https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmZkrdhOjeQ
What exactly happened to cause the WWDC WiFi Meltdown during Steve Jobs’ keynote? Does Apple just not know how to set up a Time Capsule or what?
As it turns out, the problem was just what Apple said it was: too many 3G and MiFi devices. Over on the Future Tense blog, Glenn Fleishman has a very clear explanation of what happened and why.
Wi-Fi can cope with a lot of so-called interference, but the protocol wasn’t designed to handle hundreds of overlapping networks in a small space. (Interference is really the limits of a radio to distinguish signals out of noise, not a physical property of radio waves.)
With so many networks in operation, every Wi-Fi device (notably Steve’s demo iPhone 4) try to be polite. If you’re in a crowded room, and hundreds of people are talking at once, no one can be understood. People stop talking and try to listen, but with so many people, it’s unlikely you could actually get enough quiet to make a clear statement. That’s precisely what happens with Wi-Fi.
At the end of the day, Fleishman blames the unreliability of the in-house, publicly-accessible WiFi at the Moscone Center, noting that “The less people can trust a common shared network, the more they turn to their own, which then, in a vicious cycle, destroys their own network, too.”
If anything else, it’s worth a read for an intriguing, layman-friendly explanation on just how scaleable WiFi networks are and how they manage interference.
