A quick perusal of the Web indicates that there may be issues with the range, throughput, and connection reliability of the iPad's Wi-Fi link. My own experience, however, removes all doubt.
I’m somewhat hesitant to write about the iPad again, after the shellacking (to use President Obama’s term somewhat inappropriately and gratuitously, but such sounds about right regardless) I took as a consequence of my last posting on said device. OK, I broke the code; a lot of you really, truly, madly, deeply love your iPads, and, while I suspect that this may be due in some cases to Apple Loyalist Syndrome (as in, Apple can do no wrong and is in fact a primal force for good in an IT universe otherwise populated by incompetence (Company M) and misappropriation of personal information (Company G)), I’m a Mac user myself, and beginning to use the iPad in production around here (sorry, no iPhone), so I completely understand the popularity of today’s Tablet Leader. Still, no matter what some might say, the iPad ain’t perfect, especially in the Wi-Fi department.
While there have been assorted complaints (do a search) about various aspects of Wi-Fi performance on the iPad (and even the iPhone), many people report no problem whatsoever. One posting I reviewed theorized that any problems with Wi-Fi were clearly a veiled effort on Apple’s part to get customers to buy the 3G version; this seems a bit far-fetched. On the other hand, we might be seeing Antennagate II, if I may be so bold, with a fundamental design flaw in the positioning of the antennas in the iPad responsible for any rate/range shortcomings. To be fair, radio propagation is decidedly non-linear, and, while 802.11n most certainly can improve both rate and range, much depends upon specific implementations and actual operating conditions.
So – along these lines, I’ve been testing Wi-Fi performance on my iPad at various locations around my house, and my personal results have been disappointing. I have a Time Capsule with the radio set to 5 GHz. in my basement, along with assorted other .11g/a/n APs as well. Needless to say, iPad connectivity is just fine in this room.
Going one floor up, though, problems set in quite quickly. While signal strength is fine in the kitchen, right above the Time Capsule, moving just four meters farther away, to couch in the room right next door yields – nothing; signal strength drops to unusable. Ditto for the next floor up – roughly right above the Time Capsule (actually, a little bit off-axis, so to speak), I’ve got a functional connection, but the iPad is unusable in essentially all other locations on the second floor. Trying to connect with the other APs results in similar frustration – no usable connectivity.
The iPad is the only device in my substantial Wi-Fi arsenal – which includes a variety of netbooks and notebooks – that behaves like this. Even my lowly (and aging) Asus 701 is just fine on the second floor. So is my Apple TV. Only the iPad is unusable here. Weird? Yes. A design flaw? Maybe, or perhaps this is unique to my iPad alone (although, again, based on what I’ve read on the Web, this is unlikely). Fixed in the upcoming IOS 4.2 release? We’ll see. That’s been delayed due to a reported, you guessed it, Wi-Fi problem.
The lesson here is that Wi-Fi engineering is difficult, to be sure, and even widely-publicized devices with rabid followings can suffer from assorted problems here. For now, my iPad is confined to the basement. I’m planning on do a little testing with a beamforming AP shortly; perhaps that will help, as might the update. I still, despite my previous criticism, really like the iPad, but I must say I am disappointed to find a problem like this.
