[vhcook]

I had a similar idea last night.

I do not agree that managing two networks would be too difficult. It's done in the wireless industry today as the normal mode of operation. Almost all of the smartphones in the arena yesterday will have had multiple transmission chipsets and internal antennae, to be able to do WiFi in addition to GSM or CDMA. Some of them would also have a third chipset and antenna for LTE or WiMax. In the phone context, the main problems are handset real estate and battery life, which would be substantially eased for us by the fact that an FRC robot doesn't have to fit in your pocket and run all day with a tiny battery.

I suspect getting a single device that does WiFi and whatever the other wireless communication would be might be difficult to find in an off-the-shelf product, since most dual mode devices I'm aware of are GSM or CDMA for their second mode.

I suspect that FIRST would rather fix the problem in the existing system than go to a more complex setup, which would require device selection and a lot of new software testing. I find myself wondering if the sheer volume of WiFi-capable phones, tablets, and laptops intermittently scanning for networks (if their WiFi wasn't off) might have contributed to the problem, although we should have seen it last year if that were the case. I doubt 3G and 4G services would have been a problem, given that they are indeed in very different frequency bands from the robots' 5 GHz WiFi.