Slashdot Mirror
The Joys of Microwaves And Wireless
Simone Paddock pointed me to the article on O'Reillynet about some quick and dirty testing of WEP, wireless, microwaves, ovens and all sorts of fun stuff. The article is entertaining and informative - my favorite kind.
As an engineer who works on 802.11 radios, I have a few issues with these tests.
First, the author performed only one test for each configuration. You can never come to a valid conclusion about performance from a one-shot test.
Second, the author doesn't really know much about RF, otherwise they'd realize that Microwaves are shielded to prevent from cooking the person operating the thing. While the shielding doesn't stop everything, it stops enough to let most 802.11 traffic get through without too much difficulty. As others have pointed out, the way to go is to operate other devices that communicate at 2.4GHz, such as certain cordless phones, Bluetooth devices, etc.
Third, the author doesn't appear to have read much on 802.11, or the author would realize that some amount of the overhead involved in 802.11 is used up in wireless headers that a simple application is never going to know exist.
Fourth, the author used tests on one vendor's radio to come to a conclusion about all 802.11 radios, and I can tell you that not all radios are created equally.
On the other hand, the author's results aren't actually terribly off from the performance seen in most 802.11b radios. Most 802.11b radios actually get a final throughput of about 3-5Mbps when running at "11 Mbps." Some of this is due to bus speed limitations (PCMCIA is slow), and some of it is due to the radios themselves (hey, you try getting a nice fast processor in there and maintain the price points), but whatever the limitation, no radio gets much more than 5Mbps in the best-case scenario (at least, of the radios currently on the market).
In the meantime, I'm looking forward to 802.11a, which will operate in the 5GHz band (hopefully, there will be less interference there) and should have a throughput of about 54Mbps (if they can ever finalize a standard, that is).
But I keep getting these festering lesions on my arms and chest when I try play EQ or Q3A. Must be 'line noise'.
"I pray that I never suffer an internal burn" - Nicolai Tesla
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!