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Does 802.11n Spell the 'End of Ethernet'?
alphadogg writes "Is the advent of the 802.11n wireless standard the 'end of Ethernet'... at least in terms of client access to the LAN? That's the provocative title, and thesis, of a new report in which the author began looking into the question when he heard a growing number of clients asking whether it was time to discontinue wired LAN deployments for connecting clients. Would 11n, the next generation high-throughput Wi-Fi, make the RJ45 connector in the office wall as obsolete as gaslights?"
Unless buildings are made of less concrete and brick. My school has a wireless network, but it's spotty due to the big maze of concrete and brick buildings. You only get a connection when the room you're in has a wireless bridge, but every room has a RJ45 port. There really is no question of signal strength when talking about wired networks.
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I agree that wired LAN is more secure than WiFi. But can't you do some pretty scary signal reconstruction by reading electromagnetic noise coming off your network cable? It's my understanding that this can be done from X yards away, through walls, whatever.
Yeah, that moves your vulnerability away from the hobbyist tier and into the professional tier, but honestly, which one scares you more?
Guess you could always wrap your cable in tin-foil.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
The strangest was a friend who used a linksys router with the SSID "linksys" and WEP encryption, who lived next door to someone using the same SSID but no encryption. Oh yeah, the wireless network managers on various OS's had a field day with that one. Ethernet just doesn't have those problems, so it will always been needed when mobility is less important than reliability.
Palm trees and 8
In my apt building, someone just moved in and brought an 802.11n supported router with them. All of a sudden the 10 or so 802.11g routers in the building have all but stopped working. I used to be able to pick up my wireless connection anywhere in the building, but now I can't see it at all if I'm more than two rooms away and the connection constantly drops. I've talked to some of my neighbours and they have been having the same difficulties.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Security is one reason I prefer wired over wireless... and since most of my networked equipment stays put in one room, extra cables are non-issue.
The other reason is reliability: I can count on my 100BaseTX network delivering 7-9MB/s with very little chance of external influences causing my link to either slow down or die. With wireless, I am at the mercy of nearby interference sources including cordless phones, electrical appliances, various gadgets and other wireless networking equipment, any of which can cause the link to do a number of undesirable things from retraining to going down.
There are two reasons I got WiFi: 1) my previous router was dying and 2) I got a laptop. I only use WiFi with the laptop but whenever I do large transfers, I still hook it up to Ethernet since it is ~5X as fast and never goes down. 802.11g is good enough for internet access and moderate file copying with my two laptops so I most likely won't be bothering with 802.11n until my 802.11g router either dies or becomes a broadband bottleneck.
BTW, it is possible to eavesdrop on Ethernet without touching the cables by capturing EMI from the UTP cables - there was a proof of concept for this some years ago where they managed to reconstruct a B&W image from a VGA cable by placing the receiver antenna ~1m from the cable using commodity components. That's pretty far from monitoring from a van parked a few houses down the road but it certainly proves the feasibility.