Breaking The Chain Of WiFi Congestion: Eliminating The WiFi Traffic Jam
I think it is safe to say we have all experienced it, you pull your phone or laptop out to connect to what you expect to be a busy WiFI network, with your fingers crossed hoping to connect, only to have your suspicions confirmed and be disappointed with an unusable connection. You sit there refreshing the page again and again in hopes that something will change, it shows that you have connected to the network but there seems to be little or no activity, sadly it is inevitable that you give in to the reality that it just isn’t going to work.
Last week I went to a well-organised event that had hundreds of people in an audience to watch startups pitch their projects to the crowd, towards the end of the evening they announced that they wanted the audience to vote for their favorite pitch by scanning a QR code and submitting their vote online. The cellular coverage in the auditorium was terrible and the event organiser had anticipated this so they bought their own commercial-grade WiFi access points to allow everybody to connect to the free WiFi.
I think you already know where this is going, that’s right, hundreds of people pulled their phones out at the same time and all tried to connect to the WiFi network and as you could imagine it choked. They allowed about 5 minutes for people to connect to the WiFi, scan the code and submit their vote. Unfortunately, it was an auditorium filled with people looking at each other and asking if they have managed to connect while refreshing their phones only making matters worse for themselves with every swipe of a refresh.
The organisers idea of having a WIFi hotspot that people could connect to in a room with bad cellular coverage was great but they failed on 2 key parts. The settings & the technology.
The Config:
In the movie Spaceballs, there’s a famous scene where the villainous Dark Helmet exclaims, “I said across her nose, not up it!” This quote provides an excellent analogy for setting up a WiFi access point and choosing the best channel.
Think of your WiFi signal as a laser beam, and your access point as the target you’re trying to hit. If you aim your laser beam directly at the target, you’ll get a strong hit with little interference. However, if you’re off-center, you may miss the target entirely or hit something else instead.
Similarly, when setting up a WiFi access point, you want to choose a channel that is free from interference and other signals. This means that you should choose a channel that is not being used by any neighboring networks or other sources of interference. If you choose a channel that is already crowded, your WiFi signal may get lost in the noise, resulting in slow speeds, dropped connections, and other issues.
To avoid interference and set up your access point for optimal performance, you can use a WiFi analyzer tool to see which channels are in use and which ones are free. This tool is like the guidance system on Dark Helmet’s helmet, helping you find the perfect angle to aim your laser beam. With WiFi there are 3 main channels (#1, #6 & #11) and at this venue channel #1 was wide open and free from interference, unfortunately, they decided to use channel #6 & channel #11 that both already had three or more access points broadcasting on that frequency.
The Technology:
Cellular carriers will tell you that there is nothing more difficult to handle than a surge in connections. Congestion spikes are difficult to handle, when a Boring 747 or Airbus A380 lands at an airport it’s not uncommon to see 400–500 devices try to access network coverage in a very short period of time, it’s no wonder you sometimes receive the same txt message twice when you land. The hardware required to handle this type of surge is often specialist equipment.
I didn’t get to see the equipment but I suspect it was WiFi5 hardware. I would guess that the hardware they used would have been able to handle everyone connected to the network under an ideal situation but there was a massive spike in demand and the channels were configured incorrectly. Even if they had used the correct channels it would have been likely that people would still have to wait for their turn and the network would be slow.
If they had WiFi 6 hardware it would have been much faster, able to quickly deliver packets to people and then move on to the next person. In a previous article called “The Secret Ingredient That Makes WiFi 6 So Fast” I explain why WiFi6 is better set up for this type of use because of OFDMA.
In Spaceballs, there’s a scene where Mel Brooks’ Character Yogurt is explaining merchandising. Yogurt offers them a “Spaceballs t-shirt, colouring book, lunchbox, breakfast cereal & a flamethrower.” This scene provides a great analogy for understanding the difference between OFDM (WiFi5) and OFDMA (WiFi6).
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is like a single person shopping but only able to put one item in the shopping cart at a time. It’s a transmission method that divides orders into their own full-size shopping cart regardless of how much space is left in the cart. OFDM transmits large amounts of data at once, making it efficient for transmitting bulk data, such as large files or video streams, or flamethrowers. So if 100 people are trying to connect to the network to get t-shirts, that’s 100 shopping carts in the store.
On the other hand, OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) is like shopping until your cart is full, and if you don’t fill the cart someone else will fill the gaps. Each item is still delivered separately but you haven’t clogged the store up with half-filled shopping carts. It divides the channel into multiple smaller sub-carriers, allowing multiple devices to access and transmit data, increasing network efficiency. In this scenario, you could probably fit up to 10 t-shirts into a cart so the store is much less congested.
So, in conclusion, half the time you can get it wrong with the wrong settings, and half the time you can get it wrong with the wrong hardware when you combine the two you get a completely useless network. But this proves just how important it is to configure the devices correctly, it’s not enough to just buy the latest hardware and think it will be ludicrously fast, it needs to be configured to get to plaid.
It’s a good thing that there is a company that is working to make WiFi routers and access point setups seamless and easy, soon it may be impossible to configure such a simple mistake that many people fall for.
