I have been coming close to the data limit on my phone lately so I have been looking for free WiFi whenever possible to cut down on my data usage. Mostly restaurant and coffee shop type places but I have also had problems with the WiFi at a hotel I was staying at (for guests only) and the WiFi where I work. I am not trying to do anything super data intensive like stream video, just download a podcast or update my facebook for example, stuff that I have no problem doing on even a marginal cellular connection. Usually it is not at a time of day where a lot of people might be trying to use the network.
But 90% of the time when I am on WiFi (with a strong signal) I end up with one of the following -
[ul]
[li] No data at all[/li][li] Incredibly slow data with frequent timeout errors[/li][li] Decent data speed but it will randomly stop working and/or give timeout errors.[/li][/ul]
About 10% of the time I find WiFi that works fantastic, including in my house and at a few friends houses. In locations I have been to more than once it sometimes varys between these results.
Making things worse is the fact that my phone has no way to show if your WiFi has a slow or bad data connection or automatically switch to cellular data if you do have a bad connection. If I have a bad connection I have to manually turn off WiFi before I can use data again. I do sometimes come across the login page and that doesn’t seem to be a factor on weather I get a good connection or not.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there an app for that :rolleyes: . I am using an iPhone 4s.
It’s not your phone, and there isn’t an app for it. The reason why free WiFi often sucks is, well, it’s free…to you. To the business it costs money. Usually in these coffee shops and such they have a low end, cheesy DSL connection. Often they have sucky access points as well…usually the freaking AP that comes with their DSL ‘modem’ and was configured by the telco technician that set up the DSL in the first place, as shops like that don’t usually have an IT staff.
Because you aren’t the only person using the free WiFi.
The restaurant/coffee shop/hotel/whatever providing the free WiFi probably doesn’t have a better Internet connection than you do at home but they probably have a number of people sharing it. There’s only so much bandwidth to share between all the users so no one winds up getting much.
I figured there is not a huge incentive for businesses to invest a lot of money in free WiFi but I am sure they need working internet access to run their business. Is the free WiFi for customers usually a completely separate system? I am far from super techy and the WiFi in my house works great.
I am usually using the free WiFi at times where there is likely to be very few other people using it, I work nights and am often the only person around. In fact, one thing that may be a factor is a business doing some sort of nightly upload/download that uses up all the bandwidth because it is off hours. Except I can’t see this happening so often.
The two phrases to bear in mind are Your Mileage May Vary, and You Get What You Pay For. I’ve had good results with some free public WiFi spots and terrible results at others.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get a bit in edgewise on free wifi at hotels. There’s just too many people camped out on the system and it won’t acept any new connections.
Fast food places and coffee shops seem to be pretty much hit or miss. As noted above, some places just run with the wifi abilities of the DSL bridge that they got for free from the phone company, and some will have one or more managed access points.
In general, it seems that if a place has a robust wifi infrastructure for its own internal uses (such as a hospital) and they offer free access, it will work reliably.
The technical term for one of the things that can make WiFi bad is ‘collision domain’, which is the simple fact that if you have multiple devices (laptops, phones, etc.) all trying to use the same WiFi frequency, they’ll inevitably try to talk over each other some of the time. The people who designed WiFi planned for this, and WiFi (obviously) keeps working even when collisions happen, but, like just about every other type of fault-tolerance in networking, handling the errors caused by collisions makes the network slower.
Note that wired Ethernet LANs aren’t collision domains anymore, because everyone talks to a router and routers are smart enough to not try to send multiple conversations down the same line at exactly the same time. With WiFi, the fact all conversations are being broadcast over the radio means the WiFi router can’t prevent collisions.
Making everyone take turns is possible, and some networks (token ring, for one) do just that, but those kinds of networks are less flexible in terms of computers joining and leaving them; modifying WiFi to eliminate the possibility of collisions would likely make WiFi LANs so inflexible that free WiFi as we know it wouldn’t be practical anymore.
Last spring we did some traveling and found the free WiFi in motels to be acceptable. The only complication was one place where they used encryption (w/password) and I had to go thru a bunch of settings to find the right combo to get things to work.
OTOH, a couple months ago we stayed at a place for a few days and the WiFi was atrocious. Could barely maintain a connection for a half minute. It seems that all the motel’s WiFi routers were set for the same channel. Idjits.
I am not a road warrior, but in my limited experience, wifi in hotels and restaurants has been incredibly good. Some connections are faster than my top-of-the-line home cable.
And local cable to businesses does not have a cap, so you’re not getting throttled by the ISP.
The one exception seems to be the local library – barely above dialup, but all the computers they have online at once plus the laptop walkins exceed a typical load on a single restaurant, I’m sure.
