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Hi - I hope the intended humor was taken that way! I really do see it as courageous, because I would never take it on. How do you efficiently provide remote sup

Hi - I hope the intended humor was taken that way! I really do see it as courageous, because I would never take it on. How do you efficiently provide remote support for mass-deployed, consumer wifi in residential structures - which also means unmanaged networks and systems of every imaginable variety and configuration? It can be hard enough to diagnose problems in person, on-site, in structures I know on networks I built. I can't imagine the support calls, even if you tediously work with the end-user to narrow it down to the wlan signal: "Do you have metal mesh your walls? Baby monitors? Fluorescent bulbs? A microwave? Do the bulbs or microwave leak? Do your neighbor's? Does your neighbor have wifi? Do you an RF sensor in the right frequencies, mapping software, and do you know how to use them?"

apenwarr 8y ago
No offense taken. The wifi project was indeed very hard, but I think we moved the world forward at least a little bit. If you're really interested, you can find out more about how we did it in my recorded talk here (although the slides pdf has a lot more detail): https://apenwarr.ca/log/20160328 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20160328 And some additional comments on the evolution of wireless networks in my talk from Battlemesh last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL3bvPCw5QCLJ-VJPamVeQx-UPNBVyaopj&v=vJL8xrQ3gOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL3bvPCw5QCLJ-VJPamVeQx-U... One part that made the problem more tractable was that we both ran the network and made the devices. This almost never happens. It means we could optimize the devices for quality and supportability instead of making the usual consumer device tradeoffs (is it pretty enough? cheap enough? glitzy enough?).