| > As a result, whenever you see enterprise WiFi that actually works, you'll probably be able to see a ton of access points covering a large room. IETF attendees reengineer their hotel’s Wi-Fi network - https://www.computerworld.com/article/1448494/ietf-attendees... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771876 31 comments) > “There was no WiFi signal when on the desk in front of the window in my room, but after some experiments, I discovered that the signal was quite good… on the ceiling of the bathroom,” emailed Marc Petit-Huguenin. > “I have a Nexus S phone, so I taped it on the ceiling of the bathroom, and used tethering over Bluetooth to bridge the gap to the desk,” he explained. This is a slow connection, but good enough to send emails over SMTP or use vi [the popular Unix text editor] over SSH.” > ... Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network by Sunday night. ... > The changes made by the IETF makeover team included: > – Decreasing the AP receiver sensitivity ([changing] HP/Colubris configuration “distance” from “large” to “small”); > – Increasing the minimum data and multicast rate from 1Mbps to 2Mbps; > – Decreasing the transmit power from 20dBm to 10dBm; > – And, turning off the radios on numerous APs to reduce the [RF] noise. > ... > Each floor now has approximately two access points on each of these four channels, with the channels staggered on adjacent floor. That design maximizes the distance between access points on the same channel. “I hope this will significantly improve the coverage in some rooms that had marginal or no signal while also improving the signal to noise ratio for all,” he said ---- Note that the changes were being made to decrease the power being used. |