Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Urban Wi-Fi Gridlock Predicted To Arrive in 2004

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:23:09 -0500

Urban Wi-Fi Gridlock Predicted To Arrive in 2004

October 24, 2003

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."

 http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031024S0011

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