Lyon and Sandvig appear at AAG

Elizabeth Lyon and Christian Sandvig will appear at the session, "Communication Geography: Images, Wi-fi, and Digital Networks" to be held at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in April. They will give a presentation entitled, "'Wireless Networks Detected: Right-Click Here for More Options:' Predictable Clustering in Wi-Fi."

"Wi-Fi" wireless Internet devices are low-powered radios that anyone can buy without a government license. The literature on wireless communication assumes that the diffusion and use of unlicensed transmitters like these is unpredictable. In this thinking, a license is an agreement about what a user will do with a radio. Without such an agreement in advance there must be chaos, causing headaches for the regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. While Wi-Fi use is a series of individual decisions, this study finds that overall use is predictable, and yet it differs in important ways from reasonable expectations. By constructing Wi-Fi data collection devices, researchers surveyed Wi-Fi networks in three Chicago neighborhoods over a period of three years (N = 851,939 observations). Spatial statistics, exploratory spatial data analytics, and Monte Carlo simulation indicate that there is significant local clustering of Wi-Fi activity. While the previous scholarship on unlicensed systems and Wi-Fi has worried about free riding and interference as major constraints for how the system grows, we find no support for these concerns. For instance, the existence of plentiful unencrypted Wi-Fi in urban areas has been forecast to suppress further deployment (if you can free ride on your neighbor's network, why buy your own?). At the same time, interference between Wi-Fi devices is an expected barrier to growth (above a density threshold, it has been predicted that Wi-Fi should stop working due to congestion). We find neither of these effects, and we discuss the implications of this for public policy.

(See the full abstract and location at the AAG site.)

Related citation:

Lyon, E. and Sandvig, C. (2007, April). "Wireless Networks Detected: Right-Click Here for More Options:" Predictable Clustering in Wi-Fi. Paper presented to the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), San Francisco, California, USA.

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