Ofcom Discovers Reason of UK Wi-Fi Failure

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» 10 May 2009

Ofcom Discovers Reason of UK Wi-Fi Failure

An Ofcom-supported report into Wi-Fi performance in the United Kingdom has uncovered the reasons why signals are frequently messed up and failing. Factors ranging from TV-senders, baby-listeners, to even the "Free Public Wi-Fi" virus have all contributed to the slowness of Wi-Fi connections across the UK. Without such interferences, UK residents would probably be connecting faster to the Internet, the report concludes.

Ofcom's objective is to guarantee effective radio spectrum use, including the unlicensed 2.4 gigahertz band used by Wi-Fi. To that end, it tasked Mass, a specialist consultancy company, to investigate how misused and exploited the band is. What Mass found out is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for hampering their connectivity, retransmitted TV in the bedroom or baby listening devices are the ones responsible for the network obstruction. As such, there isn't much a regulator can do about these circumstances except to advise people to switch off their TV senders and baby listeners while connecting wirelessly to the Internet.

Then again, the above situation only happens outside Central London. Within the Smoke itself, Wi-Fi connectivity problems do originate from an excessive number of networks. Housekeeping, beacons, and resends end up filling 90% of the data frames transmitted over Wi-Fi, leaving only 10% for user's data. What's more worrying is the fact that operating overheads for Wireless Ethernet have ended up much more expensive than expected save for the lucky residents of Bournemouth for some reason. Apparently, 44% of data frames contain user data down the south coast.

The study further deduced that, contrary to popular belief, it's not the number of locals that defines the speed of an individual's Wi-Fi connection. Instead, extraneous factors like other networks or devices making use of the radio spectrum have caused UK Wi-Fi to be inefficient, unproductive, and limited.

Beacon frames are those transmitted by access points advertising their presence or by PCs that have been infected by the "Free Public Wi-Fi" virus, which was at first thought to be a Windows-exclusive malware but have since been observed to happen on Meamo as well. Users see the access point with the "Free Public Wi-Fi" name, try to connect to it, and then end up finding themselves advertising the point to everyone else in a never-ending viral cycle. Tragically, it appears that "Free Public Wi-Fi" points are transmitting beacon frames ten times more regularly than they should, leading to enormous amounts of Internet traffic.

Ironically, analog baby listeners produce much more interference than network traffic and the fake "Free Public Wi-Fi" access points. The report also notes that a lot of the overhead traffic shown is produced by devices reconnecting when they've lost a connection.