Some Wireless Networks Say No to Neutral Web
21-Sep, 2009
Maggie Reardon has posted an article which will certainly make mobile phone lovers want to beat AT&T, Verizon and Comcast like a “narc” at a biker rally. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wants to add two additional rules to the ongoing net neutrality push:
Sounds reasonable to me, but I’m not a major wireless service provider.
Mmm-K, so are the two rules listed above not conducive to an open Internet?
Again, from the article:
Awww. Poor wittle Cicconi doesn’t wanna pway nice wit da big, bad FCC.
Bingo.
Blind Search Engine Test
12-Jun, 2009
With all the Interwebs a buzz about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi has set up a blind search engine test which allows you to see the results from three major search engines. I tried two different search approaches; content about which I am knowledgeable and basically random topics. I won’t even tell you which three are available, but after many searches Bing did not win. The results from a Bing map search were also disappointing. When I searched Bing Maps for “AT&T store Anchorage, AK” several search results included attorneys, because it included the letters “att.” Compare the former results to the same search using Google Maps.
Dual-band Wifi Hotness
3-Apr, 2009
I recently wrote a post describing my Wifi network woes. I was giddy as a schoolboy happy to hear that my conundrum was read and batted about on the Mac Geek Gab #194 podcast. My question is Chapter 7 at 20:22. Thanks again to John, Dave, and Pete for taking my question and cranking out such a great podcast every week. I digress. Here’s the follow-up.
Mac Geek Gab’s Response
Dave and John’s response (in a nutshell):
Makes sense. So, in response to the discussion on MGG, my wife and I do not have any baby monitors (yet) or a cordless phone in the house. We dumped our landline several months ago and only use our iPhones. We also rarely use the microwave and even leave it unplugged when not in use.
More Troubleshooting
So, I changed the channel to “1,” which seems to have helped a bit…meaning the lag (time and frequency) before it connects/downloads at full speed has decreased. Unfortunately, the problem still occurred. I installed iStumbler (which is very cool) and sure enough, there were four other surrounding SSID/routers using channel “6” (my initial default) and one using “11,” so “1” is good. iStumbler also told me my signal strength was at 75%, despite sitting in the same room as the router. Interestingly, I swapped the AEBS out for the Linksys WRT54G (WPA2 Personal) and my signal increased to 90%. I’m guessing the vertical antennas in the back of the Linksys really do make a difference. My closest neighbor has a signal strength around 40%.
The “lag” (period of seconds/minutes of 0.1-0.5 KB/s) seemed to occur when establishing a connection or initially loading a page. Once a download was occurring, the throughput speed remained near the max and does not plummet down to 0.1. Given all I’ve said and tried, is WPA2 really that much more “chatty” when compared to running the network open?
I also noticed when I changed the AEBS router to “n-only” (5 Ghz) the connection on my MacBook was wicked fast with no lag. Unfortunately, iPhones use “802.11b/g” and cannot connect to an n-router. So, I tried setting up both routers, using the AEBS (5 GHz 802.11n) and the Linksys (2.4 GHz 802.11g) in bridge mode for the iPhones. The laptops behaved quite well, but the connections established with the iPhones were dropping faster than GM’s stock.
Dual-band Hotness to the Rescue
So, I bought the new hotness; meaning the new dual-band Airport Extreme Base Station from Apple. This mofo supports 802.11a/b/g (2.4 GHz), is capable of providing a second SSID/network using 802.11n (5 GHz), and supposedly offers twice the range/reliability when compared to the previous version. I put the AEBS downstairs and connected it via Gigabit Ethernet to the Mac mini and enabled the dual-bands. The two MacBooks could now talk to the Mac mini over the 802.11n (5 GHz) network and the two iPhones were sucking down packety-goodness from the 802.11g (2.4 GHz) SSID.
Wow. This thing is wicked fast. I was able to transfer a 2-GB movie file from my MacBook (upstairs) to the Mac mini (downstairs) in 2.5 minutes. The max throughput over the course of the transfer was 17.8 MB/s. All devices remained connected when testing simultaneous downloads/uploads on three devices.
It might be to soon to tell, but so far (only three days) the thing is rock solid and it seems to have solved the “lag/connection timeout” issue I described in my earlier post. It was pretty annoying waiting for minutes to load new sites and downloads to start and I sure as heckfire wasn’t going to run an open (unencrypted) WiFi network.
