WWDC Keynote WiFi woes may have been due to iPhone 4 drivers | Hacker News Reader

WWDC Keynote WiFi woes may have been due to iPhone 4 drivers

arstechnica.com

18 pointsCrazedGeek13 comments

Umm. No.

I was there. Unless my iPhone 3G, MacBook Pro, and iPad all have mysterious pre-release drivers as well, it most certainly was not a driver problem causing the wifi mess. It was unreliable throughout the week.

People who were there last year claimed that the wifi worked quite well. That was before the MiFi became popular, though. (And the crowd size was about the same as this year so Apple clearly knew what to prepare for.)

In a crowd of over 5,000 people there were at times over 500 hundred wifi networks! There should have only been one - the official WWDC network.

Yep I had the same experience with my iPhone 3G and MacBook during the keynote and much of the week, it got more reliable on thursday and friday when there were fewer people around.

I would also confirm the second point, last year I had no problems connecting.

And it did load the title tag so it certainly received at least a couple of packets.

So the failure in a demo of a prerelease hardware device with pre-release drivers having a problem to connect to WiFi in a room in which there are around 500 access points and who knows how many connected wifi nodes warrants this much of analysis and an article of this length?

Wifi does fail here and then. That's just a fact. Even more so if you factor in pre-release devices.

On a different note, in china a sack of rice just fell over.

TL;DR

iOS 4 may or may not have a driver problem that only effects it in highly congested networks.

Click bait article. But what I find interesting about the whole affair is apple didn't plan for it to happen. Guarantee there'll never be another demo done over WiFi. If they need wireless, I bet they'll setup some very short-range signal in another frequency. Or would that be illegal?

The problem is that it seems to me Apple wants to demonstrate their products using the same connectivity options that their customers will be using. If they start using other connectivity options that aren’t available to the end user then a credibility gap could easily be formed in the demonstration of their products.

There are a couple channels in the 2.4Ghz spectrum you can use at low power. They'd have to modify the wifi drivers on the iPhone to tune those channels and modify the wireless bridge to broadcast them. Probably more likely they'd just use wired Ethernet via the dock connector. If they wanted to be authentic they could rate-shape it to match typical wifi speeds.

There's something wrong when journalists have to bring their own MiFis to cover the event. Apple should be providing ethernet - it's more reliable and doesn't cause any interference.

They already do. Apple provide WiFi and Ethernet connectivity at WWDC, but they're hardly going to roll out 5,000 individual cables.

They don't need to provide it for all attendees, just those that are liveblogging. The rest have little need to use the internet during the keynote.

True. At TechCrunch50, I remember that the first 3 or 5 rows (for journalists) all have an Ethernet cable per seat. The rest of us in the back get to enjoy WiFi connectivity.

Why don't they support 5GHz for 802.11n?

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