Friday, August 31, 2012

WiFi scanning speed is a must for WiFiLine

It turned out that users of some Android devices experience frequent timeouts while trying to scan WiFi hotspots using WiFiLine. It's because WiFiLine uses the 3 seconds timeout by default, and some devices are very slow and can't fit into this limit. By saying "slow" I mean they are slow in WiFi scanning, not in a way their processor works or graphics do. Strangely, but many modern Samsung devices, such as Galaxy S2 and S3 are affected. They perform a single WiFi scanning in 6 seconds in average. As the primary function of WiFiLine is to scan WiFi environment as fast as possible, such slow devices become almost useless for any kind of WiFi positionning (not only with WiFiLine) - just because they take too much time to detect user position. In the next version of WiFiLine the timeout limit will be increased, and timeouts will be gone, but nevertheless using a slow device makes the whole idea impracticable. When a single scan takes 5 seconds and you require 10 scans for collecting more accurate information, then it ends up in almost 1 minute of waiting at a single point. Multiply it to a number of your reference points... Well, it's possible, but it's uncomfortable.

Here is a small tip from Samsung support, which could ease the problem, that is speed up WiFi scanning a bit.

If you could follow the steps below, to resolve your WiFi issue:
  1. Go to your phone dialer
  2. Dial *#0011#
  3. When you see the "ServiceMode" screen, press the left menu button
  4. Select "WiFi"
  5. See that "Wifi Power Save Mode" button that is "ON" - turn it "OFF"
  6. Exit this menu, turn off your WiFi and turn it back on.
If you already entered all your WiFi credentials, forget your network info (remove it) and re-enter it again.


I hope this could help someone to improve WiFiLine performance.

If you plan to acquire a mobile device in future, don't forget to test its WiFi-scanning speed as well - it's very important in practice.

No comments:

Post a Comment