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A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
- dom0 10y agoThere is a German tech saying that goes "Wer Funk kennt, nimmt Kabel" ("Those who know wireless, use wires").
- agumonkey 10y agoFunk means wireless ??
- watersb 10y agoMeans "radio".
- photon-torpedo 10y agoIn this context, yes. More literally, Funk means radio, and the word for wireless would be "drahtlos".
- dom0 10y agoFunk means RF/radio/wireless. The term originates from the first radio transmitter ever, which used spark gaps (spark = Funke, gap = Strecke/Spalte) to generate detectable RF. So German Funk is actually directly related to the English funk (as in music) etymologically.
- agumonkey 10y agoThanks for the detailed explanation.
- tdy721 10y agoI think it's getting Bits and Bytes a little mixed up. You can expect about 1/10th speed? Most file transfer dialogs I've seen ("real world"?) display transfer rate in Bytes. Advertisers use bits, that little marketing wave can actually explain the speed drop to 1/8th of the "advertised" rate.
- aviraldg 10y agoI believe the article takes that into account and describes the speed loss you'd see over and above the "loss" from conversion. (it does use bytes somewhere in between, so you know they're aware of the difference)
- lucb1e 10y agoThat's not what this is about. After converting the manufacturer's bit speeds to bytes or after converting every other tool on the planet's byte speeds to bits, you still get lower performance than the packaging claimed.
- d33 10y agoIt also sucks from the security point of view even the problems could in most cases be fixed with solutions known to the current state of cryptography: https://github.com/d33tah/call-for-wpa3 https://github.com/d33tah/call-for-wpa3
- jradd 10y ago* True, but I doubt anybody is going to sniff my wireless, force me to de–auth and capture the 4–way handshake which she saves to crack offline in the comfort of her home, using cloud computing or gpu's. [0] * The WPS attack doesn't work with every router that supports it, but allows for an easy way to compromise most modern routers. [1] * RADIUS/EAP-TTLS is still rock solid. We all know WEP has already been broken and forgotten. [0]: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Breaking_WPA2 https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Breaking_WPA2 [1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uJE5YYSP-wHUu5-smIMTmJNu84XAviw-yyTmHyVGmT0/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uJE5YYSP-wHUu5-smIMT...
- d33 10y agoShe doesn't necessarily have to go offline given that everyone has a phone with internet access nowadays. Also, with week passwords, dictionary attacks, rainbow tables etc you might actually get compromised in minutes. And instead of de-auth, she might just as well wait. As for "I doubt anybody would do that" - it's not really a good security argument when we have the means easily available.
- Filligree 10y agoThis article is all about unwrapping the marketing copy and explaining why it sucks. That's still valuable, but I was hoping for a more technical view on it. Anyone have an article that explains why the systems are as limited as they are?
- mckoss 10y agoRead more (page 2) - there is a considerable discussion of channel congestion and interference due to over powered zones and large number of devices.
- Filligree 10y agoI did. It's still fairly superficial, and not the focus of the article. What I'm looking for is e.g. an explanation of how MIMO works, or why explicit timeslots were considered useful for 802.11n but not 11b.
- kogepathic 10y agoMIMO isn't that complex. It's using multiple antennas to take advantage of multipath propagation. [0] If you want a very simplistic explanation, it's like giving you multiple Ethernet cables to improve throughput. (To gloss over all the details about RF and boil it down to the practical benefit: more bandwidth) Per the article, not everything with MIMO is advertised as 1x1, 2x2, etc. You frequently find WiFi routers mentioning 1T1R (1x1), or 2T2R (2x2). Or maybe just the Chinese routers I look at. This article is mostly on about interference, which is definitely a big issue in populated areas. But there are definitely issues with Linux and the drivers used by AP manufacturers. There's a project: Make Wi-Fi fast [1] which aims to address these issues. They're making good progress, especially in environments with a lot of clients. Just having one 802.11b or g client can really ruin throughput for newer devices due to the timesharing algorithm used by default. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO [1] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast/wiki/
- stsp 10y ago
- olivierlacan 10y agoThis article should be read by everyone working in open space offices across the world expecting to get decent speed and reliability out of Wi-Fi with more than a dozen people in a single room. An open space office (or any office) for a company that depends on the Internet for any of its work without Gigabit Ethernet cables sticking out of every workstation is pretty damn foolish.
- fulafel 10y ago5 GHz has plenty of non-overlapping channels (24?), so in this situation you can use multiple APs in different room corners set to low power.
- scott_karana 10y agoOnly if the other floors in your building aren't doing the same thing. Which is exactly why this approach is no longer viable with 2.4GHz. ;)
- nerdbaggy 10y agoAs somebody who deploys high density wifi for a living I can agree that WiFi sucks. 5Ghz is already super crowded and it's only getting worse. The new LTE over 5Ghz is going to kill 5Ghz I think once it becomes deployed. Some of the cameras in arena run on 80mhz 5Ghz frequency that hop around and can't be channel planned. They are the worst.
- snovv_crash 10y agoAt least it doesn't penetrate walls, so if you are inside and have a 5GHz router you can be fairly sure of empty channels.
- petra 10y agoYou mean lte-u ,right ? Why is there a difference between the interference of LTE-u to the interference of paid wifi,like wifi-offload ? And.how big is that difference ?
- nerdbaggy 10y agoThe biggest issue is that we would be the company that is providing the WiFi offload and the paid WiFi so we have control over most of the frequency and can channel plan and all that stuff. With LTE-u its going to be a lot harder to channel plan with the cell phone carriers. A lot of the LTE-u installs I bet are going to be contracted out. So to get to the right people to channel plan is going to be a lot of layers. And they may not even want to channel plan, since its unlicensed some people refuse to channel plan.
- sathackr 10y agoAnd they have a monetary interest in wifi not working. Of course, any intentional act to cause interference with wifi users would be illegal, there are tons of things they can do or not do that will cause interference with wifi that might not be provable as intentional interference. You can't add more users to a frequency without the existing users losing something, regardless of how much the LTE-U people sugar coat it.
- 10y ago
- anf 10y agoSounds like "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" syndrome [1] :-) 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgEvjW1Pq4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgEvjW1Pq4I
- VeejayRampay 10y agoWifi sucks because Ethernet is still better in all aspects but mobility to this day.
- emodendroket 10y agoWow, it's better "in all aspects but mobility"? You're kidding. You may as well complain that batteries suck because the only advantage they have over just plugging something in is portability.
- dijit 10y agoI suppose the difference is that I don't expect my television to run on batteries, but I do expect it to work on wifi.
- extra88 10y agoWhy? TVs aren't very portable, carrying content over a wire makes much more sense.
- evan_ 10y agoIt's easier for most consumers to just put their new TV where they want rather than knock a bunch of holes in the wall (or ask their landlord to do the work)
- extra88 10y agoIt's even easier to put their new TV where the wire is.
- emodendroket 10y agoRight, and you accept a degraded experience for the portability. The speaker built into your phone isn't as good as stand-up speakers either.
- 10y ago
- willidiots 10y agoI build public Wi-Fi networks, you've probably used one of them. AMA if you have Wi-Fi questions. To say it "sucks" is a bit harsh. It's delivering multiple hundreds of Mbps to you via an unlicensed contention-based medium. The air interface is like sending packets over a noisy Ethernet hub; it's impressive it works as well as it does. That said, this article's a good primer on some of the protocol's fundamental challenges. In the coming years we'll hear more about 802.11ax, which is thankfully focused on efficiency vs. raw numbers, but likely won't be ratified until 2019/2020.
- bennofs 10y agoI've got a weird problem at my home where WiFi connection on my laptop gets really bad as soon as some particular other laptop connects to the WiFi. Reconnecting fixes the issue. Any idea what might cause this or how to gather more information on potential causes?
- kozak 10y agoTry to switch your router to 802.11n-only mode (no compatibility with b and g).
- esaym 10y agoI had the same issue with a $300 netgear prosafe AP. When certain 802.11ac clients would connect (mostly cell phones), it would randomly get periods of of complete grid lock in the wlan. All clients would have good signal strength but they had no data throughput. Disconnecting and reconnecting the offending client would restore the wlan throughput. The best I could see from packet sniffing was that these certain mobile clients would go into some kind of sleep mode, and when/if packets were transmitted to them, they would not respond with the proper ack (sometimes), the AP would then hang the whole wlan waiting for the ack (I guess). I tried several different netgear prosafe access points (all of them 802.11n). The only thing that worked was getting rid of my netgear hardware and replacing them with a Mikrotik wAP ac.
- koolba 10y agoWhich router do you recommend? Is the 5G band consistently worse than the default (i.e. constant connection drops) or is that just my experience?
- bsenftner 10y agoMy day to day happiness quotient shot up the day I ditched my wireless wifi and ran Ethernet cables through my spaces. I'd realized I was constantly noticing wifi issues, and an apple mbp I use for email seems to drop wifi every half hour. But no longer, with them all wired up! Realizing there are USB3 to Ethernet gadgets really hits home how our modern technology is market-driven-dumb and anti-consumer: all modern laptops don't even have Ethernet ports anymore!
- emodendroket 10y agoI splurged on one of the expensive tri-band routers and honestly now the wireless is good enough that I don't care.
- mrfusion 10y agoWhat is triband. Can you recommend one?
- extra88 10y agoI had to google it, it sounds selfish when the trouble is caused by many neighbors having their own APs nearby.
- emodendroket 10y agoCan't speak for anyone else, but that was not my problem.
- raphyduck 10y agoDoesn't it enhance to the problem further though? (if yes, then yes, wifi kinda sucks)
- Klathmon 10y agonot really, as I believe any router that uses more than one channel at once must disable that feature if there are any other APs that are trying to use any of those channels.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 10y agoIs it right in this instance to lay blame on the marketers?
- draw_down 10y agoI hate wires. But the only thing worse than them is wireless technologies.
- davidgerard 10y agoMy loved one went for a junior sysadmin job. They'd decided to remove all the wiring and use wifi for everything because of just the sorta hype mentioned here. Loved one pulled out a Palm Tungsten C and proceeded to crack all their WEP passwords there in the interview. Got the job too ... and the task of putting quite a bit of wiring back.
- znewman 10y agoWEP passwords? What year is it again?
- extra88 10y agoPalm Tungsten C dates the anecdote more than using WEP.
- davidgerard 10y ago2005ish, when WEP was frequently all that wifi points did. I got the story wrong (just checked) - the wifi wasn't secured at all. :-O
- h4waii 10y agoThe Tungsten doesn't support RFMON, thus it can't do packet injection, not sure how this was achieved. The most Palm OS could do was run NetStumbler, which does discovery by active beacon probing. Maybe with a Zaurus, Libretto, or other small pocket-sized Linux machine of that era, sure.
- davidgerard 10y agoI just asked and it was indeed a Tungsten C (the Tungsten C was a pretty l33t beast for a handheld in that era, I had one too and loved it a lot), but I got the story wrong - the wifi wasn't secured at all. Let me remind you again that they'd replaced their wired network with this unsecured wifi network. Their business was online marketing for companies even more clueless about technology than they were. (Replacing the unsecured wifi with wired was indeed the first job.)
- 10y ago
- employee8000 10y agoIf it's a mess then as a consumer they're doing a great job hiding it from me. I have 20 devices connected to my wifi and everything is running particularly smoothly. I did get frustrated at my 802.11n 4 years ago and dropped $250 for the best ac wifi router on the market and have had no complaints since then. Sure it could be more efficient from a technical standpoint but that's not something I'm interested in and I'm happy at how seamless things are for me right now.
- massysett 10y agoSame here. I have a Roku sitting literally four inches from my router and I haven't hooked it up by wire because I've been too lazy to go get a patch cable (where "go get" means to my basement, not to the store.) I know wired would be faster but wireless has long been fast enough for me not to care.
- mrmrcoleman 10y agoExcellent article. Thanks.
- r1ch 10y agoLots of legacy tech is also one of the reasons why Wi-Fi sucks. If you do one thing today, disable 802.11b on your router. 802.11b beacons alone can completely jam a 2.4 GHz channel in dense deployments, exasperated by those ISPs that broadcast their own SSIDs from your home router. I wrote a more in depth blog about this at https://r1ch.net/blog/wifi-beacon-pollution https://r1ch.net/blog/wifi-beacon-pollution
- extra88 10y agoHuh, I have an older Airport Extreme, it doesn't look like I can disable 802.11b. I can't disable the 2.4GHz band either. Airports were never known for their configurability.
- watersb 10y agoOn my iPad right now. My first-generation "Time Capsule" has four options I can set via the iOS Airport Utility. 802.11n (b/g compatible) 802.11n only (2GHz) 802.11n (a compatible) 802.11n only (5GHz) I gave away my AirPort a while ago, it was also first-gen of its kind so I think it only did 802.11a
- logicallee 10y agoCan we have "home" (home Wi-Fi) added to the title? I agree with others here - the author doesn't talk about how amazing it is that you can connect to a busy cafe WiFi in a busy street with five other networks coming in strong, and a dozen (or few dozen) people using the one you're on, and it still more or less works! (Wow.) Their only focus seems to be on fixed installations, specifically at home.
- apenwarr 10y agoSome even more in depth slides about why wifi doesn't always perform: http://apenwarr.ca/diary/wifi-data-apenwarr-201602.pdf http://apenwarr.ca/diary/wifi-data-apenwarr-201602.pdf
- scurvy 10y agoThe author kinda bungles his analogy/explanation of collision avoidance and detection. Wireless networks don't use CSMA/CD. They use CSMA/CA. There's a huge difference, and it's one big reason why wireless throughput won't ever come close to PHY speed. Wired ethernet uses CSMA/CD and it's one of the reasons it won the LAN networking wars of the 80's and 90's.
- dboreham 10y agoDo today's wired networks (1G+/FD/Cat6/fiber) still use CSMA/CD? I was under the impression that they don't.
- hchenji 10y agoNo, since wired networks are full duplex and are their own collision domains. No need to do carrier sensing at all.
- scurvy 10y agoNot entirely true. You can run half duplex gigabit connections on hubs. Not sure why you would, but you can. IEEE 802.3 covers all Ethernet standards and it still lists CSMA/CD. Largely for historical purposes, but it is in the spec. Starting with 10gig, full duplex is required so that was the first IEEE speed that did away with CSMA/CD.
- scurvy 10y agoSwitched networks are full duplex, point-to-point links, so there's no possibility of a collision from the transmitting station. That said, 802.3 still mentions CSMA/CD for half-duplex backward compatibility. Everything 10gig and above requires full duplex though.
- amelius 10y agoThe article doesn't seem to speak about directivity. Sending a narrow, directed beam of information could reduce contention issues, and reduce power requirements. But you'd need a more advanced antenna (probably an array), more advanced signal processing, and smarter software.
- aidenn0 10y agoDirectivity is great for open-space p2p links, but indoors it's much less useful as walls scatter 2.4GHz with aplomb. There's also the small matter that a dipole is already close to the ERP limit set by the FCC, so most directional antenna setups are not legal
- mentat 10y agoHe's testing performance with cheap laptops and blaming the adapter? Pushing data isn't free. If you have a bad CPU or memory architecture or even bad drivers, you're not going to get network rated speeds. This has been true for wired as well since the beginning of ethernet.
- xbryanx 10y agoWhat software tools do people use (OS X, Linux, Windows) to test out and debug wifi connections?
- lucb1e 10y agoOn GNU/Linux (either Android/Cyanogenmod or Debian) I use wavemon. It's just an apt-get away and tells me more than I can understand (which is fairly rare, especially compared to Android apps which are universally underwhelming).
- searchfaster 10y agoMany poeple also don't understand, how easy it is to frame a deauth packet and disconnect clients from APs. Hotels are known to use this to kick you out of using your own personal hotspot on phones. Thankfully 802.11w PMF solves this and FCC has started imposing fines on hotels doing this.
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- exabrial 10y agoFortunately my Mac doesn't have Ethernet. Wait...
- Moru 10y agoI think that if I was to buy a computer and notice it's missing an ethernet port, I would return it as defect...
- bartvk 10y agoIt's not a big deal. USB-based adapters usually don't need drivers and are $5 to $15, so cheap enough to just put on every desk you usually sit. I've got office space as well as a desk at a regular client. On both desks, there's a USB hub with an ethernet adapter hooked up. I plunk down my laptop, connect to the hub and I'm done.
- rconti 10y agoadjusts Meraki APs to auto power, 40mhz channel width on 5ghz I was dismayed at how terrible range was in my new, Silicon Valley-sized house (~1100sqft). Even with a Meraki AP at the front wall, it would work line of sight about 30 feet and start having issues as soon as I stepped behind a wall. Having a couple APs has mostly solved my issues, but even so, it feels like overkill for such a tiny house. But the neighbors on either side are pretty close, and I see a lot of interference. Worked a case with Meraki support for a long time, and that seems to be the real problem. I didn't realize I couldn't "shout over" my neighbors though, so I had signal strength set to max. Back when I was troubleshooting, I tried everything. 5ghz only. 2.4ghz only. Tweaking channels manually. Tweaking everything manually. The funny thing was, nothing helped.. but when I set things back to auto (Except max power), it all got better. Every incremental change I made caused slightly worse performance, but not enough so to notice. Going back to auto fixed it all. Hoping auto power helps as well.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Tempest1981 10y agoIf anyone is involved in the standards committees -- please try to make the naming more user-friendly. My non-techie friends are totally confused by A, AC, AX, B, G, N, WiMax. No need to reveal the inner workings of the standards committees to the public. Simple numbering would help.
- hchenji 10y agoYou mean like 3G/4G/LTE?
- matwood 10y agoI suggest reading up on how WIFI works and some of the problems like hidden nodes [1]. Sometimes I'm amazed WIFI works at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem
- mhandley 10y agoThe classical hidden terminal problem, where two clients of the same AP can't receive each other and so collide when they transmit, isn't such a big deal with WiFi. First, there are, by definition, no hidden terminals for the downlink (and most traffic is downstream), or the clients couldn't associate with the AP. Second, although two clients can't receive each other's transmissions, if they're associated with the same AP they can usually hear each other well enough for carrier sense to work. The usual problem these days is too many overlapping networks. Different APs on the same channel will not only defer to each other when they can hear each other, but also because the AP tends to use a shorter contention window than clients, when they do transmit, they still collide with each other with moderately high probability. Worse, modern 802.11n and 802.11ac only get good performance by forming aggregates of many packets (up to 64KB in 802.11n, more in ac) to reduce the overhead of medium acquisition. Often they don't use RTS/CTS because this reduces performance in benchmarks. When such aggregates collide you lose the whole aggregate, not just one packet.
- matwood 10y agoThanks for the explanation. It's more evidence to my point that I'm always amazed it works at all :)
- brokenmasonjars 10y agoMy trading terminal I have directly wired in as just issues with wifi can become costly in the middle of a trade. That said, my leisure laptop and all I'm totally fine with wifi. Then I again the leisure laptop really doesn't get the heavy use such as gaming. Some lectures on youtube is probably the most test it gets. My phone (iphone 6), despite being relatively new has always been terrible with wifi which I always found weird.
- ff7c11 10y agoIs there a way I can just not obey the collision domain and transmit over someone else anyway? Would that allow me to skip the queue or would nobody get any service?
- jakub_g 10y agoMore likely, not obeying the rules would lead to collisions -> damaged packets -> retransmissions -> higher channel utilization -> bigger probability of further collisions; and hence lower speed for everyone.
- coleca 10y agoI once had the opportunity to listen to an extremely talented WiFi expert from Aruba Networks explain on a whiteboard to a rapt audience of infrastructure engineers how this works. And how adding multiple SSIDs is a contributing factor to this problem. The most fascinating piece was what he called the "butter factor". The closer a substance is in consistency to butter, the more it will absorb WiFi signals. Aruba had one heck of a challenge installing a WiFi network in the Land O'Lakes manufacturing facilities. They had to use directional antennae mounted mounted at eye level down each aisle of the factory.
- swiley 10y ago> They had to use directional antennae mounted mounted at eye level down each aisle of the factory. Did they ever mention the permanent, cumulative damage concentrated 2.4ghz RF does to the human eye?
- sathackr 10y agoCare to cite a credible source for this claim?
- JBReefer 10y agoI have a counter claim: near face high powered WIFI router, 20/10 vision. Non-ionising radiation is safe to fairly high levels.
- sathackr 10y agoAgreed. The primary concern is tissue heating that cannot be sufficiently dissipated. This is nearly impossible at "wifi" power levels(Below 1 watt) without carefully contrived situations -- such as placing your eyeball(which is the least-equipped organ to dissipate heat) at the exact focal point of a specially designed parabolic dish. I have been safely working around thousands of watts of RF power for 20+ years and have maintained my 20/15 vision.
- hchenji 10y agoThe article misses out on explaining WHY we cannot get the promised bitrates. The answer is Shannon's limit on channel capacity, which mandates that you pay in either bandwidth or high power or low noise (SNR) to get higher capacity. Now these WiFi devices have internal rate adaptation algorithms that choose a particular modulation and coding scheme (MCS) index based on the measured SNR. A higher MCS index means better higher bits per symbol (modulation) and lower overhead code rates, and more antennas (spatial streams), which is how you get the xx Gbps bandwidth advertised on the box. List of MCS indices: http://mcsindex.com/ http://mcsindex.com/ In today's devices, interference is considered as noise, which means that SNR simply drops to a point where the higher MCS indices are not chosen at all. So, even though the device is capable of the advertised XX Gbps bitrate, the SNR isn't high enough to switch to those higher rates.
- freyr 10y ago> interference is considered as noise, which means that SNR simply drops You're arguing that PHY data rates are low because SNR is low, and SNR is low because interference is high. In my experience, this is not the case. PHY rates can be quite high, but the overall throughput is low due to inefficient channel access at the MAC layer. Wi-Fi doesn't consider interference as noise. Since it uses CSMA/CA to manage channel access, a device can only transmit if no other interfering device is transmitting, or if background interference is very low. This is why your device can be operating at a high MCS, but actual throughput will be so much lower. If your devices are using a low MCS, it's more likely that they're getting a weak signal from the access point.
- hchenji 10y agoIn my experience WiFi clients at 2.4GHz never end up using the high MCS indices whenever they transmit (whenever the channel is clear). This has something to do with the fact that the CCA thresholds are fairly high, and that high SNR (30-50dB) is required for activating the high MCS indices[1]. I don't think these SNRs are achievable in a typical setting. It is true that MAC backoffs are also a contributing factor to the throughput being low. The CCA assessment procedure detects both wifi preambles and non-WiFi interference (pure energy detection), which is why I say interference is modeled as noise. CCA does not for example, have some intelligent coexistence algorithm for dealing with zigbee or LTE-U or other ISM traffic. [1]: http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/2014/09/wi-fi-snr-to-mcs-data-rate-mapping.html http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/2014/09/wi-fi-s...
- pedalpete 10y agoThis statement is points to why it doesn't suck for most people "In practice, it wasn't a whole lot better than dial-up Internet—in speed or reliability." At the time of adoption, many people were on dial-up or just moving to slightly faster internet speeds and they were accessing the internet via wifi, so they didn't notice a drop in performance. Wifi speed increased along with access to faster internet. Is it as fast as it can possibly be? No, but it's like having a Ferrari in highway traffic. Most people can't take advantage of the technical capabilities of anything that would be considered better.
- ksec 10y agoIs there any reason why we cant use LTE as a standard for Wi-Fi use case? So we have in house LTE Router with Wired connection, and when you are out of range you are still LTE with your carriers. This is not LTE-U in Rel12 or LAA in Rel 13, which both require a functioning LTE connection as Anchor point. WiFi used to be good in 3G / WCDMA days, but i think the appearance of LTE with constant innovation and advance in both carrier and phone maker has made the LTE experience so much better. And it will only get better with LTE Advance Pro and 5G.
- sniglom 10y agoWhat's going on in this article? Is it the author speaking about having bad hardware and configuration? > In real life, if you had your devices close enough to each other and to the access point, about the best you could reasonably expect [with 802.11b] was 1 Mbps—about 125 KB/sec. I used 802.11b a lot. In a non crowded situation reaching ~5.5mbit was not a problem at all. I remember seeing transfer speeds of about 700KB/s. Why the author ignores the theoretical top speed which is something around ~60% of 11mbit is beyond me. Then the author continues with the same thing again; >your best case scenario [with 802.11g] tended to be about a tenth of that—5 Mbps or so This again is not true. In a non crowded situation I had no issues reaching 2-3MB/s, which is closer to the theoretical limits of 802.11g after factoring in some signal loss. Surely, today when everybody is having wifi you would probably not reach 700KB/s on 802.11b or 3MB/s on 802.11g, but back when it began it was actually feasible.