In article
hosting.com, Liam
O'Connor wrote:

how many of those could you reliably establish a connection and then do
something with it?

merely showing up in a list doesn't mean much if it's not usable.

This is a good and valid point.

I had also spoken (complained) to two people about this,
one of whom is actually my ISP, who said that he gets
frustrated when a customer can't connect to his wall and
ceiling mounted access points that he installs in the larger houses.

your isp installs wall mount access points?

usually they just give you a box and it sits on a table somewhere.

I trust his experienced judgement when he said he called them
iCrap. It was also his view that the iPad/iPhone equipment had
lousy radios (he called them "radios").

anyone who calls anything icrap is just a hater.

there is no evidence that ios devices have lousy radios.

However, it would be nice to find a study that shows what
the true decibels of gain are for the iPad radio/antenna
combination, transmit power, and receive sensitivity.

Does Apple publish those numbers?

no, but older ios devices could run a wifi analyzer app that showed
actual signal strength numbers.