When I was recently at the Ohio State University for a few days I noticed the following interesting statistics about their Wi-Fi network:
Quite impressive numbers, especially when setting them into perspective:
According to Wikipedia, the university currently has about 66.000 students which ties in well to the 58k+ devices concurrently connected. In other words, on average there is one access point for 6 students on their campus that spans an overall area of 65 km2.
Let’s compare that to cellular networks: In Germany, a typical cellular network operator covering the country (357.021 km2) has around 30 million customers and around 24.000 base station sites. On average, that’s around 1.250 devices connected to a site.
11.000 Wi-Fi access points to cover an area of 65 km2 compared to 24.000 cellular sites to cover an area of 357.021 km2. An interesting comparison!