Fixing The Internet, Part 1 – Spiky Noise

The last three months we’ve been focusing 100% on developing our product, building our own firmware for Jensens Air:Link 7000ac that enable logging of key data to our cloud. We were extremely curious as to what we would find, and we have not been disappointed. In fact, we found so much wickedness that we changed our mission to nothing less than fixing the internet...

I’ll share some examples in a series og blog posts, first up one on radio noise.

This happened one early Monday morning late November. Our cloud diagnostics algorithm suddenly started screaming. Our Oulu office router was logging noise data that almost went through the roof. What the heck was going on?

I started diving into the data and found radio noise levels on the 5GHz band up towards -50 db. This is 40 db over the noise floor, or approx 10,000 times the normal noise level. Noise at these levels basically kill the network.

Interesting radio noise

What was really interesting was the pattern. Noise normally establish a new noise floor, but now we saw an unusual spike characteristic. What could be the source of the pollution?

We jumped on call with Oulu and learned that Jukka, our new Linux wizard, had received his new Lenovo laptop that morning. And the router was placed on top of the laptop. So fair assumption was that the laptop was the culprit, but why the spikes?

Some more testing and many creative theories later we nailed it. It was the power supply. But the catch was, it was only polluting when the laptop battery was charging! Good luck figuring that out without reliable diagnostics.

Router on laptop with power supply nearby

Good news is that this type of noise characteristics can be classified and identified using Machine Learning techniques. And typically the noise only cover a narrow frequency band, and pollute only over short distance. So it is easy to fix, that is if you are able to identify the problem.


In the next post we’ll share some super interesting learnings on latency and buffer-bloat. Stay tuned!