I’ve been noticing recently that wi-fi connections are flakier than they used to be. It seems to me that from about 2001 to 2005, it was almost unheard-of for my home wi-fi connection to suddenly drop out on me. In the last year or two, it has seemed like this is an increasingly common occurrence. For the last half hour or so, my Internet connection has been going out for 5 or 10 seconds at a time every few minutes. It’s not a huge problem, but it happens just often enough to be pretty annoying.
I can think of a number of possible explanations for this. One might be that my current laptop, a MacBook I bought about a year ago, might have a lower-quality wireless card. Another might be that I’m using wi-fi in more places where it might be hard to get good coverage. Or maybe I’m imagining things.
But it also seems possible that we’re starting to experience of a tragedy of the wi-fi commons. I seem to recall (and Wikipedia confirms) that wi-fi cards effectively have only 3 “channels” to choose from, and that the wi-fi protocol isn’t especially well-designed to deal with multiple networks using the same channel at close proximity. It has now become commonplace for me to whip out my laptop in an urban setting and see a dozen or more wi-fi networks. Which suggests that there’s got to be some serious contention going on for those channels.
If I’m right (and I might be wildly off base) I’m not sure where the analysis goes from there, either from a technical perspective or a policy one. One knee-jerk libertarian answer is to suggest this is an argument against allocating a lot of spectrum to be used as a commons because it tends to be over-used and there’s no one in a position to resolve this kind of contention. On the other hand, maybe people are working on better protocols for negotiating this kind of contention and achieving a fair sharing of bandwidth without these problems. Or perhaps—at least for wi-fi—it would be possible to allocate enough bandwidth that there’d be enough to go around even in dense urban areas.
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