{"id":5579,"date":"2009-05-11T09:28:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T17:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/what-slows-down-your-wi-fi\/"},"modified":"2009-05-11T09:28:02","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T17:28:02","slug":"what-slows-down-your-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/what-slows-down-your-wi-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"What slows down your Wi-Fi?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tThe Register stumbled upon an eye-opening report commissioned by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2009\/05\/10\/ofcom_mass_wi_fi\/\">sources of Wi-Fi interference in the UK:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What Mass discovered (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ofcom.org.uk\/research\/technology\/research\/exempt\/wifi\/wfiutilisation.pdf\">pdf<\/a>) is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their offspring sleeping, and there&#8217;s not a lot the regulator can do about it.<\/p>\n<p>Outside central London that is: in the middle of The Smoke there really are too many networks, with resends, beacons and housekeeping filling 90 per cent of the data frames sent over Wi-Fi. This leaves only 10 per cent for users&#8217; data. In fact, the study found that operating overheads for wireless Ethernet were much higher than anticipated, except in Bournemouth for some reason: down on the south coast 44 per cent of frames contain user data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When 90% of the frames are overhead, the technology itself has a problem, and in this case it&#8217;s largely the fact that there&#8217;s such a high backward-compatibility burden in Wi-Fi. Older versions of the protocol weren&#8217;t designed for obsolescence, so the newer systems have to take steps to ensure the older systems can see them, expensive ones, or collisions happen, and that&#8217;s not good for anybody. Licensed spectrum can deal with the obsolescence problem by replacing older equipment; open spectrum has to bear the costs of compatibility forever. So this is one more example of the fact that &#8220;open&#8221; is not always better.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Register stumbled upon an eye-opening report commissioned by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, on sources of Wi-Fi interference in the UK: What Mass discovered (pdf) is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/what-slows-down-your-wi-fi\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What slows down your Wi-Fi?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,38,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-net-neutrality","category-wireless"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-1rZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}