Wi-Fi Advances
Gizmodo posted about this advancement in the state of wi-fi technology this morning. In a nutshell, it makes Wi-Fi devices continually scan for stronger connections in the background so that when your signal on connection one starts to get weak, your device can silently switch to connection two without you noticing.
When I read this, I thought, um, duh. This seems like the sort of common-sense idea that should have been there from the beginning. Cellphones do it — if you’re driving along the highway, your phone is constantly seeking out the nearest tower. So why’d it take this long to make it happen with wi-fi devices?
I have a couple more common-sense ideas about wi-fi. One of them could probably be implemented now. The other needs to wait a few years, for reasons I’ll explain.
Idea 1: Connection load-balancing among concurrently-available wi-fi networks. If I am sitting, for instance, on the edge of the campus of Freebern University with my laptop, a quick scan might show that I have access to both the campus wi-fi network as well as the network made freely available by Horatio’s Coffee & More across the street. The campus network has lots of bandwith, but since I’m on the edge of campus, my connection to the campus network is weak, and since the school has ten thousand students, the network’s often being used heavily. On the other hand. Horatio’s network is just a DSL line and is therefore slower, but I get a much stronger signal, and there’s only a couple dozen people using it.
In this situation, it would be beneificial for my wi-fi device to continually scan both networks for available bandwidth and signal strength, and balance my network traffic between them to maintain as high a connection speed as possible for me. If I’m using the campus network for 80% of my traffic, but then suddenly a few hundred other students start downloading movies, eating up the bandwidth, it might be beneficial to switch 30% of my traffic over to Horatio’s for a while until the campus network gets less clogged.
Idea 2: Using all wi-fi devices as access points. Ideally, if I’m sitting at the edge of a network’s coverage area, and I’m connected to the network, my laptop could not only use the network to access the internet, but it could also boost the signal and send it out a little farther, extending the network’s range by thirty more feet. If every wi-fi enabled device worked this way, it wouldn’t be too long before nearly everything was blanketed by wi-fi. As people drove into and out of networks, their cellphones, PDAs, and laptops would silently and automatically grab the signal and send it out a little farther, making a dynamic, human-powered web of connections.
This idea won’t work now because being a wi-fi access point requires a certain amount of both processing capability and lots of raw energy, neither of which mobile devices generally have in abundance. But in five years, our cellphones may very well have 3 GHz processors and much lower power needs than they do now, and perhaps we’ll have even juiced up the storage capacity of our batteries.
The neat thing about these ideas is that, if they’re implemented correctly, nobody should even notice these things going on. They’re the sort of idea that work completely off the average person’s radar to make life easier, like ball-bearings in kitchen drawers or that program that automatically sets your computer’s clock when Daylight Saving Time begins. So I hope that at some point in the future, we suddenly notice that these ideas have been implemented, and we didn’t even realize it when it happened.
