WiFi Everywhere

Thursday, 19 July 2012

I recently spent a few weeks in North America attending conferences and technology workshops.

Throughout this time I recorded, periodically, the performance I was receiving on various free or venue-provided WiFi networks.

These measurements were made by monitoring a sustained FTP download from a server located in a Texas Data Centre, 150Mbps in size, and excluding any pauses due to drop outs (which were reasonably frequent). I have excluded latency from these figures as it varied quite dramatically, possibly due to transient periodical usage on WiFi networks by ‘normal’ users.

City/Location	Provider	Speed
LAX	T-Mobile	4.1
Delta LAX-JFK	Delta Airlines	1.1
Manhattan, NY	Unknown	4.2
Acela Train – NY-DC	T-Mobile	2.3
Whitehouse District, DC	Verizon	5.1
Toronto Downtown	Rogers Wireless	7.6
Microsoft MSFT Wifi	Microsoft	8.1
Delta YYZ-MSP-SFO	Delta Airlines	1.4
Fishermans Wharf, SF	Verizon	3.7
Palo Alto, CA	T-Mobile	1.5
Delta SFO-LAX	Delta Airlines	1.1