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WiFi Offloading is Skyrocketing
dkatana writes: WiFi Offloading is skyrocketing. This is the conclusion of a new report from Juniper Research, which points out that the amount of smartphone and tablet data traffic on WiFi networks will will increase to more than 115,000 petabytes by 2019, compared to under 30,000 petabytes this year, representing almost a four-fold increase. Most of this data is offloaded to consumer's WiFi by the carriers, offering the possibility to share your home internet connection in exchange for "free" hotspots. But this article on InformationWeek Network Computing also warns that "The capacity of the 2.4GHz band is reaching its limit. [...] the growing number of WiFi devices using unlicensed bands is seriously affecting network efficiency. Capacity is compromised by the number of simultaneously active devices, with transmission speeds dropping as much as 20% of the nominal value. With the number of IoT and M2M applications using WiFi continuously rising, that could become a serious problem soon."
Another technological leap needed? (Opens blouse) This looks like a job for Porno Demand!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have my revenge!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We are all getting RF induced cancer!
while in a skyscraper high above Chicago's Loop, and I could see 100's of AP's.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I wouldn't be caught dead sharing my wi-fi. There are companies that try to make a living threatening to sue you if they see downloads coming from your IP. Even if you're innocent it costs more to litigate than to just pay, but you're still out $5k...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I bought my own modem and router and still had access to these hotspots. Nobody is using my internet but I can use theirs
With the number of IoT and M2M applications using WiFi continuously rising, that could become a serious problem soon.
The solution is simple, get rid of the "Idiots of Tomorrow".
[[... with transmission speeds dropping as much as 20% of the nominal value.]]
Operating at 80% nominal sounds fine. Certainly not like the end of the world. Are they saying that's where the cliff starts, and a 20% drop is a sign that adding a bit more attempted consumption will cause the real big big drop?
Or did they mean "with transmission speeds dropping to as little as 20% of the nominal value."? Because that's not what they wrote.
will will increase to more than 115,000 petabytes by 2019, compared to under 30,000 petabytes this year, representing almost a four-fold increase
10 terabytes would hold all the information stored in the Library of Congress. A single petabyte is a hundred times that. Perspective
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Some of us would prefer to eat, ya know that pesky biological nuterient intake requirement? Yeah, we kind need that more than the WiFi, but if you've got a solution to that issue, we're all ears.
Moon to Mars?
Mom to Mom?
Mozambique to Moldova?
Marmot to Mooses?
Anyway, I'm sure it's M2M apps.
The real reason for the cell companies to "offload" data is to ease the load on their networks. OK, I understand that ... and I realize that it could save me money. If I'm in a hotspot, why not use that instead of eating my limited data plan?
But honestly, Verizon has almost gotten ridiculous with it. Little beg screens ("are you SURE you don't want to connect to wireless?" -- it was a happy day when I figured out how to kill that one), refusing to open Web pages if I'm just beyond the range of a known hotspot, and worse.
Verizon is VERY aggressive about offloading.
Given how much it costs to build a new tower site nowadays, I can understand, but don't be fooled: the benefit of offloading is primarily for the cell carrier, and NOT for you. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I do it every year at the scale conference in LA. I did a writeup on how I did it in 2012 https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa12/technical-sessions/presentation/lang_david_wireless with a followup article in ;login a few months later https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/april-2013-volume-38-number-2/wireless-means-radio
As can be expected, the situation is nowhere near as dire as they predict. In large part because you aren't limited to the 2.4GHz wifi bands.
David Lang
No wonder you have a biological intake issue.....a mouth would really help!
Just run all the guest wifi-traffic through Tor this hides your IP-address. Yes, this will make it slower, but there will be no cops at your door. ;-)
New things are always on the horizon
Perhaps the FCC should allocate more license-free spectrum for this purpose? 2.4GHz was only available because it happened to be shared by microwave ovens, which made the band less usable due to all the interference. How about finding a few more slices of bandwidth to allocate now that everyone is using it? Preferably under 3GHz due to its better penetrative properties.
This whole stupid scheme to have open residential WiFi everywhere is going to blow up in their faces. Sooner or later a script kiddie package will come out that sets up fake APs spoofing all the ISPs login pages to steal credentials and grab sensitive data.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Maybe companies like Comcast are fine with WiFi saturation. They have a monopoly on the cables in most localities, so if anyone is going to challenge them as a competitive ISP, they'll have to do it wireless. Too bad for them (and good for Comcast) if wireless connections are degraded to the point of uselessness.
mobile to mobile, you dipshit
I run the campus and dorm WiFi system at the university that i work at. We have many 250 room(500-750 people) residence halls that use around 30 3x3 802.11N dual band (2.4 and 5.8) access points each (we have a total of ~270 APs in 9 halls). The 2.4Ghz band is perfectly usable ALL of the time(at least 1.5Mbps usable data throughput at all times). Our students usually have around 2000-2500 devices on each band (we allow EVERYTHING except bit torrent) with game systems/appleTV/anything....we do not disallow any device as long as it doesn't impact other people.
Now how do we keep 2.4 usable in an environment like that? We manage the crap out of it. First we only allow channels 1,6,and 11 to be used. This keeps anyone from stepping on two channels at once. We also (and this one helped a lot!) turned the N protocol bandwidth width to 20Mhz instead of 40Mhz. At 20Mhz, you have 3 completely separate channels. When the width is 40Mhz you basically chew up 2 open channels at once.....so all channels are always walking over each other. Although this does decrease raw throughput of a client, it almost doubles the amount of usable connections per radio and helps a lot with the further away users from the AP. We also do 5 minute power and channel tuning where the system keeps all that balanced as usage differs. We also do not allow anything slower then 11Mbs to connect at all. This has a two fold benefit. One being that it makes sure the client/AP stays with the closest one to it and two...and this is the HUGE biggie....it increases the efficiency of the 802.11 time slice distribution. 5.5Mbps requires 10ms per client in radio chat time that the client gets regardless of how much data it is sending or receiving. 2 and 1Mbps requires 20ms! The old 802.11b is horribly inefficient and actually causes less clients to be able to connect to a given AP. Turing of everything but 11Mbps increased AP/client concentrations around 40%. Another thing we do is NOT impose is per connection speed limits. We found this reduces amount of usable connections per AP(about 10%) and slows down everybody for no benefit 802.11 is good at balancing throughput between all clients already. We also force transfer anyone off the 2.4 band that is 5.8 capable. The last thing we do is have alarms for when the system shows very high levels of interference on the 2.4 band. Sometimes this is a bad cordless telephone or something but 90% of the time......it is a stupid microwave that went bad. In dense university living areas, they are EVERYWHERE!! Especially since the students buy the cheapest ones they can find. One bad microwave will kill 2.4 in an entire area.
Now...all that being said...when people tell me that 2.4 is crowded and slow because it is unlicensed, I tell them no....it's just managed very, very badly. I have been wishing that one day in the future...hopefully soon as i have requested it during the public comment phase of the last few 802.11 standards...that good spectrum management would be added to the WIFI standards to help with this. The best they do now is look around and try not to be on the same channel. I wish there could be some extremely low level protocol where all access points as part of spec, discuss the rf environment and attempt to keep it sane instead of the apartment fun of 100's of APs all blasting at MAX power to try and get it's voice heard over everyone else's voice. Last time i went to a friends apartment, he was complaining his wifi was slow. When i looked at the rf information.....the noise floor was freaking -62dbm. I told him it will never work right in that environment.
I generally think people have figured out that WiFi is cheaper then buying more cellular data and is also more reliable. But also I know that most phones switch automatically to WiFi if you have connected before and saved that connection. So its not surprising as more people use wifi and more wifi sites become available.
They will naturally be using it more. Personally, I think the cellular companies are missing the boat as their wired phone partners did with internet. No reason these big carriers can't offer better data plans that are affordable and provide decent amounts of monthly data. How long will they milk the customer for small data plans?
mobile to mobile, you dipshit
LOL, I love it when an AC gets it wrong, and flames someone without realizing they are a bigger Kn0b than the first guy...
I think you will find M2M is Machine to Machine :)
Doubtless it is possible but you really need to hammer the network to do that. What is more they're ignoring that the N standard doesn't use 2.4 ghz.
Been there done that, chumps.
I manage a few wifi networks that routinely have a couple hundred people on them immediately next to other networks that have a couple hundred people on them next to other networks that have a couple hundred people on them... all right fucking next to each other. The only way these networks could be more on top of each other is if all the users spooned on each other.
There aren't any issues with it. What I find fucks with wifi is big thick walls. Shocking I know... Oh and microwaves. Guy goes into the rec room to heat up a burrito or something and anyone using the 2.4 ghz networks starts to have issues. I put up amusing signs informing people of the issue.
Regardless... most new machines are N compatible so... why not use that? I use it because I can. I don't really need the speed difference since the only thing I'd do over wifi would be to browse the internet.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Almost everybody's on 2.4 GHz, and the bands overlap with each other as well as with your microwave oven. If you can run your Wifi on 5 GHz, and don't have distance problems, it's really what you want.
Unfortunately, while my Linksys WiFi router can use both frequencies, it can only use one at a time, and I've got a few 2.4GHz-only devices in the house, so I'm stuck with 2.4. Occasionally it gets tempting to switch it to 5 GHz and drag out its dumber predecessor to run 2.4 on. (I bought the newer one because I needed 802.11n to compete with all my neighbors' 802.11n drowning out my wimpy 802.11g system. I was also surprised to find that it didn't support IPv6 sigh.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I haven't had a microwave in a couple years and I haven't missed it. What is so hard about a stove or a decent toaster oven? Microwaves are power hogs and they make everything (especially pasta/bread) chewy.
Firstly, you don't need a microwave to cook food. In fact, if you're relying do heavily on your microwave, you're probably not eating very well. Which brings me to my next point: you could move away from that horrible food by moving to something like Soylent or vegetables and it'd likely be cheaper.
I have three access points at my house: One on the second floor, one in the basement, and one in the garage. (The AP in the garage is a repeater, with a hacked router doing bridged client mode (not wasteful WDS) wired to another hacked router being a simple access point.)
I didn't always have to do this: Back before the neighbors all had Wifi and a million Wifi widgets all streaming Netflix and Youtube, I had reasonable coverage all over my house and yard with a single WRT54G with a parabolic beer can on one of its antennas.
But now I have to do this just to get a simple Pandora stream running reliably in the garage (20 feet from the house), much less the garden at the back of the lot.
I try to use it efficiently, with the radios only putting out enough power to do an effective job. I manage channels carefully, so that the most-used channel in the neighborhood is the one that is in the basement (where it radiates least), and the least-used channel is used in the garage (where it radiates most), to help mitigate co-channel interference. I always hard-wire my devices if they allow me to do so, to keep wireless spectrum available -- even though I rent (old houses can be ridiculously easy to non-permanently cable).
But when I can sit in my living room and see 17 access points that don't belong to me, with manufacturer-default SSIDs, I know I'm amidst hordes of folks who are using the spectrum for fixed devices: The streaming box by the TV, the old desktop in the kid's bedroom that does Youtube livestreams 8 hours a day -- that sort of thing.
And that's just inefficient use of the spectrum. Fixed devices should be wired if at all possible: Period.
If pre-terminated cat5 cables were cheaper (and I know that quality cables can be very cheap indeed, but they're pretty bloody expensive at Wal-Mart), I think I'd see a bit less of this problem. When it comes to buying a $20 wire to hook up the Fire TV to the 75Mbps modem, or buy a pizza to go with that streaming movie: It seems that most buy the pizza.
I can't say that I blame them. But I roll my own wires, or buy the $2 Chinese imports from deepsurplus.com which seem to be as good as anything else, so I get pizza -and- high-quality streaming -and- improve spectral efficiency of the neighborhood.
Kid-proof tablet..
It's worth owning a microwave to put a donut in it, even if it's only once per year.
Sure, now you hate microwaves for probably conspiracy-related reasons, and nobody should use them anymore. My microwave allows me to defrost or heat up a piece of food in less than a minute. How much energy would it take to heat up an oven to do the same?
They make conductive attenuating wall paint that would do wonders in an apartment. When there are too many cells in a geographic area, it is time to shrink the cells. Effective walls do the job..
~35 db of attenuation works wonders.
http://www.lessemf.com/paint.h...
Some schools with cement brick walls already have considerable attenuation.
In a tightly packed neighborhood or apartments you may have 20-30+ wifi hotspots within rage at any time, probably half of them seem to be on channel 6. I'm surprised they still work at all given the overlap in signals coming from devices from various manufactures made over the past 15 years. Then older non-wifi friendly stuff that pretty much kills any nearby wifi signals like wireless cameras, old cordless phones, baby monitors and more.
And what about your cell phone signal then? Are voice calls still getting through into your faraday-cage-home?
The about of bandwidth those users consume has nothing to do with 2.4Ghz being over utilized. This reminds me of an old manager I had to constantly spread nonsense around to intrigue upper management and make it look like he was actually working.
...it can plug into a router for ethernet. My WiFi is dispensed by my own private router. It is not open and used only by my mobile devices (cell phones, laptops and hand-held game consoles). My main computers and game consoles get a wire.
Just like we'z going to run out of the IPv4z.
Someone plz call me when therz a story.
Virtually every house or apartment built in Southern California in the last 30 years is wrapped in chicken wire and/or expanded metal mesh as a substrate to hold the omnipresent stucco.
And while it does cause some attenuation, it's very, very far from a Faraday cage. All you need is some holes with the perimeter comparable to a wavelength (12cm for WiFi) and it leaks like the proverbial sieve. Building a true faraday cage is quite difficult.
Just go to Krispy Kreme and get your free hot one off the conveyor belt.
"Your hosts file comments are not trustworthy" - by omnichad (1198475) on Friday August 09, 2013 @11:22AM (#44520759)
Oh, really? Ok: MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who has seen & verified its sourcecode too no less as safe) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
&
MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus (per this VERY recent testing of them all) -> http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
&
It's GUARANTEED safe & clean (per it being checked by 57 antivirus programs recently) in BOTH its 64-bit model -> https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
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Tells us, omniweasel:
* HOW'S IT TASTE "EATING YOUR WORDS" flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH ramming them down spiced with the BITTER TASTE of SELF-DEFEAT"?
LMAO...
APK
P.S.=> Lastly: In the past, You also conceded MANY points on hosts to me & made huge mistakes vs. me here http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
&
Here too http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
LMAO @ U, "omniloser"... apk
what if there isn't a Krispy Kreme near me you insensitive clod!
"I just reply to you when I see you spamming Slashdot with your nonsense"- by dave420 (699308) on Friday June 19, 2015 @10:31AM (#49945047)
Why'd you agree w/ my points on hosts then? Quoting you:
"I'm not denying all those things" - by dave420 (699308) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @11:39AM (#47927435) FROM -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
Of course not: It's impossible to dispute HOSTS FILES superiority to other methods!
Since my points in favor of hosts SINGLE FILE native kernelmode faster part show hosts doing more w/ less vs. so-called 'competitors' many part messagepassing + cpu/ram use overheads laden slower usermode FAR MORE COMPLEX 'solutions' doing less than hosts do for more security, speed, reliability, + anonymity!
I make creating a superior more efficient solution EASIER!
(That's more than a mere trolling stalking harassing "ne'er-do-well" like yourself could *EVER* manage).
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"I'm simply pointing out that it takes an AdBlocker to block your spamming"- by dave420 (699308) on Friday June 19, 2015 @10:31AM (#49945047)
I bother you? Then WHY DON'T YOU DO IT & use 'em? Answer that!
(You stalk/harass me instead!)
OBVIOUSLY you don't & you're a "ne'er-do-well" troll & you have "other motivations" (next):
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* QUESTION:
DO YOU WORK FOR AN ADVERTISING FIRM, or ARE YOU A WEBMASTER/WEBCODER http://slashdot.org/comments.p... , or a MALWARE MAKER, or ARE YOU AFFILIATED WITH 1 OF MY COMPETITORS?
Answer it!
As per your usual you'll avoid every question, or lie & You've been EXPOSED in your "motives" in the last link just above, lol!
APK
P.S.=> See Dave420 the "pot puffing clown" SQUIRM - evasions galore will ensue (as well as effete downmods via sockpuppets to *try* vainly "hide it" -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )... apk
Which brings me to my next point: you could move away from that horrible food by moving to something like Soylent or vegetables and it'd likely be cheaper.
Bonus: moving to Soylent lets you leave the Share button behind.
It would be trivial to write a script that just gave you a new MAC address every hour.
You'd also have to write scripts that clear out all the stored objects used by the evercookie library. Even if you abstain from Flash, Java, and Silverlight, there are plenty of persistence mechanisms in both HTTP itself and JavaScript.
You need to just jump in front of a bus, and spare us all your bullshit.