It’s time to have “the talk” about wireless Sep15

It’s time to have “the talk” about wireless

Everyone gather ’round, it’s time to have “the talk” about wireless. I don’t mean the birds and the bees, even though wireless standards do seem to reproduce at alarming rates. No, what needs discussion is the part where wireless throughput claims are an obvious pack of lies. More importantly, how does this marketing malarkey affect the real-world business of supporting users in an increasingly mobile world? Let’s start off with a VMworld anecdote. While anecdotal evidence isn’t worth much, it’s illustrative of the actual theory behind how wireless networks work, so it’s worth bringing into the discussion. VMworld 2014 kicked off on Sunday, August 24th. Despite this, the wireless network outside the main “Solutions Exchange” convention hall was up and running the Friday before. On Friday, with only a handful of nerds clustered outside the Solutions Exchange it was entirely possible to pull down 4MiB/sec worth of traffic from the internet. Some things were clearly being traffic managed, as wrapping up the traffic in a VPN tunnel could increase throughput by up to 10x. Saturday was more crowded. 100 nerds become 1000, and 4MiB/sec became a fairly consistent 500KiB/sec. Still entirely useful for web browsing, but pulling down 100GB VMDKs from my FTP back home suddenly got a lot harder. By early Sunday one critical element had changed; where Friday and Saturday say maybe 3 different access points scannable from outside the Solutions Exchange, suddenly there were over 100. Almost all of them MiFi hotspots, or smartphones that had had their hotspot feature enabled. Sunday morning still saw only about 1000 devices vying for access outside the Solutions Exchange, but all these additional MiFi points had turned the 2.4Ghz spectrum into a completely useless soup. A consistent 500 KiB/sec became an erratic, spiky mess...