This last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend the annual AFCEA volunteer appreciation event at FedEx field. While there Ellen and I got to meet Brian Mitchell, a very classy guy and a great former Redskin.
I also ran into an old friend from my Sun days, Dennis McLain, who continues to be one of the smartest people I ever knew. He now works at Fortress Technologies which was bought by General Dynamics and is now probably called something else. They deal with wireless technologies and in the course of the conversation, Dennis spent some time discussing channel conflicts and wireless optimization.
After the event when we got home, I thought about how our home wireless network was sometimes not as fast as we would like. SO based on the conversation with Dennis, I downloaded a network app for my Android-based Xoom and looked at the various networks that touched us and realized in fact there were a variety of areas of interference.
By changing the channels used and moving the devices around a bit to optimize the signal we were able to increase throughput quite a bit. As usual, we look to fixing customers often far more than ourselves. A big thank-you goes out to Mr. McLain.