• Ars Technica, Thursday, October 2, 2008 11 AM

City-wide WiFi zones have long been considered a major step toward closing the so-called digital divide. But such zones are not always so democratic, as dead zones tend to occur in unpredictable places. There's a lot at stake for anyone who can help bring municipal WiFi to everyone intended to receive it.

Enter a Rice University graduate student, working with his advisers and Hewlett Packard, who claims to have found a way to predict and prevent WiFi dead zones. PhD candidate Joshua Robinson says he has developed a technique that requires only a zoning map and a few simple calculations that can greatly improve the functionality and efficiency of city-wide WiFis.

His work was presented in "Assessment of Urban-Scale Wireless Networks with a Small Number of Measurements" at the MobiCom 2008 conference, run by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Chief among his findings is that more nodes do not necessarily mean better coverage, a theory that flies in the face of convention WiFi wisdom.

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