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Wireless Throughput

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I am sitting in the Kansas City airport watching CNN where they are interviewing someone about WiMAX (At NxtCOMM I guess) and the monitor displays a table comparing WiMax with WiFi, showing a 10x increase in thorughput to 50Mbps and a radious of 25 miles. Hmm....

What the reporter is not saying is that stated wireless bandwidth speeds are typically a)best case scenario and, more importantly, b)shared with all users hitting an access point . In this context an access point is a cell tower. Meaning you might have 50Mbps speeds, but you may be shiaring the bandwidth with hundreds of people in that 25 mile radius.

This hits home for me because I am trying to upload a 40Mb presentation. I know, PowerPoints should not be that big, but that is another story). At this airport Wi-Fi is free, so I thought about 10Mbps and tried it first. Yeah, sure. I can see no less than 10 people around me hitting the same Wi-Fi acces point, so my upload throughput is about 1.8 Kbps - seriously. Something else may be wrong, I don't know.

So I start my EVDO Rev.A card from Sprint and now I am uploading at pretty decent speeds. I still have time to post this before they start boarding my flight to Chicago. My cousin promised pizza from Giodanno's for dinner...I can't wait.

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