Austin Becoming Wi-Fi Hot Spot

Omega1045 writes "The Austin Chronicle is running an interesting article on how Austin is fast becoming the Wi-Fi Capital of the Free (as in beer) Wireless World. With the industry standardization board Wi-Fi Alliance moving to Austin earlier this year, and groups like Austin Free-Net helping local businesses, the article quotes Austin has having more hotspots 'than anywhere else on the planet'. While this article does quite a bit of bragging about Austin, it also does a great job of highlighting how businesses and local non-profits can work together to promote and profit from free Wi-Fi Internet access. This provides an excellent model for other cities to follow using tools like Less Network."

Comments

Urm what?

[gotr00t]

You have obviously NEVER EVEN been to Austin. This city itself is enormous, with a population of well over a million by now. The UT campus is a mere 500 acres north of downtown (not counting the other properties), with a total population of less than 100,000. Sure, its a huge university, the largest in the world, but it is still just one part of a much larger city.

What you're saying might be true for towns say, Bryan College Station in Texas, where Texas A&M is located.

Re:Saturation

[LostCluster]

The abundant Wi-Fi saturation in the area is actually causing interference between access points. The over-propagation in the area is incredible.

WiFi's collision domain is with anything else that's transmitting on the same frequencies within the 2.4gHz/5.8gHz bands. It's not just your subnet anymore, it's everybody transmitting there.

Just like how these new "Turbo WiFi" devices are suggesting using the entire 2.4gHz range instead of just 1/3 of it like the proper channel-based protcol suggests, it's a tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. When too many people are using WiFi, it'll become unusable for everybody.

Oversaturation is a big issue. WiFi shouldn't be painting a whole city in places where it wasn't asked for.