Why Wi-Fi sucked at Mobile World Congress

There were dozens of Wi-Fi networks at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Now with more than 60,000 people in attendance, the systems were so overloaded that there may as so then have been one landline connection with a 56k modem.

Areas marked "free Wi-Fi here" often had no or painfully slow connections. Demonstrations from Microsoft, Google, Intel, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Technology In Motion, among others, became comical when the presenters were unable to connect even to their own networks.

The problem with networking conventions

"That's the problem with networking conventions," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt while a keynote address this week. "Everyone is on the network."

Mobile World Congress was a peculiar event in that most people in attendance had smart devices with the ability to connect both to 3G networks as then as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Many of the attendees carried two such gizmos, like a BlackBerry and an Android phone, or an iPhone and an iPad.

Cisco, which operated the free Wi-Fi network at Mobile World Congress -- and plastered that fact all over the convention -- estimated that there were 40,000 unparalleled devices trying to connect to its network alone. Average peak usage reached about 3,200 devices managing to connect simultaneously to Cisco's 110 access points.

Though Cisco asked to install more access points, Mobile World Congress' operators limited the availability of the free network to 10% of the conference's locations. That led to digital stampedes: The press room access point, designed to supply connections to 200 customers, had 700 people accessing the network.

Why? Three main differences: A small minority of the more than 100,000 fans at the stadium were accessing Wi-Fi, Cisco was able to install 1,000 access points at Cowboys Stadium, and there wasn't near as much interference from other networks.

In Barcelona, just in the immediate area surrounding Cisco's booth, the networking company detected 75 Wi-Fi access points. That's going to cause a lot of interference, which is part of the reason why other networks were malfunctioning as then.

The world beyond tech industry conventions?

Does this matter in the world beyond tech industry conventions? Yes, because the hockey-stick-like growth of smartphones, tablets and other connected devices means this kind of data demand deluge is happening more often.

Network operators are already dealing with this problem in crowded areas like baseball parks, concert venues and other big public locations, like Times Square.

Attractive solution

Wi-Fi is an attractive solution, because it offers the same amount of coverage at 1/4 to 1/5 the cost of a cellular solution, according to Ray Smets, head of Cisco's wireless networking business unit. Even though you can't make traditional cell phone calls over Wi-Fi, more services like Skype are popping up that allow you to make Voice over Internet Protocol calls.

Practically, it means mobile carriers will be able to deploy 2G, 3G and 4G networks on one light radio unit instead of putting up three separate cell antennas. The incredibly efficient design of the device means the light radio offers 30% more capacity, doubles the number of downloadable bits and cuts out the interference that was being caused by all of the other antennas operated by the same network.

Alcatel-Lucent is planning on bunching the light radios at the same time into four-by-four squares to create "metro cells," which can be deployed in public areas to offload the demand placed on the network's towers.

The end of the conference

At the end of the conference, Cisco said it was proud of the service that it provided. The company estimates that it transmitted more than 1 terabyte of data over its free network.

At Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest networking convention, the wireless network was unavailable. It's a problem with no easy solution. More