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Time To Cut the Ethernet Cable?
coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."
And while you can have hundreds of parallel Gbit/sec cables running through the same building, each running at maximum speed, you can not have hundreds of parallel 802.11n-accesspoint each reaching maximum throughput at the same time.
Steps to break a wireless network:
#1 - Pull up to parking lot. ...
#2 - Sniff advertised name of network
#3 - Put up your AP, set name to clone network's name
#4 - Record authentication attempts
#5
#6 - Profit!
If you can get access to a wired network; then you can plug in a WAP with your own encryption. Most companies don't question who is roaming around.
It is a question of series vs. parallel. Any sort of wireless connection is going to be shared by multiple people using it in a serial fashion. This means that Ann can't send while Fred is sending. Period.
OK, if you have Ethernet cables running to both Ann and Fred then they can, absolutely both send at the same time. With switches linked by fiber and where everyone isn't banging on the same server you often acheive parallel communications all the way through the system.
If you are posting on Slashdot or reading email it may not make a big deal. Moving large files around, interacting with some remote graphic intensive application or just doing "office work" with lots of transactions can make this seems like a really silly idea.
Sure, wired connections are expensive to run and they shouldn't be run except for productivity or security. In my company, both of these are considerations and it would be unthinkable to rely on wireless.
You've just made a serious breech of Slashdot protocol. You shouldn't post AC, when your comment would be modded funny..
Last time I checked, Funny gave no karma, and Overrated took away karma. So if moderators go into a Funny/Overrated mod war over a comment, the poster loses karma rapidly. Such mod wars have brought users from Excellent (posting at 2) down to Terrible (posting at -1) in one day.
On the wireless Internets, there are no tubes, so there are no tubes to get clogged.
The tube from the antenna to the AP that gets clogged more easily than the tubes on a wired switch. But residential Internet service is even easier to clog than the antenna tube.