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Muni Wi-Fi: Not As Good As It Gets
By Larry Hendrick | March 31, 2007
Olga Kharif links to a report done by several companies interested in the true strength and stability of Muni Wifi networks. These companies did testing on some of the largest deployments and presented their findings at the Muniwireless Dallas conference. What they presented didn’t paint a very pretty picture for the advocates for the Muni WiFi movement.
Here’s a link to Olga’s article at Business Week.
Muni Wi-Fi: Not As Good As It Gets
The results are in. After testing some muni Wi-Fi networks, three independent industry researchers have found that most cities’ networks offer inadequate security, poor coverage and don’t even support voice (and voice is the main reason people say they want to use Wi-Fi in the first place). Only 20% of municipal networks tested supported voice services over Wi-Fi.
This article at MuniWireless.com provides additional information from the conference, as well as a link to the white paper (pdf) if you want to research in depth.
MuniWireless - Why independent testing is necessary
Jim Geier provided a fascinating view into Wi-Fi in San Francisco. Geier’s firm does network pre-installation technical assessment and post installation testing. Here’s what he discovered when he did a Wi-Fi network scan in San Francisco:
- he found between 40,000 and 50,000 wireless networks;
- 75 percent of networks are not secured;
- most locations have one access point, very few have more than one access point;
- 75 percent are on channel 6 (the default on most access points);
- network utilization is only 1 to 2 percent, no significant threat of RF interference;
Topics: WiFi |