Bad Connections Dog Google's Mountain View Wi-Fi Network 144
itwbennett writes "Google launched its Mountain View, CA public public Wi-Fi network in August 2006. It was one of the first public wireless Internet services in the U.S. and was intended to provide free service across the city. But in 2012, one year after Google signed a 5-year agreement to continue the service, it started a slow decline to the point of being unusable. 'We started noticing it in very large files, things like operating system updates, but now it's on files as small as 500 kilobytes,' said Rajiv Bhushan, chief scientist of pharmaceutical startup Livionex and a long-time user of the network. A recent test by IDG News Service resulted in a total failure to get a working Internet connection at a dozen sites around Mountain View, including in the city's main downtown area and directly in front of Google's headquarters." I've had disappointing results trying to connect to several other public wireless nets around the U.S., both privately sponsored and municipal. Do you know of any that work especially well?
isn't wifi like the old layer 1 hubs? (Score:5, Interesting)
you transmit into the air and everyone receives the signal and the receiver has to filter out any traffic that is not meant for itself
too much data being transmitted by people in the area and the connection is useless. even my home wifi is almost useless during peak times at night since i have two dozen or so other people with wifi around me
Seems to be a systemic problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Abuse of tool? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I have seen (Score:4, Interesting)
While I haven't used the Google service yet, I see similar problems in a lot of public areas like airports where I happen to find myself a lot. It seems to be more of an issue with the non-direct data traffic like the auth services, ads/gateway tasks, and DNS. More often than not it is one of these 'services' that are unrelated to the traffic that are acting up.
One example is the wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. You can log on, and then getting an IP, getting on the "I agree" screens, the videos you have to watch etc etc are all dog slow to one degree or other. The Delta lounge in the Minneapolis and San Fran airports are very extreme examples of this problem especially when they were T-Mobile (damn their black souls). You would 'get on' and then nothing or something trivial really slow.
Once on you would have decent ping times and some speed tests would be OK but anything that needed 'extra services' was pain. Changing your DNS to something you have or a know fast provider helped a lot which tells me the NAS/Radius/whatever server they use was overwhelmed. Now that I am thinking about it I should do a traceroute next time I am on to see what is happening in more detail, I am curious.
My first bet is that the majority of these services go through a single auth/security box that is under-CPUd and forces everything out a single overloaded link. If anyone has the time. I also wouldn't be surprised if DPI had a hand in it too, especially from Google.
Re:isn't wifi like the old layer 1 hubs? (Score:4, Interesting)
One major problem I see is that many APs default to channel 11, and their auto-channel-selection code only seems to pick channels 1, 6 or 11. Those kinda made sense for 802.11b, but now they just waste available spectrum.
802.11g is 20MHz wide, so should use channels 1, 5, 9 and 13. 802.11n can go up to 40MHz, in which case we pretty much just have channels 3 and 11 left...
There is also channel 14. It is only supposed to be used in Japan and only for 802.11b (10MHz channel width), but I find you can usually activate it for 802.11g in any part of the world with a few simple software tweaks. Probably a bad idea but because channel 14 is spaced 12MHz above channel 13 instead of the usual 5MHz it is usually uncongested, even if channel 11 is flooded.
Re:The solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Or perhaps it's just oversaturated. Wifi doesn't have unlimited bandwidth you know. After enough people find out that they can stop paying for their regular ISP and just hop on a free wifi you'll start to run into problems.