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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."
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.
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'
Bingo!
Because of security concerns my employer does not and will never have (that I can see) wireless access to the network.
It's just too large of a security risk when you have any sort of sensitive information floating around.
security
But if I'm on wireless, I can just turn my screen closer to me so those evil hackers can't see my credit card password! If I have a cable, I can't move! Therefore, wireless is far more secure.
bandwidth
What are you geeks talking about? I can get my emails and download the internets perfectly fine while I watch the teevee!
interference/reliability
Oh yeah? What about cats? If my cat chews through the cable, then I'm out for a week while I wait for the cable guy to come fix it! That doesn't sound very reliable to me! Cats can't chew through the wireless!
And I thought you nerds were supposed to be smart!
Wireless is great for end users and other "last yard" applications, but I don't see WiFi ever overtaking wired networks for anything else. Cables will always be faster (I'm comparing *tomorrow's* cables, with *tomorrow's* wired networks, so sit down and put your trousers back on) than WiFi, and far more reliable due to greater resilience against interference and other environmental factors. It also has a smaller attack surface area, so for security sensitive applications, the additional physical constraints may be a benefit.
Yes, I think that office floors and other last-hop from switch to user applications could become completely wireless, but let's not get carried away. Anyone who says "we don't need wired ethernet any more" is short sighted and simply trying to attract attention. Wired ethernet will always have a place trunking the WiFi hotspots and carrying bulk data.
I hate printers.
You've just made a serious breech of Slashdot protocol. You shouldn't post AC, when your comment would be modded funny..
As I'm sitting here, I'm getting comments from the peanut gallery.
On the wireless Internets, there are no tubes, so there are no tubes to get clogged. Therefore wireless is muchly superior.
Ahh, how I still love Senator Stevens and his amazing insight into the functionality of that there interwebtubenets.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
RFI.
As CIO at a radio astronomical observatory with instruments receiving in the 2.3GHz band, I can say that we prohibit WiFi here completely. We went as far as running shielded Cat5e and Cat6, and building the data center into a screened room to reduce the RFI. Ferrite beads on all cabling going into and out of the data center are installed as well.
Wired Ethernet is the only thing working here.
Seriously? More Secure?
If you want to break in at a "physical" level between two wireless connections you just have to be sitting in radio range. Which may, or may not, even be in the same building. To break into a wired connection at the same level you'll have to attach some vampire clamps or whatever somewhere which means a physical break, physical access to the network.
as for client side certs there is nothing preventing wired from having this, and in fact a lot of secure installations do. Just because Wireless has some fancy WPA stuff that most people should enable doesn't make it more secure, if anything it's a nice warm blanket for people to have.
A Hardened Wireless connection will always be less secure then a Hardened Wired connection. One sends signals throughout the air one through a small cable.
Whew managed to do that without mentioning OSI once
Just updated to Ubuntu 9.04 on the laptop. First thing that went wrong was the wireless card. Drivers gone and no connection. Wired ethernet on the other hand, worked flawlessly. No driver issues, no compatibility errors, nothing. It worked likely a keyboard. There's a lot to be said for the maturity of ethernet cables.
There's also a lot to be said for the reliability of cable, or rather, the unreliability of wireless. Yes, it is convienient to give devices wireless connections, but signal quality is a huge issue with location, time and simple randomness all coming into play in ways cable simply does not have trouble with. For me, a typical ping over wireless goes something like this (below numbers are made up from memory)
PING 10.100.1.1 (10.100.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=4.35 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=3.67 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=3.56 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=62 time=4.45 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=62 time=1500 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=62 time=3.02 ms
Whereas the equivilent wired ping times, for a device in the same room would be
PING 10.100.1.1 (10.100.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=1.35 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=1.37 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=1.56 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=62 time=1.05 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=62 time=1.41 ms
64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=62 time=1.02 ms
A wireless connection is a tradeoff of human convenience for machine efficiency. When it comes to web browsing, email and even watching youtube videos, it's more or less worthwhile for most users. However, when you get to things like voip, bittorrent and online games, wireless connections begin to sag under the weight of your demands.
May the Maths Be with you!
Why would you to post your IP addresses on Slashdot?!?! Everyone is going to hack into your network now!
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!
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.
Sir, we've traced the ip address, and its in your own house! The killer is in your house right now! Run! Run!
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
Well there are other aspects. If you are not the IT guy, you may get one semi-legit answer when some real answer lies underneath.
For example;
Luser: "I want wireless" IT: "No, it's too insecure"
The REAL reason; "no, we do not have a proper policy about computers from home, and your dumb ass will doubtless bring in an infected laptop."
Or: "What, do I look like I have time to help you troubleshoot sitting on the crapper (in a metal box), nor do I want to listen to you bitch about how fast it is and explain simple high-school physics to your retarded ass for failing to understand why the microwave screws up your download."
Wired connections help IT police what goes on on the network. Wireless hurts that to a large degree. EVEN IF it's properly secured, I don't always want to finger-fuck whatever garbage the Lusers may want to try to connect with (looking at YOU iPhone).
So, if you got told "no for security reasons" and you are not in the IT department, they probably think you are too dumb to deal with a wireless card not to be a persistent pain in the ass.
Also, if you have any type of government audit, you have to deal with ignorant auditors that also have old beliefs about wireless networks. IT DOESNT MATTER what you may know about wireless if you deal with one of those bozos.
All of this stuff can quickly make wireless a net-negative for the IT folks around you and get the thing rejected "for security reasons".
Let me be the first to say that you have a really cool job.
Let's see if I can best that... C;-)
In Antarctica we can't use CAT cables because their dielectric properties change at extreme cold temperatures (-80C) and they run like crap. The cables also turn to raw spaghetti and break at the slightest touch.
So we use wireless (absolutely no interferences there !), or fiber, which doesn't change properties with the cold. Usually both as a backup in case a snowmachine runs in a cable (we can't put them in the 'ground' or they would disappear under the accumulated snow over a few years, so we place them on rows of low poles).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I use them as pickups lines at bars. So far, hasn't worked very well though.
MABASPLOOM!
An Internet walks into a bar and yells "SYN!"
Moments later, someone replies "ACK!" followed shortly by "You've got male!"
You may or may not see what I did there.
You are still going to need ethernet to connect all the wireless access points together.
Exactly. More to the point: for all those desktop machines out there, I see no purpose to flooding the air with wireless signals when the machine is essentially nailed to the desk and not going anywhere. You might just as well enjoy the faster, more secure connection.
Wireless is a great way of conveniently dealing with portable devices like laptops and so forth, but nobody can deny that congestion is going to be a real issue if we do away with ethernet.