

WWDC Keynote WiFi woes may have been due to iPhone 4 drivers - CrazedGeek
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/wwdc-keynote-wifi-woes-may-have-been-due-to-iphone-4g-drivers.ars/

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BigZaphod
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.

~~~
johnmshea
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.

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pilif
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.

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Judson
TL;DR

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

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btucker
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?

~~~
Saad_M
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.

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kylec
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.

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

~~~
kylec
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.

~~~
alain94040
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.

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

