Blame baby monitors, not congestion, for your WiFi woes, says a new study commissioned by UK regulators:
The 2.4GHz band actually has quite a bit of spectrum — a full 83MHz between 2.4GHz and 2.483GHz. Teams were dispatched across the UK to check connections in cities of all sizes, but they found congestion problems only in the center of London. Because WiFi is so limited by distance, 83MHz of spectrum proved to be plenty, except in the most densely populated bit of the country.That’s not to say that WiFi is an efficient protocol; it’s not. Researchers found that a full 90 percent of all “frames” transmitted by WiFi radios contained only management and node broadcast data. “We have found that it is rare for the user data frame rate to exceed 10 percent of the total frame rate,” says the report. Even so, the idea that one’s neighbors are “hogging” all the bandwidth in a particular WiFi channel by excessive downloading simply isn’t supported by the data.
The culprit for poor WiFi turns out, in almost all cases, to be interference. And it’s not generally interference caused by other WiFi radios; the problematic interference is caused most by baby monitors, microwaves, portable phones, and most of all by “audio video senders” (wireless video extenders) which are common in UK apartment buildings.
“The effect of AV senders on WiFi clients is distinctive and repeatable,” says the report. “As these devices are inexpensive and readily available in supermarkets, we conclude that the majority of the accusations levelled at residential users for abusing the WiFi networks are actually caused by the installation of AV senders or similar devices. Such devices can easily deprive neighbors of use of a WiFi channel and, at the same time, give the impression of overuse of the channel.”