For the past few months, our local news sources have been abuzz with news about the Main Street Wi-Fi Corridor. But what is it? And what is its future potential?
To get started, let's familiarize ourselves with two terms: LAN and WAN. A LAN, or local area network, exists to connect different devices (computers, smart phones, printers, etc.) together. Whereas a WAN, or wide area network, exists to connect LANs together. The biggest commonly known example of a WAN is the internet. So, from the start we will tell you that the Wi-Fi Corridor is a LAN. It also happens to be a wireless LAN, or WLAN. (We just snuck in a third term in there didn't we?)
So why a "Wi-Fi Corridor" instead of a "Wireless Corridor"?
Excellent question. The answer is that there is actually a difference between wireless and wi-fi. The Main Street Corridor is wi-fi, which means that when you connect to it you're connecting to one of the routers, or access points, placed intermittently down Main Street. These access points are what are directly tied in to UB's fiber network and what allow you to access the internet. This is different from wireless, which more strictly (though we just used the term more generally earlier) is used to refer to connections to cellular towers. In this case, you would connect to the tower and the tower is directly connected to the fiber optic network.
The Wi-Fi Corridor's ability to connect to the internet is provided through the University at Buffalo's network, which includes not only UB's facilities but also D'Youville, Erie Community College, and other educational institutions in the Buffalo/Erie County region. This type of network is called a municipal area network, or MAN. This particular MAN uses a fiber optic (read: super fast) network to connect to the internet, allowing those on the network to connect to data transmissions all over the world with incredible speed.
Cool right? Well we think so, but what comes to most people's minds first when they try to connect to the internet is the speed they can expect. I mean if you have to wait 5 minutes to pull up Facebook you'll probably start looking elsewhere to connect, right?
To get started, it's important to understand a little about how to quantify the speed of a wi-fi network. The most commonly recognized indicator of speed is what's called the PHY mode coverage. While you may not recognize the term, if you've ever bought a wireless router for your home and searched to see if it was a/b/g/n or ac (ordered by increasing speed), then you have the general concept. Aside from the PHY mode, there are several other factors that impact your experience using a wi-fi network, including: signal to noise ratio, signal level (can I have more than one bar please?), quality of access points, noise level, signal to interference ratio, frequency band coverage (ever have that strange issue where a microwave drops your internet connection?), and wireless transmit rate. Basically: there's a lengthy list of factors that together will determine the quality of the overall network and your experience.
To give you an idea of what these factors playing together looks like, let's take a look at a couple examples. If you have potential for decent download/upload, but a lot of noise and/or interference, then you will likely experience slow or "unstable" connectivity that appears to drop. On the other hand you may have a fast wired connection, perhaps using fiber, but still find yourself limited to the much slower maximum speed of protocol b on your wireless router.
So after all that, what do we think of the Main Street Wi-Fi Corridor?
Well, we think it is a great start. {{{TODO: Quantify what this means}}}
Before closing out, I would like to briefly touch on why we care about the Wi-Fi Corridor even though the focus of City of Light 2.0 is bringing high speed fiber connectivity to the region. Simply put: wonderful initiatives such as the Main Street Corridor are going to be throttled without region-wide access to high speed fiber connections. Remember: every wi-fi connection that is being broadcast is still connected to a physical, wired, connection in the ground. More and faster wired connections, like fiber, means services like the Wi-Fi Corridor can increase their coverage area as well as the quality of the service they are offering. So even though you are not connecting directly to fiber when you use the Corridor, you still rely on the faster speed it provides.