How Long Does It Take You to Connect to a Wi-Fi Network?

According to researchers from Tsinghua University and the developer of WeChat, more and more people today feel frustrated while trying to connect to a Wi-Fi network: it takes 15% of users longer than 5 seconds to connect to a Wi-Fi network, 5% of users – longer than 10 seconds. This means that connection setup failures are common, with almost half of the users suffering them.

Sometimes this happens because of the user error: an incorrect password or trying to connect to the wrong network. However, more often failed connections are due to problem with the network: for example, 15% of connections timed out, 9% of them suffering a DHCP failure.

The researchers from Tsinghua University analyzed the connections of 5m mobile users from 4 cities, studying the information about 7m mobile access points and 400m Wi-Fi sessions. It was found that scanning for the network is responsible for many long delays. This process involves listening for packets from Wi-Fi networks in order to find which are available, and eventually getting the access point added to the list of compatible Wi-Fi networks. According to the researchers, 40% of connection delays longer than 15 seconds also show a scan time of longer than 11.5 seconds – perhaps because the response packets from the network aren’t heard by the phone, and therefore the entire process starts all over again.

The researchers believe that this problem can be solved by devices intelligently sorting access points, pushing users to the faster ones. According to the research, these measures could push the proportion of failed connections down to 4%. On the other hand, the disadvantage of this approach is that many Wi-Fi networks will be categorized as “slow” and marked as unavailable for connection. In the end, choosing the best approach will depend on what the user wants from Wi-Fi networks: if they regularly connect to open networks in order to find a better or cheaper connection than the mobile data, such measure would be helpful in picking which to join. But for normal, security-conscious users who prefer to connect only to a small number of proven networks, it will be better to try and fix the networks themselves – for example, by buying a new Wi-Fi router, moving closer to the aerials, or simply changing a spot.

Posted by: 

SaM

  From Extratorrent