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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."
- security ... etc.
- bandwidth
- interference/reliability
What a pile of marketing crap.
A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?
Using this logic, oh my gosh, even my company must be going wireless. We have a few hundred unused 10baseT connections on our Catalyst 5500. Know why? Because we original projected them to be used for VoIP. When they finally settled on the VoIP provider, they insisted that we use their switches. We simply haven't pulled the extra cards, because we don't have blanks to fill the holes, and we can't find anyone in the office who would prefer to be on an 10Mb/s line, rather than a 100Mb/s line.
WiFi is great and all. I'm on it right now as I write this. But, that doesn't mean it's the end all of networking. When I want true reliable speeds, I go to where there's a network jack, and plug in.
At work, every desk is wired. There are AP's, but people use the wired jacks. Why? Because they appreciate the reliability. There's no random interference. No cell phone, microwave over, or transient event on another floor is going to disturb their connection. I appreciate that they use the wired connections. At any given point, I may have 4 or 5 users on wireless, and a few hundred devices on wired. I can wonder "are those wireless connections legitimate?" If a user has a problem, I'm looking at physical facts (is their cable plugged in. Did they damage the cable) rather than random environmental facts (Is there a thunderstorm? Did someone fire up a new yet not well shielded microwave two floors down?). I had to trace a wireless problem once, and it turned out to be a small portable radio in the corner of someone's office. It was turned off, but it was effectively blocking all RF for about 10 feet. Once I found it, I unplugged it, and the wireless problems there went away.
Right now, I'm sitting at home, away from the office. There are a number of devices that are connected wirelessly. Why? Because I haven't run wires to the places that we may use it. The back porch, where I'm sitting right now, smoking and writing, doesn't have an ethernet drop. The PS3 doesn't have a drop, so it gets it's updates wirelessly. But every machine I depend on for work has an ethernet cable going to a Cisco Catalyst switch. Ask me why a connection goes weird on a wired port, and I can find the problem (it happens rarely, but ...) Ask me why my connection drops on the back porch and it's a little harder to find the answer.
We had a problem on the back porch a while back. As it turned out, a neighbor just got DSL, and their AP was on the same channel as ours. Since I was closer to theirs, it interfered with the signal. I spend 20 minutes listening to channels to find the least used spectrum, and changed over. What happens when someone else comes up on that channel? I'll run out of channels eventually. But hey, it's ok, I can set up more AP's with more power, and drown them out. Then it's their problem, right?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Until I can get 1G bps that cannot be easily hacked into - wire has a future.
'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner.
Unfortunately, his idiotic terminology renders his words inaudible to me. :-/
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
That's what I've got now and I'm sure more is coming...
...in bed
And as they say, people who know radio use wires.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
Try doing a firmware update on your router over wifi and you'll see why this proposal is a bad idea.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm guessing the bandwidth of wired connections will always be one step ahead of wireless. Since I regularly have to transfer multi-gigabyte files from network storage, I'll be sticking with whatever makes this process as fast as possible, thanks, even if that does disagree with the prognosis of these moronic "future trend" people.
802.11N is awesome. It's faster than 100Mb ethernet even in real world tests. But does it scale well even in dense office buildings? In a cube-farm scenario, where there are computers every five meters in every direction in 3D space, is it really possible to get 100Mb speed?
Security isn't there yet, either. Someone in the parking lot could still put up an access point which advertises itself as being part of your company network, and your users will connect to it. Doing it right is possible in theory (configure computers such that they will only connect to APs which have certificates issued by your company's PKI) but Windows doesn't allow you to lock down wireless in such a way.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I've already.#¼#éÃdj $Ã{sdNO CARRIER
I know that a bunch of people are going to say "WTF" and all that, and I have to add my $.02 worth.
What a CROCK of shit. While wireless is great for "casual" surfing and such, I sure wouldn't want it for anything other than that. And from experience, Wireless starts to really drop functionality as the number of users on the WAP goes up. More than about 5 or 10 devices being used on a WAP is just about useless (depending on usage). You might as well be on dialup at that point.
I run into this kind of thinking all the time, and it drives me nuts. We have a guy throwing all sorts of wireless out on our campuses, and it sits mostly unused. And the wireless that IS used is almost useless because so many people are trying to use it at once it is slower old 10base hubs.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its place. My house is wireless, and I also have wired connections. I just wired my in-laws house (two computer household) because wireless was too slow for them and their needs. They now have gig wire network AND wireless in their house.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its place, as does wired lans. One has to know the needs, and design and engineer a system that suits the needs of those that are using it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Wireless only runs in half duplex. That's reason enough to use wired.
If you're an apartment dweller such as myself, you can forget about WiFi. The airspace is too crowded on all channels (1-11) which leaves me with dropped packets and a short range. Oh, and I have periods of total disconnect when my neighbor decides to use his/her circa 1980s microwave.
Solution? I just run CAT5 along the floor baseboard from the router to my PC and PS3.
Life is not for the lazy.
It is like the brand spanking new Harvard MBA starting to work for a railroad discovering, to his utter horror, that all the rolling stock in the railroad adds up to just 1/100 th of the track owned by the company. He smartly addresses the over inventory problem by tearing up and selling for scrap all the excess track!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This guy is a moron who's merely attempting to shill his crap.
As others have already said.
Wireless fails in a comparison of throughput.
Wireless fails in a comparison of security.
Wireless fails in a comparison of susceptibility to interference.
If you're just sending e-mail and browsing por^H^H^the web, wireless is fine.
If you're trying to maintain a sustained connection for things like database traffic, or a VPN connection, and being kicked in the balls by someone with electrified spiked boots is preferable.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
At this moment, the only wireless device on the WAP at my end of the building is my iPod. There are a whole slew of wired devices, though, from servers to desktops to printers.
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.
Uh-huh, because WAPs run on fairy dust and ponies' daydreams.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hey! I just realized that my office is only using 30% of our electrical outlets. What a waste!
...until we need to rearrange the office.
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.