IT Week had an article yesterday hightlighting the results of a survey that indicated Wi-Fi hot spots in London cannot currently support more than one Voice over Internet (VoIP) call at a time. Considering some of my own experiences at hotspots in the UK (and Ireland) this doesn’t surprise me.
The company said that this leaves the majority of hotspots in the UK unable to support the predicted boom in wireless VoIP services, exposing users to patchy, failed or dropped calls.
…
Schenkel said the underlying reason for the problems could be down to a lack of familiarity or understanding on the part of the coffee shop or pub offering the wireless connectivity.
My experience with slow Wi-Fi was not limited to independent hot spots in cafes or elsewhere. BT OpenZone’s service in BT Centre (the headquarters of the company!) of all places offered really poor service, as they did at my hotel and other places around the city. T-Mobile, which offers Wi-Fi at UK Starbucks locations also provided really awful throughput. In many of these instances I could not establish a VPN connection with my corporate network, and could usually only get to use the web at dial-up speeds if at all.
The UK and Ireland really stood out for me in terms of poor Wi-Fi connectivity. The fact that it was an almost universal experience was somewhat odd, and UK hotstpots compared very poorly to the fast Wi-Fi access available in the rest of Western Europe.
Oh, did I mention that the Wi-Fi was significantly more expensive in the UK? Until the UK Wi-FI price and performance picture improves there’s no way VoIP via commercial Wi-Fi is going to take off.
Technorati Tags: Wi-Fi
