Experimenting with unreliable network connections

In case you missed it, in one of our previous publications we discussed troubles with wireless network coverage in Tallinn University. Such issues lead to poor user experience and may have a dramatic effect on the perception of telepresence robots in general, therefore we decided to run a series of tests. More on that below.

We decided not to include Ohmni into this experiment, as we experienced issues in far better network conditions are that that would be a waste of time.

Although this was not a quantitative experiment, and its results should be interpreted as guidelines for a more serious research at most there were some interesting findings.

The experiment was run during evening time on Friday, when Tallinn University Wi-Fi network is not overloaded and in addition to that we used three different access points:

• 5 GHz network created by 2nd generation iPhone mini with Tele2 mobile network provider
• 2.4 GHz network created by iPhone 11 Pro with Tele2 mobile network provider
• 2.4GHz and 5 GHz networks created by Zyxel LTE2566-M634 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Router (the one on the first image) with Telia mobile network provider

Not to go into details, but we found Temi to be less reliable and more prone to losing connection, however it might be partially compensated by its higher self-sustainability and using offline maps when moving.

We also found a peculiar bug that we were unable to interpret: for some reason connection to Zyxel (both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz) and iPhone 11 Pro disables network icon and menu on Double 3 robot. On the contrary, iPhone SE and local Wi-Fi do not have such effect and we never encountered it before.