WiFi Channel Usage Update

ZigBee and WiFi Update

I had previously posted an entry on ZigBee and WiFi with some data on channel usage for WiFi from some of my travels. Having recently completed a trip to Asia I wanted to fill in some scans from this region since it was not previously represented.

I have now completed 10 larger scans in cities. This includes 3 in the US, 2 in Europe, 4 in Asia and 1 in Australia. The data is surprisingly consistent showing WiFi usage heavily targeted to channels 1, 6 and 11. The usage on these 3 channels varies from a low of 72% of the access points to up to 88%. This would appear to be due to channel 6 being the default channel for many devices (and therefore representing 35% of all usage) and also channels 1, 6 and 11 being the recommended Cisco channels for managed systems.

What this means is the ZigBee recommended channels which are between the WiFi channels would still seem to be a good fit. These become the starting channels for applications but when using frequency agility the network manager will select the channel with the lowest energy if a channel change is required. We still have not seen customers widely using a network manager because there are not reported problems in the field with interference.

In the attached paper I provide the updated WiFi results in tabular and graphic forms so the raw data is available.