Will's Web Watch: Who's been eating my wi-fi?

Want to know why wi-fi coverage sometimes isn't all it's cracked up to be? It may have something to do with large plants in the vicinity, or even fruit machines. Will Sturgeon explains...

I've been spending some time in pubs recently. Anybody who knows me may not have fallen off their seat at that piece of news but I've been working - honestly.

I've also been spending a fair amount of time thinking about - and sometimes even writing about - wi-fi.

Over the past few months on silicon.com we've maintained a guide to some of London's wi-fi pubs.

On my travels around these places I found a great variation in the wi-fi available - in terms of costs as well as quality.

So I roped in an old contact of mine, Ian Schenkel, managing director EMEA at AirMagnet, whose software tests, diagnoses and monitors the performance, potential problems and security of wi-fi networks and we set about finding out just how good London's pubs are.

And if pubs - or London - aren't your thing, along the way I discovered some best practice rules for setting up wi-fi - whether you're doing so in a pub, office or any other space you might care to mention.

Wi-fi pubs

Check out our photo guide to London's wi-fi pubs. Click here.

Schenkel tells me: "In any pub environment you are not going to get the best reception." He explains that pubs tend to be designed, quite rightly, with drinkers, not workers in mind and their lay-out and furniture often counters, rather than complements the wi-fi signal.

Upon walking into one large chain pub, a stone's throw from Liverpool Street station he adds: "One of the key things you are going to see here is interference problems. There's no fruit machines but you've still got lighting, steel pillars, plants."

He mentions fruit machines, the ubiquitous one-armed bandits, because he envisages these being one of the biggest obstacles to quality wi-fi we will encounter today - eating up radio frequency quicker than they eat up the punters' coins. Problems related to lighting and the actual construction of the building are more intractable.

The next pub we try proves the point perfectly. We locate the wi-fi access point near the pub's front door and get a signal strength of around 75 per cent. This requires us standing with the monitoring laptop right on top of the box - not a position conducive to working.

The box containing the wi-fi access point is also a quiz machine and on either side there are fruit machines and a video game. There could hardly be a worse location for a wireless access point.

The effect of this is that just two metres away from the access point, the signal is down to less than 50 per cent. That's easily still workable but the deterioration is alarming.

And at the other end of the bar, perhaps 10 metres from the access point, that signal is an almost unusable 10 per cent.

"That is absolutely the environment," I'm told of this shocking decline in the signal strength. Brass bar fittings, steel pins through wooden beams, a microwave oven behind the bar - it will all be detracting from the signal.

Plants are another major problem - and especially so in offices where a large potted palm can be the deadly enemy of wi-fi signals. If you're reading this in any wireless environment look about you.

Schenkel tells me: "People see that their access point will give them 30 metres of coverage so they look around, measure up, plug it in and think 'that'll do, we'll chuck it up there'. They don't stop to consider what else is within that 30 metres that could interfere with the signal or where the best place to put the access point really is."

Many of the pubs we visit show this lack of planning in abundance. It is also the case in other public wireless hotspots - and when consumers are expected to pay this seems a major failing.

Schenkel says: "It's easy to overcome as long as you have the right density of access points to deliver the quality of service your customers should expect."

Another problem in common with many wi-fi environments is that configuration is often poorly thought out. Many users and wi-fi access points are competing for bandwidth on the same channel - often channel 11 - and some channels are becoming critically overloaded while others go unused.

The bonus in many of the pubs we try is that security all looks pretty good.

"I really would have expected to find a lot more security problems," Schenkel tells me after about the fifth pub throws up nothing but pretty watertight wi-fi. His tone is more surprised than disappointed.

"Sure, there are things here you wouldn't expect to find in a business but for a public environment there's nothing I'd be worried about."

Instead it is performance which draws his professional criticism after another pub throws up weak signals in much of the building. He says customers paying for a service - often at around £5 per hour are entitled to expect better signals.

And then we hit gold.

The Corney & Barrow chain have bars all over the City and the first thing we notice in the chain's Broadgate Circus bar is the quality of the signal.

We move around, even seat ourselves around a corner but there is no shaking the fact this signal clings to the line which denotes a 75 per cent signal strength on AirMagnet's dashboard. We go down the road to Paternoster Square, beneath the London Stock Exchange and it's the same story - an excellent signal throughout.

"They've obviously taken this very seriously," says Schenkel. "They've not just put an access point up and slapped a sticker on the door that says they do wi-fi."

"This is a pub I would definitely recommend," he adds.

And it gets better. The service is free to use and good enough to stream high resolution video. Worth raising a glass to.

The obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that London's pubs are still in the early-adopter stage - signified by some naïve mistakes and poor implementations - though often it is commercial third parties who should have known better (or perhaps who came up against a wall of indifference).

But they are coming online quickly with varying degrees of success and this should be encouraged. Many London pubs - and those outside the capital too - do offer high quality wireless coverage and those pubs will help to inform consumers that this is an option available to them. That awareness - and a tendency among consumers to vote with their feet - will speed further improvements in quality and availability.

For now, perhaps more worrying is the fact many of these problems are universal. In theory, there is no building that cannot be wireless-enabled (check out one problematic success story) but the cost of doing so may be prohibitive and may contribute to corners being cut.

But how many problems are also of a business' own making? How high up the list of priorities is wi-fi access - either current or future - when it comes to office design? A pub landlord can probably be forgiven for not mugging up on wi-fi access, while studying for the bar, but businesses - whether third party providers rolling out access in public spaces or companies implementing their own wireless access - are clearly missing a trick or two.

It's enough to turn a person to drink.