A WiFi-Only Office Network?

periol wonders: "I'm the sysadmin for a firm in mid-town Manhattan that is moving to a larger workspace six months from now. The new space is on one floor (100+ users to begin, 200 capacity) and is completely stripped. We've been playing around with the idea of completely wireless office, with no ethernet except to the access points (probably running over VPN for security). Email and files are all accessed locally over the network, and there is a web application hosted off site. Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup? My calculations are that we would need one access point per 15 computers, but I don't know what kind of issues we'll run into along the way. Will we run into unexpected periods of network downtime with a wireless-only setup like this?"

Comments

Just be sure

[0racle]

Leave it unsecured so that everyone can enjoy the rewards of your hard work. Thats what all the cool kids do.

Wireless be warned.

[crazyjeremy]

Wait... if your corporate office is anything like ours, take note: WIRELESS LAGS FOR GAMES.

Re:Odd question.

[OakDragon]

Hot coffee is not worth network downtime.

Oh, yes it is!

Wifi Done Right

[tverbeek]

There's a really neat solution available for most of the security, reliability, and speed issues involved in Wifi networking. It makes your network almost impossible to snoop without being in the same actual room with your equipment, eliminates most of the interference and frequency contention between nodes on the network by establishing redundant exclusive channels through your local area, and can boost intraoffice speeds to as much as 1Gbps with modern desktops and laptops. It does cost a little more than standard Wifi to equip an office with this technology, but if you're building an office space from nothing, it's fairly easy and inexpensive. It's called Wifi/Isolated-Redundant-Express, or WIRE.