iPhone 4 keynote plagued by high-tech Wi-Fi meltdown - Page 2

Uhm, it was a developers conference? Not a hardware conference. What'd you expect?

Theoretical Max Speeds:

802.11G = 54MB
AT&T GSM = 7.2MB
Verizon CDMA = 3.1MB

I'm not sure there would be 5000 people in the main conference hall. A good number of developers don't even go to the keynote and they always have overflow rooms that are pretty full with live video feeds. Of course, people in those other rooms would also be using WiFi, but they'd be fairly distant with several walls (or floors/ceilings) between them and the keynote stage. Then again, there are members of the press who attend only the keynote and that aren't developers so I'm not exactly sure how many people would be needed to fill the main hall.

I can't be sure of how many persons were using WiFi or MiFi or whatever, but from previous WWDCs I know that a lot of people sit and answer email, play online games, and browse the web while the keynote is being given. Why they spend thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles just to do those activities during the conference has always amazed me but I guess it is because they aren't paying for the trip (their company pays).

Well, now Steve knows to have a wired network connection for the next and all future keynotes.

Great. Since everyone decided not to honor Steve's request, looks like Apple will not offer the keynote video on their website due to the presentation difficulties. Steve will not release any subpar material.

Thanks a lot gizmodoans.

It might be illegal to go outside of the approved frequencies and besides they would have had to modify the hardware in the iPhone to support something outside of the 2.4GHz range.

Like I've suggested before, it would have been much easier to use a MicroCell and run the demos over a secure, fast 3G connection that was routed to their own wired backplane (as a backup for the WiFi). AT&T MicroCells prevent connections from just any phone (they only accept connections from a limited list of phone numbers), so there would have been no calling conflicts from other phones in the hall. With a MicroCell directly under Steve's podium I'm pretty sure they could have gotten a strong, fast, and reliable 3G connection.

Sad that WiFi is not ready for the average consumer.

Yeah, yeah, there will never be a situation like this with 500+ devices in one room...
Never normally.
Yeah.

I really hope our military is not relying on this second-rate technology.

Exactly. Thank you for getting it. I don't think anyone else did.

The iPhone 3GS still loaded NYTimes.com. Maybe this new antenna on iPhone 4 is not so great after all. It may be the true culprit and not the mifi. I guess we will all find out on June 24th.

This is an interesting observation.

Perhaps someone with tech knowledge can answer: why did the 3GS load but not the 4G?

No, you don't understand. This isn't some techie solution about local wi-fi or cellular access. My solution ELIMINATES almost all of the REASON for all of the gadgets to be ON AT ALL!

If you're sitting in a lecture, for example, what exactly would be your need to communicate AT THAT VERY MOMENT to the outside world? Not much.

So does this means that there will not be a WWDC QuickTime Stream?

OK, I see what you mean, I got confused by the particular terms you used that probably have a stronger connotation than what you meant. It would help, I don't think it would be very effective. You can eliminate the reason, but then you're still dealing with humans, with human ego and all. We've already heard about plenty people at the presentation that were on the internet for reasons unrelated to the presentation. And you'll still have the bloggers that think there are people that want the blogger's opinion on it.

You must be new to WWDC keynotes. "Pro" aimed products, such as cinema displays, mac pros and macbook pros were the traditional staples of WWDC announcements. They have just as much place as an iPhone announcement.

I'm another that is disappointed that the 30" display hasn't had (non price-drop) update in six years since its WWDC04 introduction.

The iPhone 4 keynote was "plagued by high-tech Wi-Fi meltdown"??? It looked to me like Steve Jobs hardly missed a beat. Can you say Yellow Journalism?

I suppose, if your beat is longer than two minutes. The headline is a little hyperbolic, but a typical crash or other tech problem in a Jobs presentation is normally bypassed in seconds and done so smoothly that it's almost not noticeable. It is very unusual for him to be sidetracked with a tech problem for more than two minutes.

Except these were devices brought by the turds in the audience.

What he said

All devices trying to get on the network are peers, and in that room in the same location (Steve's hands) they have an equivalent shot at getting connected. If you had 2 3GS phones or 2 of the new ones, they might easily have one connect and one not.

The real problem here is that these personal base stations / hot spots aren't designed with a thought towards what happens when a lot of them occupy the same general vicinity. In my opinion using them during a presentation is the height of rudeness, and roughly equivalent to standing up and screaming at the top of your lungs. Using a wireless client is closer to whispering to your neighbour and listening.

And don't for a second think that having Apple broadcast the keynote would at all reduce the number of live bloggers in the audience using their MiFi devices. These are guys that are so full of themselves that they think that people care about their opinions.

Don't be too quick to dismiss wireless handling changes in the new iPad and iPhone. If you Google 'iPad wifi problems' you will see that in fact there are many people reporting issues. Delve into those a little and you'll discover that many people mention that all their other devices work fine, but the iPad experiences sluggish / slow wifi performance; a typical statement runs along the lines of 'my iPhone 3G / 3GS works fine, but the iPad is slow.'

Now take a look at the video from today's keynote - the 3GS loaded well before the iPhone 4, which is the same issue being reported about iPad. Given the wide-ranging reports about iPad, I don't think you should dismiss this as a peer sharing / resourcing issue - I think there could be something to what the original poster suggested. It is highly likely that whatever hardware changes were made in iPad may also have been made in iPhone 4. And here is a biggie: none of those earlier models supported N. I'm guessing something flaky in Apple's implementation of the N protocols, or in the hardware itself.

On a personal note, I had the same issues with my iPad - unexpected and inexplicable networking issues while my 3G and other devices all worked fine. I had plenty of scenarios that looked like what Steve experiences today, except instead of a 3GS and iPhone4, it was my 3G and iPad, with the 3G winning over the iPad.

Here's hoping Steve's experience today will cause some pressure to be exerted on engineering to find and resolve the wifi issue. For iPad, it will almost certainly hurt them in the enterprise.

I live in a flat which incidentally have relatively little sound dampening (read thin walls) and there are about 4-8 wifi networks that are within my reach and my iPad and iPhone wifi connections sometimes struggle to get a good reliable connection. Most of these have very close (neighbouring) network channels which mean overlapping service. It made worst when everybody is also eating their microwave take-aways instead of cooking a home meal! I resorted to installing a Gigabit wired network so I could have my computers and game consoles to connect flawlessly to the Internet. I could imagine how frustrating it was when network congestion happens. Technology at its worst when it fails due to popularity.

Absolutely right.

Yes, unfortunately they were unprepared for a situation that's grown to become a real problem. I agree that Apple should provide the bandwidth for the bloggers or confiscate all MiFi-type devices or simply go back to a live broadcast. Hey, if Leo Laporte can do it with few problems, why can't Apple?

And I'm sure the visual call will use little bandwidth. Can you imagine. Apple has an iPhone without video chat. That's the backup plan if 90% have these problems. It could be a real nightmare. Hope not but it could.

I don't think they would be smart to use any "work-arounds" to get the demo running.

As soon as people found out [and you know they would find out] there would be a free-for-all of Steve-bashing... for his "lying" about the capabilities of the device & software. Asserting that Steve was admitting it wouldn't work in "real world" conditions.

I can just imagine all the "sleight-of-hand" slurs, and Android fans claiming how their phones wouldn't need to "cheat" during a public demo.

You know thats the kind of world we live in...

Remember how lots of Mac fans had a good laugh when Microsoft was demoing Xbox360 games - before the actual consoles were available - and people were posting photos of the PowerPC Macs (hidden out of obvious sight) which were actually running the software?

[Because Microsoft was seeding custom-firmware PowerPC Macs to Xbox360 developers to use as the initial development platform.]

Live bloggers are going to want to post come what may, so why not just provide a free public WiFi access point in the auditorium rather than having everyone set up their own using a MiFi device?

Short of installing metal detectors at the doors and preventing people take ANY electronic devices in (laptops, phones, cameras, PDAs, etc.), which would be utterly impractical and self-defeating at a techie developer conference where the press were invited, there is no way to stop people blogging, so why bother trying?

Ummm. Lost completely.
What exactly did 3000 of bloggers do with MiFi stations in there
They can't afford a usb modem for everyone in their mob, can they?

"Try Verizon network ya idiots!"

Can't the iPhone run a network through the 30pin connector? That might be safer for demos.

But anyway I didn't think it detracted from the presentation. Steve recovered quickly and they had plenty of other demos of the screen, the NY Times was not the whole thing.

They used to do live video streaming, though that was before I started paying attention to Apple's keynotes, I heard about it from Apple fan acquaintances of mine. My local college took the satellite feed and put it on their cable system, I think home C-Band systems could have tuned to it. I thought they quit doing live streaming because they wanted to take some time to polish the video.

I'm wondering if there is any "solution" at all to the wifi meltdown. Think about the number of people in the audience and then multiply that number by 1.5. That's likely the number of wireless devices all broadcasting in the same spectrum. Just what is the device count limit before all traffic grinds to a halt? Even QOS doesn't help when a few thousand other devices are drowning each other out.

The number of devices at the Moscone center may not have reached that level. I honestly don't know. But it does seem like a possibility.

Asking a question isn't the same thing as begging the question.

Since when is giving a new product demonstration in a room lit up with hundreds of other ad-hoc networks the "real world"?

People can and will find plenty of reasons to bash Steve/Apple keynotes, but this unique worst-case situation is hardly reason to compromise the demos for the sake of 'purity'. If in the future they pipe Ethernet back up the video cable bundle then I don't think the rest of the (sane) world will hold it against them.

Steve Jobs keynotes are industry media blowouts - so why in heavens name don't they just webcast them instead of making all of us hang around watching multiple "live blogging feeds" to get the instant information? Maybe if Jobs has more demo disappointments they'll just webcast and ban audience WiFi.

Given that these will become the 'official history' of that event, Apple prefers to run them through an editing process to clean up the production. It's their prerogative.

(Microsoft, on the other hand, simply turns Ballmer loose and you can see where that leads...)

During the side by side demo, the new iPhone 4 with the new antenna wasnt able to pick up Wi-Fi to load NYTimes web site, while the old 3GS was able to. In fact, it looked as if the 3GS was much better able to pick up a signal.

Now, it could be that there was something wrong with that pre-release IOS 4 which is causing the problem with the new phone but I think not. I think they havent optimized the antenna yet or the new antenna doesnt work as well as advertised.

It was done that way for many years. Stevenotes frequently set records for the number of simultaneous video streams of a live event. I don't think anything else has come even remotely close in terms of bandwidth at any given instant in time.

Unfortunately, this lead to problems with stability and all it did was piss everyone off because the stream was so unstable.

That's unfounded conjecture.

Anyone with even the slightest amount of wireless experience will quickly tell you that, with an overloaded spectrum, it is a crap shoot which device works and which device doesn't, even with identical hardware and software.

Normally I would agree with that but the fact is that he tried it 3 times and the results were the same which leads me to believe that the new antenna’s less sensitive. He tried loading the NT Time page twice on the original demo model, he then switched to the backup demo units and got the same result. The 3GS was able to load most of the page while the new iPhone 4 just kept saying it could not get a connection.

Go watch that video again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmZkr...layer_embedded

I never imagined such a concentrated amount of wifi in one space. These types of hyper tech scenarios give a new testing ground for technology, the likes of which most manufacturers couldn't easily create before releasing a product. We've now seen part of the new iPhone 4 tested in an extreme situation.

What got me the most was the bloggers who didn't turn off there wifi when asked and then continued to blog about how they're still going, such a juvenile attitude. Then you add those who where using internet for gaming, web browsing and what else, downloading a movie off itunes or placing an Ebay bid? If a person isn't interested enough to give the speaker your full attention, why show up at all. No wonder I see an increasing number of articles about multitasking and A.D.D. behavior problems as a result of technology.

I agree with the suggestion that Apple should resume the live webcast.

But also -- couldn't they have reserved one WiFi channel for internal use only? Just tell all atendees that they are prohibited from using Channel 4, for instance, and that they need to prepare their WiFi devices accordingly before their arrival at Moscone.

Even if some don't comply, and if Apple doesn't want to go Nazi about it, the selected channel would still be much clearer as most of the attendees would have followed the instruction.