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

Odd question.

[Anonymous Coward]

"unexpected periods of network downtime"?
no.
Expect them.
200 users in a small space over wireless = problems.

Re:Odd question.

[John Miles]

"Approximately nil" leakage, unfortunately, is still a lot of energy when you're starting with a 500- or 600-watt magnetron.

See the example screenshot on this page: http://www.thegleam.com/ke5fx/gpib/ssm.htm

The microwave that wiped out the upper reaches of the 2.4-GHz band in this spectogram is two rooms away; the WiFi antenna generating the trace on channel 6 is about eight feet away. Most microwaves seem to occupy the higher portion of the band, so if you stick with channel 1 or channel 6, you may not have a problem. Also, some routers (not mine, unfortunately) can send shorter packets that avoid the oven-interference problem altogether.

Delivery Trends

[lunk]

Tv's first started wireless and are now wired.

Telephones started out wired and are now wireless.

Wireless networking is a step backwards from a switched hardware fabric. Productivity will be much faster when a file, such as a large presentation, can be trasmitted and delivered in gigabits a second, instead of potentially single digit megabits.