knew had higher performance than most competing brands. It wasn’t enough to have switched to the Ruckus-based wireless bridge. That left too many unanswered questions. Why was one product performing better than the other? Why had editor Chris Angelini himself observed in our original article that not only did the up-close proximity between his client and the access point impact performance but so did the shape of the AP itself?
Just read all the comments above. I know it's free content and I actually like the article, but you should really take a look at all the feedback you are getting.
Hang around the wireless router/dsl section of your local PC hardware store and listen to the stories...
My favorite one was where two kids persuaded their mom that they needed a $120 wireless range booster for the grandmother's notebook which was in a tricky part of their property to reach. How about giving them a $5 phone cable and a better access point for $30...
Just read all the comments above. I know it's free content and I actually like the article, but you should really take a look at all the feedback you are getting.
ROFL! But seriously this layout sucks.
Have you ever read a book to a 4 y o?
We do, regularly. This one ended up in a picture story; the next one will go into a regular review format!
Thanks for the feedback, guys.
Chris
But please Toms, as everyone else has said, sort out your format. its a simple thing, but spoils the reading.
Seriously, 4 year olds are not reading your articles. If someone DOESN'T want to read more, why on Earth would they not just STOP READING. Do you have an option that says "Stop looking at pictures"? How about an option that says "Stop having ADD and being illiterate"?
Are you afraid that 15 sentences might entice readers but 18 sentences are going to scare them away? What planet are we from that this makes sense...as a scientist and computer programmer I always try to be as skeptical as possible that I am wrong and think of ANY possible mistake or oversight that I have made, but I cannot think of ANYTHING that would explain these ludicrous layout choices.
If I have clicked "Read more" 15 times, maybe just maybe you should keep track of that and not force me to click ANOTHER 15 times? Do most readers have such an attention deficit that they have to reconfirm to you their intent to read your article every 30 seconds?!