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Baby Monitors Killing Urban Wi-Fi
Barence writes "Baby monitors and wireless TV transmitters are responsible for slowing down Wi-Fi connections in built-up areas, according to a report commissioned by British telecoms regulator Ofcom. The research smashes the myth that overlapping Wi-Fi networks in heavily congested towns and cities are to blame for faltering connection speeds. Instead it claims that unlicensed devices operating in the 2.4GHz band are dragging down signals. 'It only requires a single device, such as an analogue video sender, to severely affect Wi-Fi services within a short range, such that a single large building or cluster of houses can experience difficulties with using a single Wi-Fi channel,' the report claims."
Why not use some awesome alternate firmware to use a channel (14, anyone?) that nobody else in the area is likely using and thus avoid interference?
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
(or are we using code words like "baby monitor" and "urban" to mean something racist?)
Or are you just following up an otherwise interesting post with a flamebait comment?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
The research smashes the myth that overlapping Wi-Fi networks in heavily congested towns and cities are to blame for faltering connection speeds. Instead it claims that unlicensed devices operating in the 2.4GHz band are dragging down signals.
Since WiFi is yet another one of those "unlicensed devices" that operates in the 2.4GHz frequency range, how exactly does this smash the myth? We all knew that all these various devices operating in the same frequency range would stomp all over each other once there were enough of them.
2.4GHz is known "garbage" band, precisely because it is the frequency for microwave cooking ovens.
Consequently, due to obviously low channel availability, licensing was and is unnecessary. Wi-Fi was intentionally designed to use this unlicensed band to avoid over-regulation. Wi-Fi was never meant to be a Metropolitan Area Network technology it now tries to be, but to achieve some kind of "no pigtail" LAN connectivity inside single room/office instead, just a little bit more then Bluetooth. It's main competitor at the time was IrDA!
All devices in the 2.4GHz ISM band are unlicensed devices. Baby monitors and wireless TV bridges are just as legitimate users of the bandwidth as Wifi networks. You can use the relatively free 5Ghz band, but it's only a matter of time until other applications also start to crowd that frequency. That's why the ISM bands have power limits, so that interference is limited to the vicinity of the device.
I think you're just reading this whole thing with the wrong emphasis. The interesting part of this is not that a baby monitor can cause interference for WiFi. The interesting aspect is more that the interference many people experience in urban areas is because of devices like baby monitors.
Lots of people in big cities find trouble maintaining a stable WiFi network because the signal keeps dying even though everything is well within range. The assumption has been that it's a result of too many people having WiFi in too great a concentration, and so they're all interfering with each other. So the news here is the idea that, no, it's not other WiFi devices, it's baby monitors.
Part of the problem is, being in a city, it's not easy to tell what the problem is. If at random times of the day your WiFi cuts out, how are you to know that one of your neighbors is turning on the baby monitor? If you live out on a farm with nothing in range but your own house, you're probably going to figure it out much more quickly.
It's so sad that everybody has to squeeze everything from microwave ovens to wireless into 1% of the useful airspace. With basically every computer on Earth having WiFi, the government should stop kissing the corporations asses and allocate a slice of free spectrum where CSMA/CA (collision avoidance) is mandatory. Problem solved.
As the father of an 18 YEAR OLD who was at one time a 9 month old I hate to be the one to tell you but you have been trained. He won't stop working himself into those huge fits until you stop running into the nursery every time he wakes up.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
The point is that they need to understand that any device run on open frequencies can not and must not be trusted or relied on.
If I jam your baby monitor, you have no recourse, because the FCC blurb on it states quite clearly that it must accept any and all signals, including harmful ones.
If you rely on your baby monitor, or trust what it sends, switch to one that doesn't run on open frequencies.