TalkTalk Members - Wifi Utilisation Report

Wifi Utilisation Report

The snappily titled Estimating the Utilisation of Key Licence-Exempt Spectrum Bands (~1.5MB pdf) has just been published as a commission by Ofcom produced by Mass Consultants. The aim was to evaluate the efficiency of the use of wireless communications. They conclude that there is an incredible density of traffic in the unlicensed frequencies which Wifi operates... and the main source may surprise you!

Graph shows proportions of frame types in a few selected locations. Beacon frames are polls from routers and access points telling the world they are there and inviting someone to connect.

The main issue which jumps out from the findings is the proportion of bandwidth taken up by Beacon Frames. Viruses highjack pcs and turn unsuspecting routers into a "Free Public Wi-Fi" access points. Beacon Frames are those used to advertise the access point's presence (and invite people to connect thus potentially becoming infected themselves...). Normal activity of these communication frames should be once every few seconds or so at most. In fact, the report finds the broadcasting of these "I'm here!" type framse to be much more, high as 100s of times per second or the majority of the total frames sent!

Our experiments show that AV senders cause serious disruption to WiFi services. At the same time, WiFi signals interfere with the AV signals.

Mass Consultants Ltd. 2009

The culprits in polluting (for want of a better word) the actual airwaves themselves are household transmitters; for example, baby monitors and wireless video retransmitters. These affect your connection in a couple of ways. One is to blast a huge signal in the same frequency range as Wi-Fi into all nearby rooms (and next-door's rooms...) thus effectively rendering Wi-Fi channels unavailable. The second way is through interference causing blocks on part of the total bandwidth available on a connected channel; a transmitter in your or next-doors house could be rendering part of your Wi-Fi channel unusable thus reducing the potential bandwidth available (in turn your download speeds!)

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