Making Wireless, Not Ethernet, the Heart of the Network

GMGruman writes "As mobile devices enter the workplace and latch on to Wi-Fi networks — along with devices such as HVAC sensors and videoconferencing that most people don't even realize use Wi-Fi — the typical wireless LAN is unable to cope. What needs to happen, argues Aberdeen Group's Andrew Borg, is a rethink of the wireless LAN not as a casual adjunct to the wired LAN (the typical mentality when they were first set up) but as the corporate LAN itself."

Comments

The number of devices is not most relevant

[drinkypoo]

[...]as mobile devices gain strong adoption in businesses, it's not unusual for there to be as many -- or more -- devices connecting to your network via Wi-Fi as are plugged into an Ethernet jack.

So what? What is relevant is what those devices are doing. Anyone who needs to pull boatloads of data needs to sit the hell down, and at that point, you can serve them with a wire.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Albanach]

So what? What is relevant is what those devices are doing. Anyone who needs to pull boatloads of data needs to sit the hell down, and at that point, you can serve them with a wire.

And where, exactly, do you suggest I plug in my iPad? The MacBook Air requires a separately purchased dongle to connect to a wired LAN.

Your solution assumes that a majority of devices continue to be developed with an ethernet port. As we move towards thinner, lighter laptops, I doubt Apple will stand alone in manufacturing devices that no longer have an easy way to connect to a wired network.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Samantha Wright]

Aha, but corollary: if they're in a line of business that doesn't involve boatloads of data, then a slow network can only be caused by employee misbehaviour! Ergo, productivity. (Long live the PHB twist theory: anything annoying can be twisted around into a means of enforcing a certain style of working.)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Huntr]

Anyone who needs to pull boatloads of data needs to sit the hell down

Sure, in May 2011. The idea is that, moving forward, let's not have to sit down. Let's be able to pull, process and use that boatloads of data on the go.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you where to shove your iPad

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[dfghjk]

You are using an iPad on a corporate LAN and accessing "boatloads of data"? Haha.

Some people have real work to do.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[hawkbat05]

Perhaps then it's time to refine the overly large rj45 plug into something that will accommodate smaller form factors. Call it Ethernet micro. Most of the connector is wasted plastic anyway.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

And where, exactly, do you suggest I plug in my iPad? The MacBook Air requires a separately purchased dongle to connect to a wired LAN.

Your company shouldn't have any issues buying you an adapter. Unless, of course, they didn't provide the device for you, at which point, any good MIS/IT department would say "What are you doing using your personally-owned equipment on the corporate network?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the laws of physics: shared collision medium, higher latency, etc.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[drinkypoo]

Why is it that we in IT have people that are so resistant to change instead of being the change advocates we need to be? As users start using the technology we support differently, it's up to us to find a solution, not to force the user to use the technology differently. To think that users will not change how they use technology is naive, at best.

I see what you did there, but I don't see why, because you didn't log in, and usually people say this kind of thing for the cheap up-mods from people who want to think they are erudite and are willing to moderate, so that they can get more karma. But what you are saying is ignorant at best since if a mobile user needs to apprehend a lot of data, you put access to it in a remote application and grant them access to that. Then their device only needs to work with their apprehension of the data, and not the full data set. The only time it makes more sense to store all the data on a limited device in the first place is that you have no network connection, and you require the full data set. Basically we're talking about making changes to the corporate network that make no sense. We already went backwards in the sense that we have all these PCs on desktops and our organizations' processing power tends to be distributed throughout our organization where it sits idle most of the time.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Spad]

Sure, just sign this document accepting complete liability for anything that happens to our network as a result of you connecting up your latest penis extension de jour to it.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mcavic]

What are you doing using your personally-owned equipment on the corporate network?

See, that attitude (which as an administrator I agree with) goes completely against the concept of wireless.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[hedwards]

Precisely, which is why you'd get that response. If the company wanted you to use an iPad for your job they would either provide it or provide resources with which IT would support it. It's really clear that under typical circumstances that they won't provide the support unless they provide the equipment.

Plus, self entitled assholes like you make it a lot more difficult for the rest of us to get our work done.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[msauve]

RF based WLAN is shared media, there's no way around that. Unlicensed spectrum is always subject to interference, so can't be considered reliable. So, there's limited, unreliable bandwidth to share with multiple devices. It makes zero sense to use all wireless clients, just as it makes zero sense to deploy Ethernet hubs. That is, unless you don't really care about performance or reliability.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[clang_jangle]

Why is it that we in IT have people that are so resistant to change instead of being the change advocates we need to be?

Because of the laws of physics: shared collision medium, higher latency, etc.

Don't forget security! You know, that magickal thing nearly all users take for granted, assuming it's just automagically built-in to networking or perhaps there's just an app we all use that handles all security issues. People who rage against IT because they can't have their way are usually (not always) frakking morons who need to be locked down for their own and everyone elses' safety.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[yarnosh]

Devices that require regular fast data transfers will continue to need wired access, yes. This isn't really optional. Wired networks are just faster by a very wide margin. Not only that, but they're switched so you're not necessarily sharing bandwidth with the person sitting next to you. You can't just say "Oh, lets make wireless the center of our infrastructure," and BAM, faster wireless. It doesn't work like that. Even 802.11n can't hold a candle to GigE. On paper it looks like they are comparable (300Mbps vs 1000Mbps), but in practice the difference is huge. I'd take even a 100Mbps wired connection over a typical 802.11n link if I had to do any significant file transfers.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[JonySuede]

if you want something done and not wait at the institution you have to rogue. My team has 3 formal complains against it. Complain 1 and 2 : architect are not suppose to code, complain 3 : architects are not supposed to install a projector (a projector that was bought by the employer).

1 and 2 are caused by some brain dead syndicalist that ask too much but do not see the real advantage the the union brings us and 3 was provoked by the 6 weeks administrative delay to install the damn projector. Result : my boss received a sternly worded letter but we were more productive since we now had the projector install in our reunion room and the code that the tech were not able to write was done.

The web team has gone ahead and bought some iPhones androids and pads, they got a formal complain from net-sec but nobody cared because net-sec is supposed to be the everyone bitches. To every IT department: you are everyone bitches, we do not care about your concerns shut up and make it work.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Frnknstn]

If keeping the floor clean means that we can't walk on it, then you're not performing your function.

Bad analogy. You wanting to use crazy hardware at work is closer to you wanting to drive your Harley over the Janitor's clean floor.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[filthpickle]

wow...this is not trolling.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Gerzel]

No. I don't think that is the reason that a user who needs lots of data should also need to sit down, but I do think you are somewhat right.

Two reasons both of which stem from the fact that on Wires the signal is cast down a narrow path with only a limited number of recipients. Yes there are some wireless technologies that also are narrow path but these behave in practice much the same way as wires do, chiefly that they are stationary.

First is security. It is more difficult to tap a wire and easier to protect a wire. The area you need to protect for a wire is much smaller than that for a broad-cast wireless signal.

Second is overlap of signal. You can add more wires to an area but the number of channels over the airwaves that you can use is limited.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike most kinds of wires (e.g. USB), it's very common for people to want to make their own Ethernet cables. Part of the reason people are often staying with CAT 5e instead of CAT 6 is that it's easier to deal with. Any change would have to keep them easy to pull and crimp. Plus, if you make a new system, you're going to have to replace all the tools associated with it. Every IT pro is going to need to buy new crimpers and testers.

All that to fix a system that ain't broken.

Now I wouldn't mind seeing a new cable that's better, but I'm afraid in this case it might be impractical.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as long as we can work within the confines of physics, yes, let's move forward.

If you are proposing to break the laws of physics so that the PHB can get his request through... well... No.

There are some places so saturated by wi-fi networks that you cannot get good throughput. Unless technology makes a amazing leap, we are stuck with the fact that the airwaves are limited.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[filthpickle]

To every IT department: you are everyone bitches, we do not care about your concerns shut up and make it work.

YES. THIS. Give me the tools I need to pay your fucking salary and get out of my way.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

People are apparently having trouble understanding that there is a finite amount of spectrum allocated to wireless and you have to share it between all the devices in range. At some point all the bandwidth is used up, and if you want more, you need wires.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[bjorniac]

It's not being a self entitled asshole to ask that IT do their job so that I can do mine. My job brings money into the company, and that is what keeps us all in business. We don't make money by having a little walled garden network which isn't any good - we make money by selling our products to other people. The asshole is the person who wants to rule his own little kingdom and in doing so inhibits the core function of the business - to make money.

You've lost an understanding of what your job is: You job is to help ME bring in money. So do that. Not make a pretty network that no-one can use, but provide the services that help me bring in money. Otherwise you're not worth having.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Charcharodon]

An iPad is not a real device, it's a toy. Besides exactly how much "data" do you need to send it?......... oh wait you are talking about watching movies/video at work not actually doing "work" because anything else doesn't actually take up that much bandwidth for more than a minute or two.

The only thing thin devices like iPads may be usefull for someday is running remotely software on a hardwired server or a desktop and then streaming it to it.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Charcharodon]

I hate those. We use them on a laptop that we use to connect to the flight data record for troubleshooting/downloads/updates.

They do not hold up well and are constantly ordering more of the cards as they only last for about 20-30 uses before they fall apart.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[vakuona]

This is the very reason Apple does well, and hardware companies run by engineering types fail. Technology should work for people (or users) and not the other way around. If you can't figure out how to make wireless (or any IT) work well for your customers (everyone who needs WiFi) then you are not very good at your job.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Comen]

I do not think it was trolling, if you are doing some serious work, get off your iPad.
I have a iPad myself, and like many have stated before, its a device used to watch media and browse, you can stream video just fine at WIFI speeds, not sure what else you want to do here, if you really want a good connection plug a wire in.
Wireless will never top a wired connection, you have to much interference, and retransmissions just at layer 1, its nice and all, but if you can plug in... do!
I had a buddy recently buy a PC from Best Buy and paid the Geek Squad to hook his new PC up witha new wireless router, the router sat only a few feet on his desk, and still they hooked his PC up using the wireless connection, I changed that for him right way, why would you do that?
Is the original poster asking for us to make wireless as good as wired? because thats not going to happen.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[h4rr4r]

If you have a good crimper all you need is a new die. If your crimper does not have swappable dies, buy a better one.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[DarkOx]

I work in IT security at my company. If an end user acted the they way you are acting I'd report it and you'd probably be pretty severely reprimanded for your attitude and if you failed to change it afterward you'd be fired. Yes IT does need to *make it work* if its actually *work*, the fact that'd you would *like* to use your iWhatever may or may not be work. If you have a good reason come talk to us, most security departments would try to find a solution.

Expecting IT (Security especially) to just get out of the way or have a no request is to unreasonable attitude is just wrong, and I think you will find your UPPER management realizes that. Maybe you are not at a public company that might change things a bit too, but trust me someone will care when they have to put in the notes to the financial statement that something happened.

Management would be very unhappy if they were forced to report that, our trade secrets relating to the manufacturing we do may have been leaked, that our competitors know our cost structure, that we lost customer data, etc etc. The last on is embarrassing and might cost some current business, the first two could seriously harm the competitiveness of the company going forward. IT Security IS IMPORTANT we are not just your BITCH. We play a role just like every other department. We need you to be able to do what you do so we have job, you need us to make sure you are able to keep doing what you do, so you have job. That is why its called a (corp)oration, we are supposed to be cooperating.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[clang_jangle]

It's not being a self entitled asshole to ask that IT do their job so that I can do mine. My job brings money into the company, and that is what keeps us all in business.

Your sense of entitlement is quite apparent to everyone but you. IRL you don't make money without IT. IT doesn't make money without you. It's by nature a marriage of equals, but you sound like an abusive spouse. Get real.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Bing Tsher E]

I just have a home wireless network, and even dumb old I know enough to set up a MAC address whitelist on the router.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

The only thing that leaves me inclined to go wireless is not having to pull butt loads of cable through ceilings and attics. Then things like security, PCI DSS and HIPAA are brought into the mix and reality sets in, as I head back into the attic. One of the places I worked at was trying to use an apple airport for a firewall. We were scanned for PCI DSS compliance and gave us a report of every single device on our network. I yanked that in my first 30 days there. Don't even get started on the wireless encryption bit. Really

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[h4rr4r]

And when your know nothing solutions break, who do you expect to fix it?

Getting that sort of support is easy, sign this form stating any damage done will come out of your budget.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Bing Tsher E]

Also, would you please change the toner on the fucking LJ4 in accounting?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Comen]

Wireless will never be as good as a wire, get over it! you sound like a baby, IT departments do not create the standards for WIFI, and WIFI is good enough right now for you to use your iPad on it, if you want to get serious put down the pad and grab a wired desktop like anyone else serious enough about their job.
The "make some bullshit work that a dream up, or ill cry you are not doing your job" more than annoying, no wonder you posted as a coward troll.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[clang_jangle]

Or maybe we don't have the budget for testing iOS devices, and all the employees who own them are lusers who can't help with testing because they don't know memory from storage, plus have a chip on their shoulder so no-one wants to help them beyond what the job description requires. Ever think of that, genius? No, of course not. Just "me me me, I want I want!!!!". So typical... Doesn't it ever occur to you attitude wielding fartknockers that maybe you get shitty service out of IT because IT doesn't like being treated like shit? You're probably the type that pisses off food servers and hotel maids, too. Not very smart.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Charcharodon]

:) I can give you 1,000mbit connection all to yourself over a wire which you can plug into your desktop/laptop.

Or I can give you a 300mbit wirelss connection that you have to share with every office drone within 300ft who is watchin youtube on their portable and non-portable devices.

Even with a thousand fold improvement in wireless bandwidth the unwashed masses will still be bringing the network to its knees while the wired network won't even break a sweat with 10 times the traffic.

Maybe what they really need is a very short distance wireless router that covers the distance of say a room or four cubicals or maybe not much beyond your own cubical/office. You'd get the benefit of being wirelss without the downside of sharing.

Of course the bean counters will just say plug your damn device in instead of having to spend an extra 100-200$ per employee so they can be lazy.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[lwsimon]

I look around at the Fortune 100 company where I work, and I note that every single executive is carrying an iPad. I regularly see them pulling down enormous PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, and watching Netflix.

This is the first wave, of course - soon, VPs will need one to feel important - then Directors, then Sr. Managers, and on down. The iPad is on the path to finally cracking the corporate market for Apple.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[filthpickle]

we are all smartasses....we've met each other....he was a smartass...not a troll

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

It's not so much a pretty little network, but a network that has to be useable by everyone else in the office trying to make money also. Perhaps every salesman should be responsible for buying and paying for their own internet access at their desk? Perhaps they should rent their own cubicle. Coins on the bathroom stalls ( Yes we are often building maint too). We can send you a bill for our repair services and have that added to your office rent. What's that you say? You need some storage space or want that conference room or the afternoon? Credit card please? And since we are everyone's bitches, why not just slide that down my a** crack.. There ya go. I will make sure the fee shows up as a strip club so your wife can trip out when she looks over the monthly statements. But then again, judging by your previous statements, you probably have to pay her too.

By the way, I read your email.

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[lwsimon]

... or more spectrum, or more efficient use of the spectrum to already have ...

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Bing Tsher E]

Basically we're talking about making changes to the corporate network that make no sense. We already went backwards in the sense that we have all these PCs on desktops and our organizations' processing power tends to be distributed throughout our organization where it sits idle most of the time.

Translation: you used to like being the dude wearing the white coat in the computer lab and having a half-door that regular employees could make requests for printed reports at. It all started going downhill when they let them have those Lear-Siegler ADM3A dumb terminals! And it's only gotten worse!

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

if they're in a line of business that doesn't involve boatloads of data,

Why are you bringing an Ipad to flip burgers at McDonalds?

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Mr. Slippery]

We don't make money by having a little walled garden network which isn't any good

No, but your company loses money, and maybe go out of business, if you have a security breach and disclose vital data.

You've lost an understanding of what your job is: You job is to help ME bring in money.

An admin's job is also to help prevent YOU from doing something boneheaded that loses money or even kills the company. (And the more someone spouts this sort of big ego bullshit, the more I'd suggest to admins to keep a close eye on what they're doing.)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[rikkards]

Except that any decent wireless sniffer will find:
1. Your wireless network
2. Any MAC address that is on #1 making a whitelist irrelevant.

However with that in mind most people would just move onto your next door neighbor who is still running default settings on their 8 year old router.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Mr. Slippery]

I look around at the Fortune 100 company where I work, and I note that every single executive is carrying an iPad.

Yes, but this thread was about people doing work. Not about people who parleyed social connections into dead-wood positions where they rake in large salaries to get in the way of the people who actually get shit done. (Or am I being cynical?)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately, an IPad is not a toy but also it is not a workplace tool either. The problem is that the small screen and lack of a real keyboard (and by that I mean something with actual keys) make it a device for consuming data. Try to produce some lengthy document on one, it wouldn't be as efficient as doing it on a device with a keyboard!

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

I do not think it was trolling, if you are doing some serious work, get off your iPad.
I have a iPad myself, and like many have stated before, its a device used to watch media and browse, you can stream video just fine at WIFI speeds, not sure what else you want to do here, if you really want a good connection plug a wire in.
Wireless will never top a wired connection, you have to much interference, and retransmissions just at layer 1, its nice and all, but if you can plug in... do!
I had a buddy recently buy a PC from Best Buy and paid the Geek Squad to hook his new PC up witha new wireless router, the router sat only a few feet on his desk, and still they hooked his PC up using the wireless connection, I changed that for him right way, why would you do that?
Is the original poster asking for us to make wireless as good as wired? because thats not going to happen.

That, and the fact that I tend to believe more and more that wireless (Wi-Fi at least) actually has an impact on health. I have a friend whose daughters got headaches the day he powered his WiFi router. He did some double blind testing (nobody in the house was remotely aware of what he was doing). Every day the router was on, both daughters got headaches. The days it was off, they got none. He kept running this for two entire month, some days on, some days off. 100% match. No wifi ever again for him.

It gave me the idea to do the same at home, since my wife has been suffering headaches for a while now. And it looks like a winner so far. The test is over yet, and my sex life is already up ;-)

Well, it looks like Wifi will soon be banned at my home too.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

They said the same with computers. I do work on my ipad. Why couldn't anyone?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Samantha Wright]

Why are you considering an iPad the heart of a network?

Anyway, you forgot all the pencil-pushing bureaucrats.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[icebraining]

How many of them actually involve pulling "boatloads of data"? If you have an iPad, you should at most use it for the UI layer and leave data processing to a decent machine (plugged to Ethernet).

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mjwalshe]

some people obviously have zero ideas about basic physics and how wifi works and just how much more expensive a wireless network its when compared to wired one.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Not mentioning wifi will banned from most schools and public libraries in France, given the speed at which people complain.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Larryish]

The idea is that, moving forward, let's not have to sit down.

Agreed.

Now companies can get a lot of fat fucking desk jockeys to work from a treadmill/stairmaster via iPad.

Everybody wins:

the company, because fit (not fat) people are more motivated

the employee, because it sucks to be a fat fuck

the rest of us, because we have fewer ginormous blobs of grease riding around Wal-Mart in those little electric LTPs (Lard Transportation Devices)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[cynyr]

please explain to me how you would crimp something that looks like micro hdmi at home reliably?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[magamiako1]

Yes, let's break the laws of physics to make wifi work *exactly* like you want it to work.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

how do your friends daughters and your wife not get headaches from:
tv signals
radio signals
cellular signals
gps signals
sunlight
cosmic rays/cbmr
garage door openers
remote controls
hell just sitting in front of a monitor or tv.

you are BOMBARDED with electromagnetic radiation all day every day. anecdotal story is fail.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[cynyr]

right and very few of those business uses are using "boatloads of data". Think video production, 3d animation, CAD, etc. We are talking multi GB of part files, or TB of raw video footage.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Culture20]

I had a buddy recently buy a PC from Best Buy and paid the Geek Squad to hook his new PC up witha new wireless router, the router sat only a few feet on his desk, and still they hooked his PC up using the wireless connection, I changed that for him right way, why would you do that?

At work, where everyone has two gigabit lines to every office, using wireless this way would be silly. At home, where my cable modem is slower than 802.11b speeds, there's no real point in using wired. If 802.11g isn't fast enough for home network transfers, I can just sneakernet a drive from place to place.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

Everyone doesn't do the same work you do. Some of us for example, like to use two hands to type. Productivity nearly doubles when you type with two hands instead of just one.

But seriously, I can't think of anything you could be using that for, please, enlighten me..

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Vectormatic]

at my manager's going away party two weeks ago, i saw this suit use his ipad as a tray for his beer... i imagine similar use-cases can be found by the dozen at mickey Ds

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MeatBag PussRocket]

considering that one of the primary things these executives appear to do is "watch Netflix" i dont think you're being cynical at all.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[The O Rly Factor]

Tell that to the higher-up execs who all seem to want the newest, shiniest iToy because they have the money to buy it, and then complain to IT people like me when it doesn't work.

Company CFO: "But I just got this brand new I Pad Thing and I wanted to use it here in the office because its so convenient and its much better than my desktop you geeks in IT gave me, look they have this er...'Application Store' thing I just buy software from, no more getting you guys to install crap."

Me: "Sir our network does not support iPads, we have a BES server though if you wanted to use your Blackberry or Playbook..."

CFO: "I DON'T CARE MAKE THIS WORK OKAY THANKS BYE"

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

WAIT!

I detect common sense and factual comparisons in your post.

If we wan't to go this route, I'm obliged to add that no wired or wireless connection can beat the transfer rate of a blue ray. or an external hd.

now, if one needs to move a buttload of data and requires low latency on top of that, probably he should revise his business plan.. or his definition of buttload of data.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[linest]

Why is it that we in IT have people that are so resistant to change instead of being the change advocates we need to be? As users start using the technology we support differently, it's up to us to find a solution, not to force the user to use the technology differently. To think that users will not change how they use technology is naive, at best.

I work for one of those forward looking IT departments that advocates allowing users to use their personal iPads for work. We also allow them to connect their own personal wireless routers to the network. Problem solved!

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Culture20]

net-sec is supposed to be the everyone bitches. To every IT department: you are everyone bitches, we do not care about your concerns

This is where great ideas like storing passwords and credit card numbers in clear text in a publicly accessible database come from. Sony programmers likely said the same thing to Sony's network security team and sysadmins.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[growse]

Or, more likely, the IT guys don't have enough budget to spend on making wifi a little bit faster. Unless you want them to suddenly stop caring about the exchange server. Or the SAN. Or any backups - Actions on all of which might be as the result of legal requirements due to local law or ongoing legal cases involving the company.

But hey, better wifi. That's the most important thing, right?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately, an IPad is a toy because it is not fit to be used as a workplace tool. The problem is that the small screen and lack of a real keyboard (and by that I mean something with actual keys) make it a device for consuming media

Fixed.

The fact that the Ipad's only real use is consuming media is precisely what makes it a toy, obviously. The people who want to play with toys in the workspace and can get away with it are usually called "management". Everyone else has to wait until they get done working to play with their toys. Welcome to adulthood!

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

The power at which a WiFi router emits signal barely has anything to do with all of the stuff you mentioned (except for the sun of course and cellular towers). It is always on unlike most stuff you mentioned (save the sun, tv/radio signal and cellular towers). Cell towers are beoing banned all over europe next to schools, preschools and nurseries. Of course, no credible study have been conducted by anyone that wasn't completely biaised on the matter (cell phone manufacturers, telcos, government, etc)

That said, I don't dispute the fact that my science isn't up to speed on the matter. What I said is that when I tell my wife to write down twice a day every day the level of pain she feels, it is constantly 2-3 when the Wifi is on and constantly 0 when the Wifi is off. And no, she doesn't have the router in her line of sight, she doesn't even know where it is. It's been only a couple of weeks so far, so no conclusion yet - the statistical sample isn't relevant yet. But I kind of see the way it's going.

And it's going to be a pain if I have to turn it off completely since more and more devices use Wifi only these days. But that versus my wife's head, it'll be a no brainer.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MeatBag PussRocket]

Your job may be vital to your organization, and you may be "goddamned good" at it, but thats really besides the issue. Any corporate network contains mountains of proprietary data that is placed at risk when people who dont understand how to manage that data (you) attempt to hook up whatever you damn well fancy. Computers are not magic no matter how much you'd like to believe otherwise. Ethernet is not powered by unicorn blood an IT staff are not wizards (no matter how much some of us would like to believe otherwise). Getting a virus is only one potential problem, and truthfully the ability to not get a virus has no bearing on "knowing what you're doing"

At the end of the day, if your flashy electronic status symbol causes a network issue and then no one in your office can work, it really doesnt matter how 'goddamnded good' you are at your job, you cant do everyone elses too.

I've seen a number the power-suit, anger-management, "i'm a type-A", throbbing hard-ons; thinking they're the next Richard Branson. its a great wet-dream until you fuck up and get punted from your high horse by people that care about advancing the goals of the business over their own personal agenda.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[dlgeek]

Easy. You terminate your custom cable at the wall jack with your existing tools and only use the new connector for the last few feet to the device - and you purchase that cable.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[0123456]

Except that any decent wireless sniffer will find:
1. Your wireless network
2. Any MAC address that is on #1 making a whitelist irrelevant.

Anyone who brings their own personal hardware to work, somehow doesn't realise it's not allowed and then finds it won't connect because the MAC address is wrong will probably stop at that point. Anyone who runs a wireless sniffer and fakes a MAC address so they can use the WLAN can hardly complain when they're laid off for breaking security policy.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MeatBag PussRocket]

i totally agree that workplace health is an important part to many things (including productivity) but the notion that an iPad is an adequate replacement for a desktop or even a laptop in terms of productivity absurd. If everything you do on a computer would be no less constrained by use of an iPad i serously doubt you need a computer at all. Its useful for reading email and reviewing documents and the like, but composition is really impractical, If its not a Mac or mixed OS environment already, setting that up can be cumbersome, et al. i mean, its a cool device, but lets not be fooled into thinking its going to be a good replacement for a desktop, ever.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MeatBag PussRocket]

whoever told you Apple does security well was selling you something. Wireless will *always* be inherently less secure than a wired. to suggest that this makes me "not good at my job" is like me being upset because my mechanic cant install a flux capacitor in my car.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[CastrTroy]

How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows, the data can't possibly be that big. Maybe if you stick some movies in that powerpoint it can get pretty big. I'd be surprised to see a spreadsheet that took up more than 50 MB. Netflix, while having large files, doesn't actually require that much bandwidth, as you have the entire time the movie is being watched to download it. For this kind of stuff wireless is fine. But one you start talking big data, where you need to transfer gigabytes of data around in minutes, you really need to move to a wired connection.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[vakuona]

Is it really rocket science to make WiFi work in a building that houses 10,000 employees. We have WiFi in one of the buildings in the company I work for, and when I go to meetings, the WiFi is really helpful. I don't need WiFi all the time, and if I am sitting at a desk, I plug in. But i don't want to plug in for every meeting I might attend, or when I go to sit in the atrium.

No one cares so much about the performance, yes, we want it to be fast, but we are not downloading gigabytes worth of data onto laptops all the time. If only has to be appropriately fast. If it is a bit slower, it might actually encourage people to use the WiFi in more appropriate ways, i.e., for convenience. Our WiFi is plenty fast though.

And your users are never losers. If you can't help them do their job, you know, the bit that actually brings in the money, then you are of no use to them.

And no, I do not piss off food servers and hotel maids, but I was responding to you taking the position that people who ask for things you are not willing to deliver are morons for wanting IT to deliver what they need. Why can't IT go to their bosses and say "the users are clamouring for this, why don't we find a way to make it happen".

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Bacon Bits]

Your NetFlix comment makes me think you're being sarcastic, but let's take the comments seriously:

I look around at the Fortune 100 company where I work, and I note that every single executive is carrying an iPad.

Again, you need to find someone doing real work on an iPad. Executives don't do real work on a computer. They pay other people to do that. They do their real work on the telephone and face-to-face.

I regularly see them pulling down enormous PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, and watching Netflix.

They're viewing. Viewing is not working on the device. Creating is doing working on the device. In this case the iPad is little better than a printed document or a DVD player.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[vakuona]

I wasn't talking security when I referred to Apple. I was referring to their attention to their users. They don't expect users to change to fit their products, they make products that fit their users (death grip issue excepted).

I didn't clam that wireless could be made as secure as wired, but it can be secured appropriately for the required use. But it is also wishful thinking that we can just ignore that many devices being produced are made to be mobile, and expecting users to use a wired connection with inherently mobile devices is just silly.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Alex Belits]

This is precisely why users are not supposed to use their wireless devices at work without IT creating and approving a secure configuration for it.

MAC address whitelist is absolutely worthless against anything other than your neighbor's torrent-leeching kids. No currently available hardware-implemented wireless encryption is up to any reasonable safety standard, either. There are good solutions for dealing with potentially insecure devices on the network, insecure protocols, and even with secure access over insecure channels, but they involve some serious system administration work -- firewalls/routers and authentication servers' configuration, installation of VPN endpoints, distribution of keys to the users, writing policy documents, etc. More often than not I have seen those being done poorly by IT itself, but a user who thinks that of all things, MAC address whitelist is an adequate security measure, is definitely worse than even a very bad professional network admin.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Kjella]

How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows

Your information is way out of date. Both Excel 2007 and 2010 support a million rows or thereabouts, and yes it does get abused that way.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

Unless your company was the fucking Hudson's Bay Company, there was always IT. Computers have been part of business for over half a century, prior to that there telex, telegram, electronic typewriters, calculators, pneumatic and the list goes on.

Not only are you a vile disgusting repugnant megalomaniacal self-important piece of shit, but you're fucking stupid as well. I'd hate to have to deal with an outright unmitigated emotional abortion like you if I was in your IT department. I can tell you this, you worthless collection of cells, that if you got hit by a bus, the collective IT department would fucking cheer.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[SomePgmr]

You're absolutely right. The rj45 connector is easy enough to make quickly (read: big enough), sturdy enough, cheap and ubiquitous. The desire for a smaller jack at the machine will only be addressed with breakouts or special factory-made cables (that will likely irritate people).

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pence128]

Translation: I like buying 100 times more computer than I need and only being able to use 1/100th of it at a time!

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

Anyone who thinks they cannot be replaced is usually at the top of the list of those that cannot be replaced. No company can afford an out-of-control prima dona who makes irrational demands out of a sense of entitlement. Guys like you are usually the ones busted trying to sell customer lists to competitors because your employer does not massage your sense of self worth.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

We have a policy where we work that anyone that wants to use personal equipment; whether that's a WiFi device like an iPad or an iPod, or work from home with their PC, have to submit the devices for regular inspection, and IT staff have to have root/administrative access. The one thing we're not going to do is open up our network to someone else's hardware. Most people prefer to use company hardware.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

There is no more spectrum. You can't manufacture it, you can only reallocate it. There still comes a point at which all of the allocated spectrum is consumed and there is no more, and that scarcity means that it isn't exactly cheap.

Efficiency has the same limits. If you already have something which is 50% efficient (i.e. 50% of the Shannon limit), it is physically impossible to more than double your available bandwidth through efficiency improvements, and in practice you can't even do that.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[hawguy]

If we wan't to go this route, I'm obliged to add that no wired or wireless connection can beat the transfer rate of a blue ray. or an external hd.

Actually, it's easy to beat a blu-ray's bandwidth if you're walking it across a relatively large facility.

It takes me about 10 minutes to walk a 50GB Blu-Ray from one end of my facility to the other so (ignoring the time it takes to create the disk), my transfer rate is:

50000 MB / 600 seconds = 83 MB/second

I can get 1 Gbit/second (~ 100 MB/second) from any desktop to any other desktop in the facility (1 gbit to the desktop, aggregated to 10Gbit over fiber, then back to 1 gbit at the receiving desktop). Assuming that I just wanted to get the data between server rooms or IDF's, I could run 10 Gbit over fiber without too much trouble.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[satcomjimmy]

Anyone who needs to pull boatloads of data needs to sit the hell down

Sure, in May 2011. The idea is that, moving forward, let's not have to sit down. Let's be able to pull, process and use that boatloads of data on the go.

When you develop 802.11z which utilizes different frequencies and gets you the bandwidth you need on a channel scheme that mitigates interference among the hundreds of people that share the space you want to connect in, let us know. Until then, trust the network engineers in the discussion that explain what you want is not always feasible, at any cost. 802.11n will not fix the problem, though it does help. It is also expensive and still inherently not in the same category of wired networking for all of the same reasons that every other version of wireless networking has always lagged behind the wired LAN.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[hawguy]

To every IT department: you are everyone bitches, we do not care about your concerns shut up and make it work.

YES. THIS. Give me the tools I need to pay your fucking salary and get out of my way.

But you don't pay my salary, my salary is paid by the CFO, who happens to pay your salary as well. The CFO pays me to keep our network safe from intruders, and to make sure that we are compliant with the regulatory environment we live in - SOX, HIPAA, PCI, etc.

If your device causes a regulatory compliance violation, it's your butt that will be out on the street because you violated IT policy, not mine. If you need some piece of technology to get your job done, convince my boss that you need it and that it's worth the cost to support it. Or convince my boss that you're able to meet all of our regulatory rules on your own - and make sure you have the documentation to prove it.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[satcomjimmy]

Why is it that we in IT have people that are so resistant to change instead of being the change advocates we need to be? As users start using the technology we support differently, it's up to us to find a solution, not to force the user to use the technology differently. To think that users will not change how they use technology is naive, at best.

Because of the laws of physics: shared collision medium, higher latency, etc.

ditto, a thousand times.......the physics of the wireless medium, especially on ***UNLICENSED*** spectrum does not change just because you want it to function differently, so please stop pushing that rhetoric. I gladly put wireless where business requires it but I also do not allow the user to develop unrealistic expectations as to how it can be used. I don't plan on being the guy that tells Steve Jobs "sure, you can run your demo on 802.11 while in a room full of interfering devices, I don't see a problem with that!"

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Culture20]

This is the very reason Apple does well, and hardware companies run by engineering types fail.

And the very reason why Apple doesn't do well in big business, where security sells. Protip: If your computer requires a thrid-party cage to encapsulate it because simple things like bios passwords (nvram security setting, whatever) can't be locked down, you're not paying attention to security enough. Likewise for providing Java but not updating Java security vulnerabilities (I'm still jaded about that one, Apple).

Technology should work for people (or users) and not the other way around.

"Working" means different things to different people. "Working" didn't include *any* security for home users (even of Macs) until 2000ish. For those in the know, "working" included and still includes security (more now than then), because without security, other important features of "working" stop working, or worse, they start working backwards (data gets destroyed or stolen, lawsuits occur, cats and dogs living together). For iPhone users, "working" included 4-number passcodes until other people easily bypassed them, then "working" included auto-wipes on several failed attempts, and arbitrary length passphrases.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Zoxed]

> Why couldn't anyone?

I need a bigger screen, a keyboard and decent ergonomics. And they are a ridiculous price compared with commodity PCs.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[newcastlejon]

Think video production, 3d animation, CAD, etc. We are talking multi GB of part files, or TB of raw video footage.

Not on an iPad though. As has been mentioned before, wi-fi is quite adequate for streaming whatever you might need.

You're not doing real CAD on an iPad, though you might be using one to view a model.

You're not doing real video editing on an iPad either, though you might be trimming or resizing some home movies.

You're definitely not working with TB of footage on a device with less than 100GB of memory.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[newcastlejon]

He did some double blind testing (nobody in the house was remotely aware of what he was doing).

I'm going to lay off saying "bullshit" to the idea of wi-fi sensitivity and just concentrate on this: I don't think double-blind means what you think it does. In essence, he knew whether the wi-fi was on or not.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[clang_jangle]

^^This^^

A lot of Apple customers don't realize there's a world of difference between a Mac being a home machine which is "more secure" than Windows WRT malware, and an iOS device on a corporate network which is required by law to be secure. We've already seen some daunting issues with iOS on the iPhone, hogging network resources and being far too easy to detect and attack. Not to mention the ease with which a trojan can be introduced on these devices, basically I can infect any iOS or Android device with a hidden file on a microSD card. This new generation of mobile OSes frankly makes XP look like a fortress in comparison. It's one thing to use that under the thumb of your carrier's network, it's a whole other thing when we're talking about a network for which I am legally and ethically responsible. So iPad people cry and pout and call nasty names all you want, but until the testing is budgeted for and under way the answer is no -- and it's for your own good, maybe one day when you grow up you'll understand.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[lpp]

But that versus my wife's head, it'll be a no brainer.

I don't think I need to add anything here.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[jedidiah]

Use less lame devices.

Wireless networking is highly problematic for a number of reasons. Those problems disappear once you use a proper network.

A situation that may be tolerable for a self-centered early adopter may not scale to hundreds or thousands of seats.

The idea that corporations should go wireless because that's the only way that some Apple devices can connect just demonstrates how poorly suited Apple products are for business or "serious work" in general.

"I've followed our glorious cult leader over the cliff. Now deal with me."

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[jedidiah]

> some people obviously have zero ideas about basic physics and how wifi works and just how much more expensive a wireless network its when compared to wired one.

It's almost as if these conspicuous consumers like to brag about their willful ignorance while denigrating anyone with a clue or more interesting requirements.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Namely reading and writing. I can type on the iPad keyboard as quickly as I can type on a regular keyboard. I am aware that not everybody does, but I do (and I'm not the only one). In some cases it's even easier that typing on a regular keyboard, like when you need to enter something specific such as a number.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

ok, you're right, it wasn't double blind. My bad. Maybe I can set up my wireless router on a PC-controlled plug so that the computer will decide whether it's on or off (randomly). That way, nobody knows if it's on or off.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Maritz]

Seems to me there are two problems here - prior plausibility, and rigour. Your study is not in agreement with the consensus on this issue, in which many other blinded tests have been done to see if people suffer ill effects from EM and from what I've seen the best trials come out negative. If your results show anything it's that poorly controlled tests with imperfect methodology can produce all kinds of erroneous conclusions. In addition, the radiation in question is not ionizing radiation so it's very difficult to see how it could have an effect on physiology, hence the prior plausibility issue. Having said all that, IANAE (epidemiologist)... ;)

To be honest, if you think you can detect EM fields purely through a feeling or sensation, you might be eligible for Randi's prize, might be worth looking into.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[lwsimon]

What's your point? I was merely pointing out the activities that I saw as the most bandwidth-intensive that they regularly use in my presence. Does it really matter if they are producers or consumers of the data, as it is still being transferred?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[lwsimon]

We are nowhere near 100% utilization of spectrum, though.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mikkelm]

That's a pretty dishonest argument to make. You're saying that if both 802.11 and wired Ethernet can saturate the Internet connection supporting the network, then there's no real reason to use wired Ethernet. If that's as far as you're going to extend your argument, then there's no real reason to use 802.11 either. Of course, you seem to forget that some people do transfer data between hosts on their local network, and that 802.11 features layer 1 and 2 concerns that just don't exist with full duplex wired Ethernet.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

In some cases it's even easier that typing on a regular keyboard, like when you need to enter something specific such as a number.

And it's not possible to do this with a keyboard?

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Maritz]

You make a good point and in an amusing fashion. To someone like this who stamps their feet and demands you bend the rules for their toys, it's tempting to let them hang themselves but in reality you'd probably be just as implicated for accommodating them.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

Have you even bothered talking to management and tried convincing them? I wonder if you know what the answer would be, so you hope to force IT to violate the rules for your special device.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Bogtha]

It's a perfectly reasonable requirement and your comment is nothing but flamebait. Why is it so hard to believe that tablets are being used for serious work?

As an example, one of my recent projects was an iPad app for a company to use for going through projects with their clients and during pitches. They have a lot of projects and some of the files are relatively large. They easily transfer gigabytes of data at once. The only alternative to Wi-Fi for their app would be to add the files through iTunes file sharing, which isn't anywhere near as convenient.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

CTO: Hey, CFO, yeah, I liked the present you gave to us for Christmas. Oh, and by the way, if you ever talk to a member of my staff like that again, I'll forceabley remove your testicles with a three hole punch and shove them so far up your ass your kids will think your tonsils doubled in size.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[filthpickle]

haha...funny.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mjwalshe]

yes some one in the uk commented that one well known celeb who gets asked about gadgets (hes an apple fan) is "the sort of person that stupid people think is inteligent"

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[RogerWilco]

We are nowhere near 100% utilization of spectrum, though.

We are much closer to that than you might think. Only certain frequencies are suitable for certain applications. There are actual physical limitations.

I'm working in radioastronomy. There is a serious chance that in the near future only a few remote locations on earth and the backside of the moon will be suitable for any kind of scientific work. Most of the spectrum in most of the inhabited world is allocated and being used. A few frequency ranges are reserved for radioastronomy, but there is a lot of commercial pressure on governments to give that up.

I predict an astronomical observatory on the backside of the moon before 2050. If trends continue, by then it will be the only radio-quiet place left.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

I suggest you not believe your iPad was designed to handle serious GB or TB of data transfers and use a real computer.

PS blame Apple for not being enterprise-ready, not the enterprise for ignoring Apple's stubbornness.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

The issue in question was moving boatloads of enterprise data. Explain to me what enterprise app you legitimately use an iPad for that requires moving "boatloads" of data. That is to say, where simple wifi isn't good enough.

Things like this keep me from wanting iPads on my wireless network.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

As someone else posted, you're not doing any of that on an iPad unless its through a virtual screen (Cisco, VNC, X-Windows) anyway, in which case only the server needs access to those speeds, not your iPad.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

Yes, one requires processing power and more bandwidth. It also results in doing something productive that's justified.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

I've defeated more MAC whitelists than you want to know about while showing my customers why they need wired networks.

I install wireless service only for devices like wearable computers in warehouses, on their own segments, and connected through a firewall to the main network. Incidentally, if at all possible, wireless segments can never access the Internet.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

Don't forget turning on the microwave in the lounge to kill everyone's bandwidth :)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[russotto]

Now companies can get a lot of fat fucking desk jockeys to work from a treadmill/stairmaster via iPad.

This is a nonsense argument; it's easy to put a full wired workstation on a treadmill.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Culture20]

If 802.11g isn't fast enough for home network transfers, I can just sneakernet a drive from place to place.

Of course, you seem to forget that some people do transfer data between hosts on their local network, and that 802.11 features layer 1 and 2 concerns that just don't exist with full duplex wired Ethernet.

I didn't forget. Sneakernet is far more secure and faster.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[the_enigma_1983]

Assuming large enough data sets, you could easily carry 10 Blu-Ray discs in that time though. That's now 830MB/second. Although now you'll need to consider time taken to burn said discs. Alternatively, you might have a 2TB drive that you're walking across. 40x bigger, so your transfer is now at 3320MB/s, bug again, you'd need to account for the time taken to read/write the data at either end which will definitely slow things down. In the end, given current network capabilities and hardware limits on reading/writing individual discs or hard drives, I'd still agree with you that networks are faster, but it's generally because of the additional time that it takes to read/write data.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[evilviper]

Its useful for reading email and reviewing documents and the like, but composition is really impractical,

There exist both usb and bluetooth keyboards. And with combo iPad case/stands with integrated keyboards, you'd have a hard time telling the difference between a netbook at iPad + keyboard from a distance.

As an added bonus, the Android tablets are much more open. So you can buy something like an Archos 70 for $200, and upgrade the firmware to make it a full Linux tablet with X11, KDE, etc. Hell, Archos even has a 250GB model. Frankly, tablets are probably more capable than netbooks, thanks to bluetooth allowing much more expansion options.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mikkelm]

You're really reaching here, and you aren't even addressing the issues introduced by the medium on 802.11 connections. You're advocating the use of a technology that makes tradeoffs in reliability and security to gain mobility to connect a stationary device that is adjacent to the router. That's not ever going to sound smart.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mikkelm]

Could your company make money today without IT? Chances are good that if there's a genuine need for IT staffing, it couldn't.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[kaizokuace]

what about optical at the jack. those can have small connectors yes?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[gmhowell]

In some cases it's even easier that typing on a regular keyboard, like when you need to enter something specific such as a number.

And it's not possible to do this with a keyboard?

- Dan.

You started by saying "Everyone doesn't do the same work you do. Some of us for example, like to use two hands to type." and then you proceed to douche it up. Why not stick by your original comment, which is along the lines of "different strokes for different folks"?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

You're the one betraying the anti-social behavior. In the real world, IT departments are bound by policies, most of them being sensible policies in part based on law and in part based on good practice. What is not good practice is to open up your network and its data to some self-important asswipe who thinks the world revolves around his needs and desires. Grow up, you're just a fucking salesman.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[hazem]

How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows, the data can't possibly be that big.

Well, Excel 2003 only handles 65k rows... per sheet, but there can be at least 255 sheets. Plus many corporate offices are on Office 2007 or 2010, which had much higher limits.

I personally am tasked with sending an excel file each month to a VP that is about 150 MB, because it's basically an extract of a ton of data from a database... that he wants to have "on hand" in his iPad.... "just in case I need it". I'm sure there's a better way to make it available to him; however, I'm just glad I don't have to deliver it in some kind of PowerPoint format.

Granted, that's only 150 MB/month, but I suspect I'm not the only person tasked with requests like this. I can only imagine the gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations he has on the thing.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[mjwx]

I doubt Apple will stand alone in manufacturing devices that no longer have an easy way to connect to a wired network.

I highly doubt that any manufacturer, even Apple will remove Ethernet from their production lines.

What you've done here is taken your POV and projected that onto the world, claiming your experience is indicative of everyone.

It's not, you are in fact in the minority.

Wired networks will exist for a very long time, when Ethernet becomes obsolete it will be replaced by another wired technology (IP over Fibre Channel). Wireless is useless for large file transfers, when I want to move 7 GB of avi's from my laptop to my media centre (they are in the same room), my wireless N network is slower then my USB 2.0 hard disk. People, especially at work will transfer a lot of files.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

Agreed,

But on the rowboat everyone strokes the same as everyone else, with identical and correct equipment or nobody gets anywhere useful. You can use older or newer oars if you like, but that's about as much deviation as you are allowed.

As for douching it up, your comment about entering a number? Please. iPads might be useful in the field, but then the Toughbook has that market.

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[kelemvor4]

Just because you have a device modeled after early 90's laptops with no built in network jack does not mean he's wrong.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Vancorps]

The reason people find it so hard to believe is because it so rarely happens. The execs where I work have iPads and its really just a novelty, they will do presentations with it, view spreadsheets, basically all of the same things they used to do on their laptop except in most cases the iPad does it poorly.

Now I've seen it used in home automation scenarios and its kinda cool there. The owner was psyched when I installed the Citrix receiver on his iPad giving him the ability to use full Outlook, Java, Flash, and oh yeah, he could then print too! So we're kludging all these technologies together just to make the iPad useful.

The device is better off as a piece of consumer electronics rather than anything that people work on. I've seen some intriguing software that would be good in hospitals so I won't dispute that on a fundamental level it is quite possible but the vast majority of iPad use is probably better spent on a real computer where productivity is dramatically improved. I'm of course speaking from a business use perspective, on the consumer electronics side there are a great many entertainment related uses.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

That is only an efficiency improvement. It isn't at all the equivalent of having multiple wires because it doesn't work if the network nodes in contention for bandwidth are in proximity to one another. If I want to have a dozen laptops practically sitting on top of each other on a conference room table, it isn't going to help.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[zmollusc]

You seem to be mixing your bits and bytes.
A skateboard would be enough to put the Blu-Ray back into the lead (although I agree that the time to create and verify the disk is significant in the real world).

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[yuhong]

What really matters is whether they are satisfied with the speed, IMO?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[DarwinSurvivor]

Do you have a like to that Toshiba? I do not doubt you in the slightest, it just sounds like an awesome machine.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Jesus_666]

How about Thunderbolt? Uses Mini DisplayPort plugs and should do networking.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[aix tom]

You could also speed up the transfer time of sneakernet by using avian carriers.

In some countries that might be 25 times faster than their Internet connection.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Agreed,

But on the rowboat everyone strokes the same as everyone else, with identical and correct equipment or nobody gets anywhere useful. You can use older or newer oars if you like, but that's about as much deviation as you are allowed.

As for douching it up, your comment about entering a number? Please. iPads might be useful in the field, but then the Toughbook has that market.

- Dan.

It becomes increasingly painful to post on slashdot... All those click and scrolls until all the parents are unfolded... Anyway.

Don't confuse users, I made the comment about entering a number. The keyboard displayed in Numbers when entering a formula beats hands down everything I know. There are other cases, but the point is that in many situations I find the iPad's keyboard equivalent or better than a regular QWERTY plastic one. In many other situations the iPad keyboard is close to unusable, such as typing code (Java, C, html, etc) with lots of extra characters (<{+-*/= .......)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Seems to me there are two problems here - prior plausibility, and rigour. Your study is not in agreement with the consensus on this issue, in which many other blinded tests have been done to see if people suffer ill effects from EM and from what I've seen the best trials come out negative.

Do you have links of such studies that were not funded by any party that would have an interest in showing it has no impact? That's a real question, not bitching.

If your results show anything it's that poorly controlled tests with imperfect methodology can produce all kinds of erroneous conclusions.

My results don't show anything yet as I have not yet finished my test. That's the sentence "the statistical sample isn't relevant yet."

Also, what in my posts led you to draw the conclusion that my test was "poorly controlled tests with imperfect methodology" ?

In addition, the radiation in question is not ionizing radiation so it's very difficult to see how it could have an effect on physiology, hence the prior plausibility issue. Having said all that, IANAE (epidemiologist)... ;)

If we keep on looking for stuff we know are there, we don't discover much now, do we?

To be honest, if you think you can detect EM fields purely through a feeling or sensation, you might be eligible for Randi's prize, might be worth looking into.

Headaches can be caused by many things, and having consistently a headache when some type of EM field is at some level for a while is not necessarily "detecting EM fields." Or maybe it is...
In any case, I don't see the relation to Randi's prize and my Wifi router. Maybe it was sarcasm...

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[yuri benjamin]

As I always said,
Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a pack mule loaded with DAT tapes.
Or an African swallow carrying an SD card.

Or two African swallows carrying a 2TB portable drive between them (assuming a 2TB portable drive is about as heavy as a coconut).

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[tehcyder]

So what? What is relevant is what those devices are doing. Anyone who needs to pull boatloads of data needs to sit the hell down, and at that point, you can serve them with a wire.

And where, exactly, do you suggest I plug in my iPad? The MacBook Air requires a separately purchased dongle to connect to a wired LAN.

Your solution assumes that a majority of devices continue to be developed with an ethernet port. As we move towards thinner, lighter laptops, I doubt Apple will stand alone in manufacturing devices that no longer have an easy way to connect to a wired network.

On a related note, my four year old's Fisher Price "first Barbie laptop" doesn't have an ethernet port either, WTF can I do?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[yuri benjamin]

pre-made pigtail and fusion splicer? The ones we have at work line up the strands automagically before fusing. I'm getting under 0.02dB loss on my splices.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[tehcyder]

I did my own ad hoc (well, made up) survey at home, my family mainly get headaches when it is sunny, therefore the sun is poisoning them with radiation. I now insist we only move about under cover of darkness, as a bonus the teenager can pretend she's a fucking vampire.

Your friend -of-a-friend anecdote is meaningless.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[tehcyder]

Namely reading and writing. I can type on the iPad keyboard as quickly as I can type on a regular keyboard. I am aware that not everybody does, but I do (and I'm not the only one). In some cases it's even easier that typing on a regular keyboard, like when you need to enter something specific such as a number.

That can only possibly be true if you are a very slow non-touch typist.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Ah, since you know The Truth (C), then I apologize.

Dumbass.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

Thanks. Lots of insight. Why posting if you have nothing to say?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Ash-Fox]

They don't expect users to change to fit their products, they make products that fit their users

I've been an Apple user, their products didn't fit me and didn't even offer the ability to make it fit.

I made these pictures at the time in question:
http://ash-fox.quickfox.org/temp/dock-customizability
verses
http://ash-fox.quickfox.org/temp/kdepanel-config

When trying to address this issue, I was told that I should get used to the way Apple does things.

I have to strongly disagree with what you said, Apple expects users to change to fit their products.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[RockDoctor]

And where, exactly, do you suggest I plug in my iPad?

I thought the iPad had it's network socket in the middle of the big glass sheet on one side (user supplies own nail to hold it in place).

This may suggest that I haven't read the specs of the iPad yet ; you'd be correct in thinking that. Why should I bother reading such things when I've got an iColleague who will keep me iUpToDate on iAnything iApple. Indeed, he's waiting on his iPad to be iDelivered iIn the iNext iFew iDays. (Sorry,iI'll try to stop speaking like iHim.)

Strange that he not once mentioned this iLack. But he knows fully-well that iI don't have an iWireless network in my iHouse, because iI still have the wired network iI put in over a decade ago, and it is still iFaster than any iWireless network iI've met.

That's a point - has wireless reached the speed of 100-base cable yet? ; iISTR hearing of such a thing recently. But it's not terribly iImportant to iMe ; I'm still unconfident of my ability to properly secure an iWireless network, and a 1000-base network might well be simpler.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[swalve]

CEO: What the fuck. Cfo, keep your toys at home. Cto, pack your things. Your department is a service department, and your attitude clearly shows that you don't understand this.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Ash-Fox]

I install wireless service only for devices like wearable computers in warehouses, on their own segments, and connected through a firewall to the main network. Incidentally, if at all possible, wireless segments can never access the Internet.

Two questions:

1) Why aren't you using IPSec so people can actually work properly on their networks?

2) Why would IPSec over wireless be vulnerable to intrusion like you imply all wireless is vulnerable to?

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[drinkypoo]

Lots of small devices can't really do IPSEC, either they can't do it at all, or they run like crap when they do it, or they don't support enough of it to actually be secure. These, of course, are the devices we actually want to use wirelessly.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[BuckaBooBob]

Unless your out in no-mans land where there isn't much for population density there is no way you can consider than free license spectrum could or can be reliable and uninhibited. The 2.4 spectrum is way too small as with 802.11g there are only 4 non-overlapping channels and with 802.11n there is only a single non-overlapping channel that can be used.. in the %G spectrum you have much more room.. but that is still only 11 usable channels for 802.11n..

So Unless your going to start to use licensed spectrum all you need is a small handful of people to start to generate some wireless traffic and you will start to feel the impact..

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[drinkypoo]

I am not a lawyer (obviously) but if you don't even fucking try to maintain security then you have no leg to stand on when your customer base comes with lawsuits over your exposing them to risk by being cavalier with their financial information.

So this guy might well be a super genius who will never get a virus, but I've personally seen the effects of that. I went to work for this guy as the network admin. So he hires a friend of his to work on some project and the guy starts doing my job, he put up an FTP server for some project. So I go to my boss and express my concern and he tells me not to worry about it. In a few days the ISP expresses THEIR concern that we have become a warez site. You fucking guessed it.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[drinkypoo]

Translation: you used to like being the dude wearing the white coat in the computer lab and having a half-door that regular employees could make requests for printed reports at. It all started going downhill when they let them have those Lear-Siegler ADM3A dumb terminals! And it's only gotten worse!

Are you a very stupid person or a very smart troll? Because this has been eating at me in a predictable nerd rage kind of way. But I finally found a short and reasonable answer: that guy is still that guy whether the hardware resources are spread out across the organization or concentrated in a single location, but with more of the hardware in a single location he doesn't have to do nearly so much running after hardware.

In all honesty, I prefer being the dude in the street clothes who never even talks to users, except perhaps a few highly articulate ones. I like to fix problems under contract and then go away and do my own stuff. There is a certain satisfaction to squatting on top of a gigantic pile of puissant hardware, though. Either way, I am perfectly capable of putting on a smiley face and being personable with users; it's a job. You do the job, then you go home and think whatever you want about people.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[the_hellspawn]

That is why you buy things that work with other things and not themselves. Apple products are like masturbating alone to the Sears catalog and PC products are like having sex with all the partners you want. Don't know about you but the partner thing just sounds more fun.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[godefroi]

what in my posts led you to draw the conclusion that my test was "poorly controlled tests with imperfect methodology" ?

Pretty sure he was referring to the fact that it wasn't double-blind. As long as YOU know whether the thing is on or off, you can subtly (and even unconsciously) affect the outcome of the study.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

He's probably the janitor.

"I keep the shit flowing out of the toilets! Without me, this company would be nothing! Now I want on the WiFi network so I can watch pr0n!"

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Pieroxy]

But but but I have ADHD... So one minute after setting the router on or off, I don't remember which state I left it in... That has to count for something ;-)

(this is true actually)

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

At this point do you think anyone here actually believes you are in any way what you say? If you can't even go to management and get the policies changed, which I'm sure a hot shot salesman who the company relies upon for its very existence could probably do, no matter how much it might piss off the IT guys, then I say you're just probably a low-level functionary, an entry-level salesman who tried to bullshit or bully your way into getting your iPad on the network, only to have the IT department point to the policies, leaving you, well, fucked, because no one in IT or in management really actually cares whether you got hit by a bus tomorrow.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Albanach]

I do not think it was trolling, if you are doing some serious work, get off your iPad.
I have a iPad myself, and like many have stated before, its a device used to watch media and browse, you can stream video just fine at WIFI speeds, not sure what else you want to do here, if you really want a good connection plug a wire in.

Okay. Now imagine you are in an office. 10, 15 or 20 coworkers also have iPads and start streaming a 720p internal webinar/conference/training video at 3kbits/sec so as to keep their laptop or desktop free for email and other work. Your Wi-Fi is now saturated and the webinar probably failing to stream.

Plenty of offices exist where a handful of access points are providing data connections for perhaps hundreds of people. Even if the backend is capable, the wireless installations were not designed for the kind of data we can easily expect to be transferred over them today, let alone tomorrow.

Pretending that mobile users won't consume a lot of data won't make the issue go away.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Albanach]

This is *not* a troll, just cold hard reality. Sorry you don't like it.

Actually, Dan, it is a troll. You just lack the imagination to think of scenarios outside the little box you consider to be serious work.

I'm glad you're not running my network.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Ash-Fox]

Lots of small devices can't really do IPSEC, either they can't do it at all, or they run like crap when they do it, or they don't support enough of it to actually be secure. These, of course, are the devices we actually want to use wirelessly.

I've honestly not encountered this issue with wireless devices in the enterprise environment, even the phones (BlackBerry) used IPSec.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

It becomes increasingly painful to post on slashdot... All those click and scrolls until all the parents are unfolded... Anyway.

This one quote is enough for me to call you brother ~ Amen!

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

Now that was a troll.

But please, share what you consider serious work, that can be done over wireless? I sincerely desire to broaden my horizons...

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Hylandr]

Blearg, point in case.

Getting tired of being shoved to the middle of the page too.

- Dan.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MightyMartian]

Big AC on Slashdot making up more fabrications. Color me unimpressed. You're just another anonymous liar on the Internet.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[MikeBabcock]

Printers with IPSec support? Handheld barcode scanners with IPSec support? Sure, my Android phone has IPSec (and I use it), but I can't expect all handheld hardware to support it. Its much simpler to lock down wireless and not risk the denial of service issue for other devices in the first place.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually, it's counterintuitive. In the old days radios used to "shout" and then you can only get one sender on each frequency.

Modern kit adjusts the loudness (intensity) of the radio so that it just reaches the next node, and then they route it on.

Provided the environment is at least somewhat lossy, then there's no finite bandwidth- the more nodes you have, the more bandwidth you have, in proportion.

It's a bit like when people talk to each other in a classroom, there's lots of information exchanged, whereas they all have to shut up when the teacher talks to the whole class and there's far less exchanged in total (although it's hopefully more important). That's also pretty much how cell phones work.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

That requires each device to become a router, which at scale creates a huge amount of latency. Moreover, you still end up with shared bandwidth -- if you have to route through my device then you're necessarily sharing its available bandwidth to the uplink. Your model only works if there are lots of nodes that each talk to their neighbors as endpoints. When you have lots of nodes that all want to talk to the same node (like the closest uplink to the rest of the internet), you haven't really gained much if anything.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I don't necessarily agree about the latency thing, individual nodes can have access to two different frequencies and can be listening and transmitting at the same time, with very low delays indeed.

And the problem about having too many nodes trying to use the same internet access point, all you're saying is that you don't have enough access points. But then so what? No network, not even wired networks, can survive oversubscription of any one node.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

I don't necessarily agree about the latency thing, individual nodes can have access to two different frequencies and can be listening and transmitting at the same time, with very low delays indeed.

I'm not talking about half duplex. In order to have what you suggest, i.e. increasing bandwidth by reducing transmission power levels, you either have to have endpoint devices route through endpoint devices and create a hop for every five feet you are away from the access point (and each hop adds latency), or you have to have to install a wired-in access point every five feet.

And the problem about having too many nodes trying to use the same internet access point, all you're saying is that you don't have enough access points. But then so what? No network, not even wired networks, can survive oversubscription of any one node.

What you're missing is that with wired networks, over-subscription is resolved by adding more bandwidth. You can run another fiber pair or upgrade terminating equipment. There is no equivalent with wireless -- there is 1Gbps of spectrum allocated for unlicensed use, that's what you have. You can't just pay a service tech $500 to install more wireless spectrum in your building.

What you can do is disperse the access points so that instead of having one 1Gbps access point for the whole building, you have an access point on every user's desk which only covers that desk, so that each user can get 1Gbps. But that's totally useless -- if have to run a cable to every desk then you can just plug the cable into the device and have better security, no interference-related network problems and a non-frivolous cost savings in not needing to buy a huge pile of wireless access points.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

You don't need one per desk, you need one per n users, where n is the designed contention ratio.

So the total bandwidth winds out to be per volume, but you can design in how much bandwidth you want to support.

The thing about latency is that there's virtually no minimum, some routing techniques give 1 or just a few bits of delay at whatever speed you're using (say 16 bits at 100 Mbit/s, which is well under a microsecond per hop); you don't necessarily have to wait for receiving the whole packet before routing it on.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

You don't need one per desk, you need one per n users, where n is the designed contention ratio.

So the total bandwidth winds out to be per volume, but you can design in how much bandwidth you want to support.

Having less than one access point per device requires you to have more spectrum to achieve the same amount of bandwidth per device because the available spectrum has to be shared between n devices.

Which brings up the other problem with wireless: Sometimes you just don't have enough spectrum, full stop. It doesn't matter how many access points you build, if you have 600Mbps worth of spectrum total and you have something like live video processing machines that require 1Gbps or 10Gbps connections, there is simply nothing you can do to fit 10 pounds of video into a 5 pound bag.

The thing about latency is that there's virtually no minimum, some routing techniques give 1 or just a few bits of delay at whatever speed you're using (say 16 bits at 100 Mbit/s, which is well under a microsecond per hop); you don't necessarily have to wait for receiving the whole packet before routing it on.

Processing delay is not the only source of latency. If node 2 is routing through node 1 and both are transmitting at the same time, somebody's packets are getting buffered or dropped. The more hops you have, the more opportunities for that sort of collision. All it takes is for one node in the chain to be transferring a large file and you max out your bandwidth and start filling up the buffers on every hop. The only way to avoid that is to try to implement some kind of QoS that prioritizes smaller data transfers, but that requires extra processing and increases latency in its own right, and incorrect classifications can really screw up latency sensitive high bandwidth applications.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No you route between a few *different* frequencies with basically no delay. You only need a few frequencies to avoid interference, just colour the space so no two bubbles of transmission volume are the same frequency. (Having a few different frequencies is how cell phones work for much the same reasons.)

You've also obviously not understood the point about contention ratios; hosts are only sending for a fraction of the time, they don't need full capacity all the time. In fact most of the time they don't need any.

So if I've got an 11 Mbit/s access point, I can give ~11Mbit/s access to (say) 5-50 users and they won't notice too much difference. Essentially ALL internet access is (in reality) a contended service. You can get uncontended, it's just much more expensive.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

No you route between a few *different* frequencies with basically no delay. You only need a few frequencies to avoid interference, just colour the space so no two bubbles of transmission volume are the same frequency. (Having a few different frequencies is how cell phones work for much the same reasons.)

Graph coloring is computationally difficult. How do you propose to do it ad hoc with devices that can move around as they're transmitting and where no single device can see the entire graph?

You've also obviously not understood the point about contention ratios; hosts are only sending for a fraction of the time, they don't need full capacity all the time. In fact most of the time they don't need any.

So if I've got an 11 Mbit/s access point, I can give ~11Mbit/s access to (say) 5-50 users and they won't notice too much difference.

You're assuming ISP-like contention ratios for LAN traffic. There are a wide variety of usage patterns for which that is not reasonable. Suppose my devices include HD TV set top boxes to which I want to stream HD content at ~30Mbps per device. There is no way that you can have 50 users in the same broadcast domain under that usage pattern with any sane amount of spectrum. If you're using e.g. 802.11g with 54Mbps available, having even two is unacceptable because it means they can't both watch TV at the same time. Moreover, the way ISPs do it is by having a much faster uplink than any single user can consume. The problem with wireless is that you want any single user to be able to consume all of the available bandwidth if no one else is using it, but if that is possible then any concurrent use whatsoever results in immediate reduced performance in direct proportion to the amount of actual concurrent use. Granted there are a lot of situations in which this doesn't matter -- sometimes you have 100Mbps of spectrum and each user only needs 1Mbps of bandwidth -- but that doesn't mean it isn't a performance disadvantage of the medium, only that there are situations in which you can live with the disadvantage in exchange for the convenience.

Essentially ALL internet access is (in reality) a contended service. You can get uncontended, it's just much more expensive.

That's the point: If you need uncontended service (or nearly so) with a wired network, you pay more money and lay more fiber and you get it. If you need uncontended service or anything like it with a wireless network, you have to build a wired network instead.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Minimal graph colouring is difficult, but non minimal isn't hard.

And as to your last point, if you need more net or peak bandwidth, you just add more or better capable wireless points. It's largely the same.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

And as to your last point, if you need more net or peak bandwidth, you just add more or better capable wireless points. It's largely the same.

What I'm saying is that the sameness is the problem. If you need almost as much bandwidth per device as you have total (either because you don't have much spectrum available or because you have high bandwidth requirements), you end up installing as many or almost as many access points as you have workstations.

Moreover, you can't use ISP contention ratios on a LAN with good results. An ISP might have a 1Gbps uplink and put 5000 10Mbps users behind it, which is fine because on average less than 1/50th of the users will be active at once and they have highly heterogeneous usage patterns. The difference with a wireless broadcast domain in a business is that if you use the same contention ratio (i.e. fifty users in a broadcast domain), you can't make the assumption that only 1/50 of the users will be active at once, because you don't have a pool of 5000 to average it out over and because all the users have similar usage patterns. The Boss says that at 2PM everyone will sit down at their desk and watch a training video on the intranet server, so at 2PM everyone sits down at their desk and suddenly if your contention ratio is not very close to 1:1 the The Boss is mad at you because the video is choppy.

There is a reason they put a gigabit uplink on almost every 100Base-T 48 port switch: It's because the 48:1 contention ratio that would result if you had a 100Mbps uplink is unsuitable for a large variety of businesses.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Sure, a 10:1 contention ratio is doubtless more appropriate, that's one wireless access point for every 10 desks.

Re:The number of devices is not most relevant

[Anthony Mouse]

It depends on the organization. If all you're doing with your network is sharing a single 20Mbps Internet connection, you can just install a 54Mbps access point for the whole building because the bottleneck is the uplink rather than the wireless.

It's just that not all businesses have such minimal requirements. Sometimes you have scientific data sets, HD video, distcc with large projects and fast machines, etc. There are situations in which the network really is the performance bottleneck, even with a wired network. In those situations you simply can't put more than one such machine in the same collision domain without materially impacting performance.

Even in the case where you might get five or ten machines to share a fixed amount of bandwidth with no material performance degradation, you're still defeating almost all of the advantages of using wireless in the first place without mitigating its disadvantages. If you have ~250 users, you need 25-50 access points which become that many separate points of failure, and if you misconfigure a single one you give anyone on the street access to your internal network. You still end up having to run wires all over the building for the access points and running one wire for an access point is 95% as difficult as running ten wires at once for ten computers that are all in substantially the same location. And all it takes for your entire network to fall over on a regular basis is for the tenant on the next floor to install a cordless phone.

Too bad it won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

High latency, low throughput, and a shared collision domain.
What's not to like?

Re:Too bad it won't work

[Idbar]

You also missed interference. If there's something you don't want is a clown with a jammer bringing all your network down (in addition to having probably a security leak if they patiently listen to your high-demanded service - which brings the topic of extreme overhead in packet transmissions for security reasons).

Not to say that wireless is good and useful. But wired is and always been more reliable since people use switches instead of hubs. But perhaps what this guy is proposing is creating a "wireless switch" that avoids such collisions and interference from the outside world.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[bdwebb]

Shared collision domain? For clients connected to a single WAP style infrastructure, sure...for corporate campuses with APs spaced every 50-100 feet this is not a problem because you're not trying to send data to 25+ wireless clients simultaneously. Any wireless LAN that requires decent data throughput should never have more than 10 clients connected to a single AP. Most people think it is acceptable to buy a wireless router, drop it in their office, and suddenly they have cheap wireless for all 40 of their employees. While this may work when not everyone is using it simultaneously, this is exactly the mentality that the article suggests we move away from.

The idea is that the wireless environment needs to match the wired one in cost and budgeting expenditure at the very least these days to accommodate a host of new tech that is either here or right on the horizon. It is idiotic to say 'if you are a high bandwidth user you need to sit the hell down and stop moving' - this is also the exact same type of mentality. With an appropriate AP distribution and a centralized wireless controller solution any large firm can achieve reliable daily use at current speeds and with future standards beyond N already being explored for gigabit+ wireless speeds, there is no reason to believe that the shared collision domain and high(er) latency issues will not also be addressed. Any organization clinging to the old school thought that wireless and wired users are different classes of users with respect demand and availability requirements is already behind. We in the IT world tend to think of new tech as toys sometimes because we see a kickass device that we would use but everyone else might not necessarily have an interest in. We're not the only ones who like new tech toys anymore, however, and most of them, especially those with wireless capabilities, have already found their way to the workplace in surprisingly (at least to me initially) large numbers.

Whether this is good or bad for company security policies, that can be left to argument...what's certain is that when the CEO and CFO latch on to any of this tech, you're damn sure going to have excellent wireless access around their office. Once they realize the potential of the devices they want to use and once people have argued them into the workplace as productivity tools (iPads and other tablets are a PERFECT example), wireless - actually GOOD wireless - will be a requirement and early adopters of this newer mentaility are going to be ahead of the game.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[hairyfish]

Lol, mod up. I manage wireless infrastructure for a large warehouse. We have best-that-you-can-buy wireless, and it's still flakey for all the reasons you described. Give me the speed and reliability of wires any day.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

"for corporate campuses with APs spaced every 50-100 feet this is not a problem because you're not trying to send data to 25+ wireless clients simultaneously. Any wireless LAN that requires decent data throughput should never have more than 10 clients connected to a single AP"

Then you make the math... at about 500$ per corporate-grade AP versus 1000$ per 48 ports corporate edge switch.

"there is no reason to believe that the shared collision domain and high(er) latency issues will not also be addressed"

Most usual corporate environments will mean that a ~10 people by cell will mean cells so short that basically they will overlap on 100% of their surface even with adaptative signalling, so collisions, latencies and renegotation will not be addressed.

"what's certain is that when the CEO and CFO latch on to any of this tech, you're damn sure going to have excellent wireless access around their office"

What's certain is that those big ego CxOs will shout and cry if access is below perfect for their new shinny devices but they certainly won't want to pay the bill for such a service level to be acomplished much less to pay for both high quality wireless overlapping the old style "wire lan" that still must get in place.

"wireless - actually GOOD wireless - will be a requirement and early adopters of this newer mentaility are going to be ahead of the game."

Which game? There is a case for wireless LAN -nobody likes all that wiring costs and limitations but technology is certainly not there nor for the most part is network connectivity the critical factor that ties to a table most of the time. So the early adopters will pay for it out of their noses to be ahead of no game at all. Mainly wire-less offices is, if anything, a game for late adopters. Which doesn't mean that wireless space hasn't a place on modern corporate environments: the provided example even makes a case for itself. Wireless for the VIP zones, were the big ego CxOs tend to be and space is a luxury so there are lower headcounts per square unit and then cable plus low level density wireless for the rare event of the big barons coming to overlook the minions on the areas were work is really done.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[Bacon Bits]

I tell people it's like going back to Cat3 on a 10/100 hub. Or, if they're not technical, it's like having one teacher for 30 students versus 1 tutor for every child.

It's also important to remember that wireless is a brand new technology. We act like it isn't, but really it is. 802.11 was ratified in 1997. The technology is only 14 years old. For reference, this is what a cell phone looked like in 1997. Cell technology was about 20 years older then. Remember how bad cell phones were in the 90's? That's where wireless LAN is today.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[Bacon Bits]

Sorry, that should read "Cell technology was about 20 years old then."

Re:Too bad it won't work

[dave562]

The idea is that the wireless environment needs to match the wired one in cost and budgeting expenditure at the very least

How do you propose to make that happen? I can buy one 48-port GigE switch and connect about 46 people to. You stated that

Any wireless LAN that requires decent data throughput should never have more than 10 clients connected to a single AP.

Using current technology, it takes about four and a half wireless APs to achieve the same density as a single switch. It has been a while since I worked with any of Cisco's enterprise (Aironet) gear, but it was not cheap. If you really want to manage it, you have to weave in additional hardware to unify it all together. Otherwise, your are left with half assed options like setting all of the APs to the same SSID and letting the clients hop between them. Above and beyond the wireless components, you still have to back everything with ethernet, and usually PoE at that. I have never seen a single, real world, "enterprise / campus" level wireless network that was setup as a wireless mesh. All of the APs had direct connections into switches.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[bdwebb]

The idea is that the wireless environment needs to match the wired one in cost and budgeting expenditure at the very least

How do you propose to make that happen? I can buy one 48-port GigE switch and connect about 46 people to. You stated that

Any wireless LAN that requires decent data throughput should never have more than 10 clients connected to a single AP.

Using current technology, it takes about four and a half wireless APs to achieve the same density as a single switch. It has been a while since I worked with any of Cisco's enterprise (Aironet) gear, but it was not cheap. If you really want to manage it, you have to weave in additional hardware to unify it all together. Otherwise, your are left with half assed options like setting all of the APs to the same SSID and letting the clients hop between them. Above and beyond the wireless components, you still have to back everything with ethernet, and usually PoE at that. I have never seen a single, real world, "enterprise / campus" level wireless network that was setup as a wireless mesh. All of the APs had direct connections into switches.

Cisco 2960G 48 Port Gigabit Switch - $2,654.99

Cisco 2106 Wireless LAN Controller - $1,692.99
Cisco 1041 Single-Band G/N AP - $341.99 X 4 = $1,367.96

Total cost ends up $3,060.95 vs $2,654.99 so a bit more money involved but you end up with the flexibility of wireless, not having to install (as many) wired runs, leveraging effectiveness of smartphones, tablets, and laptops in the business environment, etc. Also, the 10 clients per AP is for quite a bit of throughput per user. Standard internet and LAN data usage I try to keep between 15 and 20 max per AP when I am configuring a site. With regard to setting the APs to the same SSID, that is exactly how the controller handles things, it just takes into account the connected client's signal strength and if it drops below a certain threshold and another signal nearby is higher it will move the client. This capability also exists outside of controllers and can be configured on the standalone APs, you just have to make sure that your signal density is enough that at whatever threshold you have set to disconnect clients, there is another AP with a higher signal strength to migrate to. Seamless roaming sufficient for even VoIP environments can be achieved without controllers and by using WDS services, it is just more difficult.

With regard to ethernet backing and PoE requirements, almost every PoE AP comes with the required inline power brick if you don't have a PoE switch to connect to. Also, I'm not arguing that ethernet isn't important...anyone who needs to have serious data throughput still needs a wired connection until we have gigabit wireless everywhere and will probably need it afterward. I'm just saying that wireless has become just as important and more and more over the last 10 years has become cost effective enough that it should be considered an equal budgeting consideration.

I have personally overseen the installation of, configured, and installed 2 enterprise mesh networks (12 total uplinks to gateways supporting 10 mesh APs each for a total of 120 APs, 12 Mesh Gateways as an example). Additionally our company provides monitoring for municipal water and power companies who have widespread mesh 802.11 networks with a small number of wireless gateways that serve as the network interfaces for hundreds of field mesh APs distributed across t

Re:Too bad it won't work

[YoopDaDum]

Yes indeed, for most people interference is the main issue. If you're in a dense area you'll have plenty of others WiFi networks around, with everybody stepping on each other foots^H^H^H^H^Hantennas. Where I work you can't get a good connection close to the windows due to too many interferers from outside. Yeah it would be possible to put your own APs all around close to the windows and win, but it's too much of a pain. People use their smartphones and cell connection. Chalk one up for proper network planning and managed spectrum.

Now this may be less of a problem in some parts of the US where there is plenty of space and businesses have less to fear from neighbor networks interference. Then the issue mentioned in the article (scaling to many devices) can be the problem: WiFi doesn't behave well when there are too many clients using it at the same time. It's CSMA/CD so it's to be expected. A system with centralized scheduling (as in cellular networks) would fare much better here. Hyperlan, once a competitor of WiFi, used this. But it was as a result more complex, longer to specify and would have been more expensive (at first. The added complexity is peanuts nowadays, see the femto BSs for cellular). WiFi arrived first with good enough and cheap devices, and won the market.

In any case, the guy writing the article as no clue about wireless. Saying that the main issue is not having a central management covering wired and wireless... Wow!

Re:Too bad it won't work

[MikeBabcock]

Wireless "switching" would only be meaningful if you could physically segment each area, not just logically partition them. Without physical insulation (think Tempest), you've still got the problem of broadcast interference from a third party device that takes down the segment.

You can't *block* wireless spectrum without physically blocking its ability to communicate. Physically blocking its signal path annoys people with cell phones immensely.

Feel free to install latticed wire in all the walls and ceilings and install high quality wireless service in each room to guarantee proper partitioning of the spectrum though.

Re:Too bad it won't work

[yarnosh]

Most people think it is acceptable to buy a wireless router, drop it in their office, and suddenly they have cheap wireless for all 40 of their employees. While this may work when not everyone is using it simultaneously, this is exactly the mentality that the article suggests we move away from.

But it works. There's nothing wrong with that "mentality." OK, maybe you want to spend a little bit more on the AP, but the basic idea of relying primarily on the wired network is perfectly sound. Wired networks are fast, reliable, and cheap. You can't normally get that combination in IT. Normally it is a "pick two" situation.

It is idiotic to say 'if you are a high bandwidth user you need to sit the hell down and stop moving'

No, what's idiotic is not taking advantage of the speed, reliability, and simplicity of a wired network for users and devices which are stationary 95% of the time. It is idiotic to structure your whole network around a few high bandwidth users who like to move around. Basically your argument for going totally wireless seems to be "because it is cool."

Re:Too bad it won't work

[DarwinSurvivor]

I remember reading an article about glass windows that had very small (nearly invisible) wires in it to block the corporate network wireless from leaking outside of the building. You could probably put a light wire mesh over the window (like a window screen) to keep other networks *out*.

Don't grasp it

[del_diablo]

I don't get it.
If the problem is internal bandwith, the latest and greatest wireless standards should suffice.
If it is the actual LAN part, then everything is still behind a router so it is the same regardless.
If its the noise, frankly there are already solutions to that, like using a light instead of waves.

Re:Don't grasp it

[hedwards]

Indeed, this sounds dangerously like changing the OSI model as it applies to wireless. I suspect that they could find away of doing that without changing the model, but one of the reasons for a lot of the network design decisions surrounding WiFi was to allow for the same protocol to be used for as much of the process as possible.

I'm sure that there are all sorts of neat things that we could do if we chuck it in the waste bin, but we'd also have to upgrade a substantial amount of infrastructure to do it. I suspect that there's a way of avoiding most of that, but it's not a particularly easy fix. Especially when things like HVAC and such shouldn't be operated wirelessly anyways.

Re:Don't grasp it

[swalve]

The nice thing about the OSI model is that you can change any layer your want into anything you want, as long as it conforms to the standard for inter-layer communications.
What they need to do is create a multi-frequency system that allows wireless to be a little more user friendly and flexible. First, make it full-duplex. One frequency for broadcast, one for receive. The broadcast (from the perspective of the AP) can be high speed and encrypted, like ATSC television. The receive can be a mesh of antennas that just listens for communications, using some kind of CDMA/spread spectrum deal that reduces channel competition. Then things like printers and HVAC dodads can be connected without having to wreck speeds for normal users.
Maybe better yet, use three frequencies- one for broadcast, one for receive and one for control signals. The AP (or AP controller in a large network) would act literally like a air-traffic controller, allocating spectrum on the fly as needed by the devices. "Hey, AP, I'm an HVAC device and I have a routine message for my mothership." "OK, HVAC, transmit on channel 13 starting........ NOW."

No, can't be done.

[SuricouRaven]

Ye cannae change the laws of physics!

Seriously, though... wireless has serious inherent disadvantages. Susceptibility to interference, a single collision domain, much lower bandwidth in the analog sense. It's good for mobility, but if you try to run a whole site-LAN on wireless it just wouldn't work - even if you utilised the 800MHz, 2.4GHZ and 5.0GHz bands all at once. Maybe if you put little 60GHz nodes in every room, but it'd be far too expensive.

Re:No, can't be done.

[DigiShaman]

In production, it also doesn't plain work. Even in a small business comprised of about 8 employees and three WiFi APs, packet loss will incur in an area with crowded airspace. Try a shared office complex or anything above the 3rd floor of a tall building for example. File based databases aslo hate it (use SQL bla bla bla, ya I know. Tell it to the devs). After about a month of bitching each day, and constant tweaking and tuning WiFi settings, analyzing with WiSpy, etc, we finally resolved the issue. We hired a contractor to run CAT5e cable. Problem solved, and haven't heard so much as a peep within the last several months thereafter.

FUCK WIRELESS!!!

Re:No, can't be done.

[MightyMartian]

I fucked around with a WiFi network at one of our small offices (five computers) and even within that environment WiFi could be horribly unstable. It didn't play well with our roaming profiles on the Windows boxes, was dropping out and that made working on network shares absolute hell. After screwing around for months, I finally went up and ran CAT5 and plugged everything into a switch, and not a problem since. WiFi just simply is not good enough for the kind of work companies do.

Re:No, can't be done.

[SuricouRaven]

I work at an organisation with over a hundred stations and a couple of hundred users*. We've had similar problems with roaming profiles. A user gets up, moves to another room and loses signal - or sometimes it just drops on it's own - and windows throws a hissy fit. Ends up with multible copies of the profile using different suffixes, some of them corrupt, and profiles swelling to hundreds of meg with prf*.tmp files. Then Outlook panics too because it's archive file isn't where it's supposed to be. The fundamentals of Windows multiuser networking predate wireless lans, so at the time of design it was a reasonable assumption that the network would actually be reliable. Not to just pick on Microsoft here - while it's true that Windows goes to hell if the network drops out, linux doesn't handle losing an NFS mount much better.

*Most of the users are only occasionally on the stations, so many times more users than stations.

Re:No, can't be done.

[MightyMartian]

Any kind of network or roaming sharing, whether *nix or Windows variants, does not handle the issues that crop up with WiFi. It works well enough on laptops because you use local profiles and some sort of synchronization with the understanding that, even with VPNs, you're dealing with unstable connections. Most of the road warriors I encounter keep data on their computer and sync it up when they're at the office or at least able to get a solid connection. That just won't translate well into an environment where you're working off of shared network resources.

The way I've set up WiFi where I work is simply on its own discrete network, with some filtering and traffic shaping to stop some prick that's left Bittorrent running from taking things down. Good enough for notebooks, iPhones and other assorted portable hardware. If they need into the internal network, we have VPN ports open to get inside. No way in hell am I going to open up our internal network to WiFi. There are ways to secure WiFi reasonably well, but I don't think they're worth the effort. There are enough issues with securing wired LANs without making your life complicated by adding in WiFi.

wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[OzPeter]

One of the advantages of a wired network is that the data only leaves the premises at well defined locations that you control. With wireless networks it floats over the aether in all directions. And before you can say "encryption will protect me", think about how easy it would be to build a transmitter running on the same frequencies as the wireless network and sit that just outside the company and pointed inwards - instant denial of service attack with zero traceability.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Amarantine]

One of the advantages of a wired network is that the data only leaves the premises at well defined locations that you control.

Well defined locations you control, or well defined locations you *think* you control? It is very well possible to do port security at the access layer of your network, but how many networks have that? There's always some outlet somewhere for a printer that nobody uses... Somebody sneaks his way into the building, hooks up an accesspoint to that port, sits in his van outside, and can hack away at your network. Really, wired is not always as safe as people think.

In fact, i remember a customer with a voip network, and had a sip intercom at the front door... I got sniggered at when i suggested that anybody could screw off the intercom, and had free access to the network. Went into my report anyway.

And before you can say "encryption will protect me", think about how easy it would be to build a transmitter running on the same frequencies as the wireless network and sit that just outside the company and pointed inwards - instant denial of service attack with zero traceability.

Zero traceability? Get an Aruba wireless network controller with sufficient accesspoints, put a map of your building in the controller, and it will tell you where rogue transmitters are, including those outside of the building (if you left enough white space around the building map when uploading). Cisco has similar solutions, and i'm sure there are many more.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[laffer1]

Not only that, but encryption adds additional overhead to an already slower technology. I can't even live with wifi in my home as the primary connection. Interference from my neighbors pet projects can kill the signal. If I can't maintain two computers connected at a reasonable speed, how can an entire office run on it?

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[TheRaven64]

There's always some outlet somewhere for a printer that nobody uses... Somebody sneaks his way into the building, hooks up an accesspoint to that port, sits in his van outside, and can hack away at your network

Doesn't even need to be that. If the cable is exposed anywhere, you can splice it easily. There are cheap off-the-shelf devices that you can buy that will plug in between a computer and a LAN and record everything that's transmitted, and even do active probes or MITM attacks. Would your IT department notice a workstation dropping off the network for the 20 seconds it takes to install one?

The physical network - wired or wireless - should always be treated as hostile. If you're relying on the integrity of the wire, then you're doing it wrong.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody sneaks his way into the building, hooks up an accesspoint to that port, sits in his van outside, and can hack away at your network. Really, wired is not always as safe as people think.

Which requires physical access to the building. Which leaves traces, risk of discovery, and possibly appearing on security tapes. Far easier then finding that parked car a block away where the attacker never had to enter the premises at all.

Just because a security item is not perfect, does not mean that it's not worth implementing. It raises the bar a little bit, requiring the attacker to jump through additional hoops before they can break in.

An opportunistic attacker will go elsewhere. (The old adage applies, if you're being specifically targeted, you're screwed no matter what.)

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but that doesn't detect where a rogue microwave is located. Just cut some of the radiation shielding of a common microwave and you can DoS an entire building.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[bdwebb]

You are doing something completely wrong or you are using a shitty access point if you cannot use wifi as your primary connection. Either that or your neighbor is experimenting with some serious radiation and you may end up with the Hulk storming through your wall crushing your WAP anyway.

Seriously, though, I have 2x Cisco APs in my house and I run almost all of my internet and internal access over it. I stream from my server to my 360 via wireless, stream NetFlix and DirecTV in HD via wireless, browse internet, and transfer files across my wireless regularly. In my area I also have up to 23 other wireless SSIDs active around me at any time, a few of which are using the exact same channel frequencies.

As far as simultaneous usage, a typical day for my house means 4-10x laptops connected alongside the bridge to my DirecTV and 360. I have had 5 laptops doing standard internet browsing/web video streaming and streamed HD from NetFlix simultaneously all across wireless with zero degradation to throughput for any one device. Eventually I want to set up a real stress test and bring a Linksys WAP around to see how interference actually affects things. Granted, I've put a bit more investment into making sure that my wireless devices are powerful enough to carve out some signal space of my own, but this is exactly as the article suggests...better investment into wireless alongside the wired network means at least some measure of future-proofing.

Don't misunderstand me please...I'm not trying to insult or anything, I'm just trying to point out that most people's perception of wireless is that it is (even still) a weak tech with lots of issues. I'm just trying to illustrate that there is a lot that can be done with it and most people's experiences are problems getting it to work because it is not well enough understood.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[dave562]

Forget pet projects. Every time my girl friend turns on the microwave, I lose connectivity.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[laffer1]

Since you shared your experience with me, I will explain my perspective. I live in a new subdivision. Houses form a semi circle around a pond. My next door neighbor experiments with tesla coils and other types of gadgets regularly. Everyone in the neighborhood has a wireless router.

I was able to use a wireless connection in an apartment building with two apple airport express devices bridging the network, and that was enough to stream on an apple tv or use a wii plus 2 laptops. It wasn't great, but it was usable.

In the house, I have difficulty getting a wireless signal in the next room. I assumed the airport express unit(s) were getting old and tried upgrading to airport extreme base stations. I've tried different channels. I've tried interface robustness. I've tried nearly every combination of settings, moving the wireless routers, etc. I suspect in addition to interference, some of the materials used in my home or the design could be impacting the signal. It's a two story home with a basement built last year.

I regret not wiring my house (with cat5e) when it was built. I assumed wireless would just work. I have most of my serious computing devices in the basement and have a run up the stairs to the living room where my wifi router is currently located. In the next room, I sometimes have drops with Netflix streaming or Apple tv use. These same drops happen on the wii in the same room or the ps3 upstairs. Wifi adaptors on a desktop pc, an iMac, a MBP and a Toshiba laptop with a realtek usb internal 802.11n device all exhibit these problems. One could blame the apple gear I'm using, but I've seen apple gear work where cisco and dlink devices did not. Wireless often will work for casual browsing, but anything requiring a constant connection such as a video stream fails several times while streaming a simple tv show at mediocre quality. Streaming the same content on a wired connection works fine. I have a business class cable package here so it's not the pipe. At this point, I've resorted to running cat 5 cable from the basement to the second floor using the airport extreme as a switch in the living room. My wife won't agree to let me put "holes in the wall" to run cat5 upstairs. I heard nothing but complaints until I ran this cable from her as she couldn't maintain a connection to battle.net for her WoW. Nothing pisses the wife off more than getting disconnected during a raid.

I've seen wireless work in some places quite well. Various coffee shops and bookstores I visit, for example, have exceptional connections. I just don't think it works without planning for it in ways most people can't control. Perhaps really high end equipment from cisco or another vendor might work here but I just have lost patience for it. If I'm doing something wrong, I'd love to know what.

I do run WPA2 / 802.11g/n

I've seen some crazy things with wireless tech. My former employer could not get a wireless signal through the entire office (1 floor of a modest sized building) using several repeaters with cisco equipment. The reason was the old building had massive interference from the elevator shaft which happened to be in the middle. After running cable past the elevator and setting up POE, we were able to get a signal there but it was never that great. Dead zones happen. At that same location, we couldn't get decent signal strength for cable tv runs to two sets mounted on the wall. Comcast had amp up the signal and then get cable boxes as close to the tvs as possible to even get a picture.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[bdwebb]

I completely understand your frustration and it is one that most people deal with on a regular basis. Things like freakin microwaves and tile can wreak havoc on your signal for sure. My initial assessment may be a bit harsh now that I reread it but I'll detail a bit more about my set-up, too, for clarity. I have a lot of experience working with wireless and have worked as a network engineer for 8 years now so I've got a lot of experience in how to make mine work. The issue is that most people are purchasing a standard consumer grade wireless router and expecting it to work out of the box to cover areas waay bigger than they are capable of. In my experience, while they can work well through a few rooms the antenna gain is not high enough to push very far with very much strength...this is for every brand - Cisco, D-Link, Apple, whatever.

In my situation, I run two Cisco air-ap1131ag-a-k9 APs and I have a FortiGate 50B hardware firewall performing NAT/routing. These APs have significantly higher signal strength and operate on the A/G bands so I set my bridge up to my entertainment center on wireless A since the proliferation of A signal is much less widespread, thus less interference. Granted, I spent a lot more money on my set-up than most people but I only broadcast my G SSID from one AP anyway and I get signal up to two houses away. Realistically, my investment was $210/ea on the APs (great deal on used ones) and I got lucky that my employer provided me the firewall but if you wanted to really make sure your wireless worked, you could even disable the SSID on your wireless router and connect a higher-grade AP with a higher gain antenna and it will work as well.

Keep in mind this depends on your house's size, too. Your wireless devices' antenna signal strength also plays a big part in your connectivity. It sounds like you have optimal positioning with your wireless router on the 1st floor and you definitely shouldn't have issues in the next room unless your kitchen is between...you may just need a better AP.

Regarding your employer and wireless, it sounds like the off-the-shelf Cisco equip and repeaters and, yeah...I definitely understand the issues with that. Repeaters are a bad option usually anyway. Your employer probably needed 3-5 APs similar to mine and the same number of ethernet runs to each of them for a really solid wireless deployment. I've pushed wireless through some of the shittiest environments ever - power plants, ports, tv stations, etc...it is a pain but if a bit of money is put into it like the article is arguing for, the reliability and usability is there.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Culture20]

One of the advantages of a wired network is that the data only leaves the premises at well defined locations that you control.

Except right outside the office of the VP of IT who insisted on a wireless keyboard over the objections of his underlings. Wee.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[YoopDaDum]

A microwave typically uses a frequency of 2.45 GHz, which is in the WiFi band. If her oven leaks RF power outside, it will indeed kill all the WiFi channels. A WiFi AP transmits 200 mW, a microwave can use 750 to 900 W. Of course this energy is supposed to stay inside the oven, but if the oven has a defect or is not well shielded and even a small part of this leaks it will blind all WiFi receivers around for sure.

I hope she's not one of those people freaking out because of cell phone radiations by the way. Because a GSM cell phone tops at 2W (or 33 dBm) worst case while 3G and 4G are much lower (23 dBm for both WiMAX and LTE). It's likely that the oven dumps much more in the environment when used. Time to offer your lady a tin-foil hat, or a new microwave ;)

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[MikeBabcock]

My hardware notifies me immediately when a foreign device is attached to a network port. At my sites with high security needs, those printer ports won't service anything but port 9100 and SNMP requests anyway. Attaching a third party device is pointless.

On the other hand, you can sniff a wifi network without broadcasting your presence at all.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[evilviper]

think about how easy it would be to build a transmitter running on the same frequencies as the wireless network and sit that just outside the company and pointed inwards -instant denial of service attack with zero traceability.

Anybody with a tiny bit of knowledge about radio wave propagation, and a portable device with a wifi signal strength meter, could track it down to within a small area in a few minutes. I can't imagine why you think broadcasting high power radio signals could ever be even remotely difficult to trace.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Agripa]

Anybody with a tiny bit of knowledge about radio wave propagation, and a portable device with a wifi signal strength meter, could track it down to within a small area in a few minutes. I can't imagine why you think broadcasting high power radio signals could ever be even remotely difficult to trace.

Well, he might have experience doing amateur radio transmitter hunting.

I have lured people to locations 10s of miles away (and across some 5000 foot mountains) from the actual transmitter before and at least a couple times managed to broadcast a clear signal where nobody was able to find it at all without help. Once with a very very good low gain directional antenna designed for low side-lobes and another time by gamma-matching a high voltage power transmission tower.

Re:wireless networks in critical infrastructure

[Agripa]

A microwave typically uses a frequency of 2.45 GHz, which is in the WiFi band. If her oven leaks RF power outside, it will indeed kill all the WiFi channels. A WiFi AP transmits 200 mW, a microwave can use 750 to 900 W. Of course this energy is supposed to stay inside the oven, but if the oven has a defect or is not well shielded and even a small part of this leaks it will blind all WiFi receivers around for sure.

Part of the problem is that integrated wifi receivers have atrocious out-of-channel performance. Direct conversion receivers are not known for high dynamic range and the low price points targeted do not support good filter implementations anyway.

Why are these things using WiFi?

[betterunixthanunix]

Printers? Video surveillance? HVAC? Electric meters? Why are these things using WiFi, when they rarely move and are always plugged into an external power source?

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[RobbieThe1st]

Printers? Haven't seen any but one or two low-end consumer models. All professional installs I've seen use good old Ethernet.
Video surveillance? Sane deal. Heck, most of these just use composite over coax.
HVAC? Low bandwidth at best, and I haven't seen an in-use system that actually uses WiFi.
Electric meters? Really low bandwidth, and the better systems I've seen send /very/ low speed data back up the power lines.

So, no, WiFi isn't everywhere. It's just a good add-on for portable devices and stuff that doesn't care about high latency.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[ledow]

That's no excuse.

I work in schools (i.e. limited budget). It's just not sensible or practical to have ANY of that stuff running Wifi, especially in solid-build buildings, near residential areas, or anywhere you need something to STAY connected.

We have HVAC controls - on a Cat5 outlet that we put in specially. The electrician ran it in with the electrical outlets and the AC engineers run it with their cabling happily too - for the price of the cable / box and a little extra labour.

We have a printer in every room. Usually wired to the same Cat5 outlet as the main computer outlet.

We have door-controls - same thing. All over Cat5/IP, even down to the individual door activators and swipe-card sensors.

We have VoIP - same thing. If there isn't a socket where we need it, Cat5 goes in for no more than a phone line of the same length / distance.

We have CCTV - all wired to Cat5 sockets rather than with Coax back to a central point because that would mean more unnecessary cabling when the Cat5 does the job and STILL supplies Gigabit Ethernet to several other devices on the same point.

And then eventually you realise - after a while, in any large building, you still always have a Cat5 point within 100m (usually within 10m) and from there you can do everything you need to split it / put a switch in and join even more stuff to the normal network.

Cat5 is a universal deployment that virtually everything can use once plugged in and can be extended to ridiculous means (i.e. Gigabit to every outlet, so you CAN stream multiple CCTV channels from the other end of the building without having to worry about the wireless bandwidth / interference in between and/or knocking out other systems).

Whereas our wireless deployments? In the middle of a residential area, we can't get more than 8 machines into a room reliably using Wifi - even with flooding 3 channels full from school AP's - ( and where reliability means "can login via LDAP without having to constantly retry") because of the interference and up/down-ness of it all - training days we only use switches and hard cables now.

What we do expose to Wifi can be picked up miles away if you want to but can't be used reliably on the other side of the room. Wireless CCTV interferes like hell and knocks out both itself and the Wifi and other 2.4GHz gadgets.

Yet with wired cabling we can cover the entire building with the minimum of fuss. Diagnosis is simple (green light on switch = working). Things don't change over time. We can have redundant and even circular links. We don't drown out our neighbours.

It costs LESS than the Wifi crap - hell a run of Cat5 to the maximum run (with installation costs and sockets) costs less than a single access point (without installation costs) if you have decent contractors that aren't conning you. If you have in-house staff, you also save the "profit" that you would have given the contractor.

Copper cabling saves you so much more hassle and time and money and effort and extraneous costs, if you're being charged sensible prices, and stays that way pretty much forever - use your brain and install Cat6a now and you're save until each outlet needs more than 10Gb/s. Install wifi now and for MORE cost, you get LESS service, LESS reliability and in before you even get to 200MB/s you're going to be replacing them ALL.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[Spad]

They're not artefacts of an ancient civilization; if there's no Ethernet port where you need it, get one installed.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[GNious]

Same reason people now buy TVs with WiFi

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[Gryle]

In the one instance I've seen of WiFI printers, it was a mobile field-office set-up that ran off one of those celluar WiFi cards that AT&T or Verizon produce. The individual in question traveled a lot and apparently felt the need to be able to print wherever he wanted. I can't speak for the other devices however.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[bdwebb]

Printers? Haven't seen any but one or two low-end consumer models. All professional installs I've seen use good old Ethernet.

Printers typically sit in the exact same spot they have always sat and already have a wired port. It is becoming extremely common that I see these types of wireless laser printers deployed in the small/medium business environment and I've even seen them starting to come into the enterprise environment at an increased rate. I've even seen one of these connected to a UPS that gave it 4 hours battery life that they just carted around a law office to wherever they needed to print. Printers are wireless now, whether laser or not, and that is not an uncommon thing anymore and will be even more common in the future.

Video surveillance? Sane deal. Heck, most of these just use composite over coax.

Whoa...you are so off base here and you don't even know it. I started my career (8 years ago so this isn't new) in CCTV over IP deployments working on Dept. of Homeland Security projects for 6 different major ports (two of the most major ports in the world). EVERY ONE OF THEM had 90% of the camera resources either across miles-long wireless bridge links or performing a point-to-multipoint style IP video bridging. We're talking up to 500 cameras at each port. We're also talking about unlicensed wireless spectrum (wireless A) so this is not some special wireless that no one has access to. When you want to deploy cameras across a space covering 30 or so miles, wireless is a bit necessary if you don't want to spend millions on fiber runs to net you no real benefit.

HVAC? Low bandwidth at best, and I haven't seen an in-use system that actually uses WiFi.

Low bandwidth you're right about...while I don't typically see wireless for HVAC because ethernet is almost wired upon device installation, I am fully expecting to see things like this in the future. The one that stands out that I have seen is in a studio environment where stage temperatures need regular control from a remote site. There is an iLON interface that connects to a WAP so that customers can manage their temperatures from off-site using a secured public portal.

Electric meters? Really low bandwidth, and the better systems I've seen send /very/ low speed data back up the power lines.

So, no, WiFi isn't everywhere. It's just a good add-on for portable devices and stuff that doesn't care about high latency.

Every SmartMeter program in the country uses wireless to monitor meter usage. There are hundreds or thousands of wireless mesh gateways distributed throughout your entire city that you have no idea about and the device they attach to your power meter is a wireless AP. The better systems you've seen transmit nowhere near as much data and are the ones that were in use before most municipal water and power organizations began moving to wireless mesh monitoring. Wireless is also used for municipal water and power organizations to monitor the levels of reservoirs, PLCs for pump stations, etc. Just because they don't use much bandwidth on an individual device basis for these periodic checks doesn't mean that they don't use wireless or that accumulated bandwidth is not significant. If you haven't seen an in-use system, maybe you don't live in a major city?


Qualifications: I've worked as a senior level network engineer for 8 years now with over 3 of those years dedicated solely to wireless deployments. Because of my company's primary focus as a managed services provider and IT project engineering/deployment firm I have also been lucky enough to have worked with over 1200 different companies and have directly experienced the uh....unique..... nature (this is a very, very nice way of putting it) of each's underlying wired/wireless network concerns.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[dave562]

Whoa...you are so off base here and you don't even know it. I started my career (8 years ago so this isn't new) in CCTV over IP deployments working on Dept. of Homeland Security projects for 6 different major ports (two of the most major ports in the world). EVERY ONE OF THEM had 90% of the camera resources either across miles-long wireless bridge links or performing a point-to-multipoint style IP video bridging

A wireless bridge is not the same as an access point. I setup a wireless bridge in the mid-1990s for a point to point connection because it was less expensive than leasing the equivalent bandwidth from the telco. A user cannot just fire up their 802.11 wireless card and hop onto a wireless bridge.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[bdwebb]

You do realize that my comment was in direct response to the assertion that wireless was not widely in use for Video Surveillance, right? Exactly how does a user's inability to access a wireless bridge used for the express purpose of a site-to-site link for CCTV data play any part in the discussion or the original topic at all?

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[dave562]

The original context of the article is the usefulness of wireless as a replacement for traditional wired setups in the enterprise. One of the applications mentioned was video surveillance. You brought up the random edge case of CCTV over wireless bridges. The discussion has been about traditional access points, and replacing the wired LAN with a wireless infrastructure.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[RobbieThe1st]

What I was thinking about was the cameras themselves, not how they connect to the rest of the infrastructure, which may well be done with an ethernet-attached device or wifi bridge, etc.
But I've seen /loads/ of cameras which use coax to transmit their data, at least for the first stage.
Wireless in this case seems /very/ dangerous, especially on a per-camera basis: It doesn't take that much to jam or block a wifi signal; a coax(or ethernet) lead has to be physically cut however.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[MikeBabcock]

Actually a lot of the mass-market video surveillance and security companies are pushing wireless sensors all over the house to save installation costs.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[dave562]

You're talking about two completely different wireless technologies. A standard access point does not have a "miles long" range. A point to point bridge is not the same as an access point. You jumped into the conversation and said, "I setup all of these security systems using wireless cameras." That has nothing to do with whether or not replacing CAT5/6 or coax with wireless is a good way to go for security systems.

I know you say you did some work for DHS, but given the way the government gives the contracts to the lowest bidders, that's not exactly reassuring knowledge.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[RobbieThe1st]

I.e. they are pushing an inferior system so they can advertise it cheaper.
How is this different than anything else?

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[Eric Green]

All the latest video cameras are either POE or WiFi. We currently have around 50 WiFi cameras in our facility and roughly 200 POE cameras (we do camera validation with VDMR venders). Composite-over-coax cameras are not used for any installation that has more than four cameras nowadays because it doesn't scale -- modern-day legal requirements pretty much require you to store video data for *all* the cameras for a specified amount of time, you can't do like the old days where you just flipped between cameras recording snippets to a VCR tape. Try doing that in today's legal environment and someone gets raped while your cameras aren't recording that area, and you're going to end up with one honkin' big negligence lawsuit against you. Regarding where WiFi cameras are used vs. POE cameras, by and large it depends upon access to power and data. Where wires can be run, POE is preferred for security purposes. If the integrator must instead suck power from, say, the emergency exit light's power source (say we're talking about a fire escape stairwell where it's virtually impossible to run new wires due to the physical firewall requirements), that's where a WiFi camera gets plunked on top of the EXIT sign or fire escape light and piggybacks on that power.

Disclaimer: I work for a vendor of video surveillance appliances.

Re:Why are these things using WiFi?

[dbIII]

That's why it is called "work" little boy. Sometimes you have to do things that do not provide instant gratification if you want to complete tasks.

Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

The wireless LAN will be the future! What a great idea. It is so great that I wonder why nobody has thought about it already. Oh wait. My University-LAN works that way. And when I move from Kiel to Berlin and enter campus I am back in my Office-Network. So this is bleeding edge? No. Whole Estonia has such a WI-FI-network.

However, wired networking will stay with us for a long time. Why is that? Because it is faster as it does not need to cope that much with its environment. It has its ether free of most disturbances.

So nothing new here. It has more the quality of a sack of rice.

Security, Availability, Expandibility.

[Bilby Baggins]

These are the three things that WiFi still can't compete in against a wired network.

Even the most secure wireless is still much more susceptible to attack then a wired network. Even with the most modern access control and protection methods (which are neither cheap nor convenient) the sheer massive avenue of attack WiFi presents creates a problem for many large corporations. Ask JPMorgan Chase how much WiFi connectivity they have. Or pretty much any US Government building.

Even if you do as the article suggests and call in an expensive contractor to map out the best locations for access points, you have to find out if it's even feasible to run network and power to that location. Even with the best-possible placement you are going to have dead zones, and the size and location of dead zones will vary depending on the devices used. My Toshiba laptop got service in places a virtually identical Macbook did not- let alone the poor wireless reception most mobile phones and devices provide. So you have to deal with irate users, and try to find places to install additional access points to cover the dropped zones.

When I worked for a small non-profit K-12 school, during teacher inservice days I always had to install 2 additional access points in the gym so that the teachers could all connect on their laptops, as the single AP currently serving the gym was not sufficient. Even then, transferring any large file from the server or online either brought the network to a standstill or required tethering each machine to an ethernet cord to do the transfer. Most high-tech oriented conferences, the wireless is all but useless if it's available publicly, due to the hundreds of devices all connecting within a limited frequency space and bandwidth. There is just not enough bandwidth in a small space available to deal with more then a handful of data-rich connections. Spread across multiple spheres of AP reception the problem is reduced, but not eliminated! My bedroom is WiFi-connected only due to wiring constraints and connecting from my laptop to my server via VNC or to copy files is very... very... slow. And really, try having a LAN party over wireless- I can run hundreds or thousands of network cables through a small room and connect everything I need for nearly any project or task inexpensively, and know that the network will be robust. Working with WiFi in anything other then a solo arrangement is a lesson in frustration.

TL;DR - Until security protocol and access control methods are more robust and available; until tools to design, implement, and test wireless networks are more plentiful and robust; and until bandwidth availability is not on par with but exceeds that of standard CAT5- wireless is but an adjunct, a convenient add-on to the main structure of a wired network in a business. ... err, not that I'm impassioned about it, or anything.

Re:Security, Availability, Expandibility.

[Bilby Baggins]

Interesting point, but I think ad-hoc may actually work better then a client / AP network in a high-bandwidth situation due to bandwidth overhead in a repeater-type wireless system (access point). When you are connected Ad-hoc, your data goes directly to the other computer and vice-versa. When you have an AP in the middle, your data goes to the AP, and then the AP sends it to the recipient- if you are both connected to the same AP you have a doubling of data in the same band space. Multiply that by 2 or 3 devices and you see where the problem is. Additionally most networkable games are designed to use as little bandwidth as possible so they work well with a variety of internet connections.

Is not reliable enough

[cjonslashdot]

I agree with the sentiments here that wireless is not appropriate for a large portion of traffic. Especially as we move to all kinds of media traveling over our IP networks, do we really want all of that to be steamed over wireless when it does not need to be?

I consume all of my media at home over IP, and because of my house's design and the location of my wireless router, it is very difficult to run a wire to where our big screen is, so I use wifi. When it works it is fine, but I have to reset the connection every time I finish watching anything. There is something wrong with the protocols. And I have very new equipment. And I have tried several brands of router, and the problem manifests with both my AppleTV and Roku - and with our laptops (Macs) as well.

I find that wifi is not reliable enough to rely on. It is great when it works, but it is very flaky. If we want to deploy it for everything then we need to make it work first.

Re:Is not reliable enough

[nurb432]

That is true if we stick with the 'fat' client concept we have today, pushing gigs of data to the end point directly..

If everything is moved to a RDP/VDI sort of environment, then it might become more feasible ( and secure ).

Re:Is not reliable enough

[Arlet]

There's nothing wrong with the protocols, you just have bad equipment.

Re:Is not reliable enough

[Arlet]

I was referring to the need to 'reset the connection'. Sure, interference can lower the throughput, or make it impossible to stream at a sufficient rate, but if anything can be fixed by resetting, it indicates a bad implementation.

Re:Is not reliable enough

[cjonslashdot]

Yes, I suspect you are right. But the equipment I have tried include the latest models of Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys (Cisco) wireless routers, all 802.11n capable. And everyone in my household has a Mac, and the other wireless devices are an Apple TV and a Roku. The Roku seems to be the least problematic, although it also loses its connection frequently - just not as frequently. (This never happens while one is streaming, however: only when a stream is done.) And interestingly, all devices show a strong wifi signal strength.

I am mystified and at a loss to explain what is wrong.

Re:Is not reliable enough

[icebraining]

I'd prefer if we separated our applications into client/UI layer and server/core; that way you could have multiple UIs adapted to the workflow of each device.

Uhm, Wireless (Wi-Fi) is Ethernet.

[funnyguy]

Wired and Wireless Ethernet are both Ethernet.

Re:Uhm, Wireless (Wi-Fi) is Ethernet.

[vlm]

Wired and Wireless Ethernet are both Ethernet.

Some places, mostly traveler oriented, but also some public K-12 schools, try to provide only www service over their wifi. Often via whitelists. Filtering at layer 7.

Also lots of places only allow ipv4 traffic over their fully ethernet capable wifi. Filtering at layer 2.

For a couple years in the 00s (was it the late 90s?) my wifi at home was bridged onto my wired network. Don't even remember why, I think it was for old fashioned lan parties or it was back when IPX was still viable, or something like that. Confused the heck out of some people. (Oh, heres your problem, your wifi and wired have the same subnet address, thats not possible, etc)

You'd be surprised how many non-networking people think wifi is a ip only protocol or even web-traffic only protocol.

Controlling the language is just a wedge to shove more filtering in.

Re:Uhm, Wireless (Wi-Fi) is Ethernet.

[Animats]

You'd be surprised how many non-networking people think wifi is a ip only protocol or even web-traffic only protocol.

Right. We used to use WiFi in Ethernet bridging mode for robot vehicle development, with no connection to the outside world's Internet. Protocols used included QNX QNET directly over Ethernet, not over IP. Nobody does this any more.

What needs to change

[Anonymous Coward]

As many people have pointed out the wired network isn't going away as the wireless network will always be far behind the wired network in terms of throughput. What I think really needs to change is the transition between wired and wireless networks for those devices that do both. You really should be able to move a machine between wired and wireless networks without causing any open TCP connections to be broken.

Maybe IPv6 is going to fix that, but I am not convinced the proper solution is actually at the IP layer. It could be implemented at a lower layer of the stack. If it was implemented at the Ethernet layer it would work for both IPV4, IPv6, and anything else you were running on the network. However doing it at the Ethernet layer does limit its scope to a single Ethernet segment, so wouldn't work for those places that implement wired and wifi as separate segments. Hence an implementation at a higher level would be useful as well, and in case IPv6 becomes widespread enough it could render an implementation at a lower level redundant.

Imagine starting a large download while on wifi, when you notice it is going too slow plug in the Ethernet cable and see the speed increase as TCP notice more bandwidth is available. And if you are on the wired network and the cable for some reason gets pulled out nothing would break, it would just cause a drop in speed until you plug it in again.

Re:What needs to change

[Celarent Darii]

Imagine starting a large download while on wifi, when you notice it is going too slow plug in the Ethernet cable and see the speed increase as TCP notice more bandwidth is available. And if you are on the wired network and the cable for some reason gets pulled out nothing would break, it would just cause a drop in speed until you plug it in again.

My MacBook already does this. The magic of TCP/IP is that it just searches for more routes. Adding another interface gives more routes. I believe ubuntu also does this too, though I've never taken down the server's interface.

wifi 'core'

[otis wildflower]

Wifi can be handy as a 'core' network if you live in an apartment and don't want to (or can't) drill holes to run copper throughout. An extended 802.11n 5GHz-dedicated works well enough to feed 1080p from my upstairs NAS to my downstairs home theater. Still, if I owned, or had an apartment with ethernet wall plates, I'd take advantage of that..

Wi-fi != wired

[max]

Since I am not an InfoWorld subscriber I could not read the report by Andrew Borg of the Aberdeen Group that Galen Gruman wrote about (nice plug about your own article BTW). Thus I have a hard time to see what Borg really meant and what got lost in the filtering of TFA.

But of course we will have to think of wired and wireless networks as two separate entities. Not that we cannot think about them at the same time and how they should work together, but because of their different characteristics.

For an end-user the experience should be roughly the same, but from an engineering point-of-view, you have to take all factors into account when designing your network. The limitations, security concerns, cost, etc of each medium is important to acknowledge.

So even if I might agree on that we shouldn't view wi-fi as the "neglected stepchild", we cannot dismiss the differences. Doing so would be plain stupid.

Quantum Teleportation

[HyTeK3000]

This would be the only way I see as being able to beat physical mediums for data transportation. Granted there are many hurdles to overcome, and it is still not fully understood, but it would be far superior to any wireless [and wired] based system when [if] mastered.

Borg

[arisvega]

What needs to happen, argues Aberdeen Group's Andrew Borg

So a Borg is giving suggestions as to how Earth's networks are to be set up?

Careful now, people.

Re:Borg

[MrQuacker]

They are the masters of efficiency...

Ethernet != Wired!

[acoustix]

Jebus, people. Ethernet is a layer 2 OSI technology and has nothing to do with the physical layer. Wireless uses Ethernet too.

Re:Ethernet != Wired!

[Tacvek]

Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) defines the physical layer (layer 1) and MAC layer (lower half of layer 2). Both of those are specific to wired connections.
Wifi (802.11) defines the wireless physical layer and MAC layer. Again both of those are specific to wireless connections.

The MAC layer of both were deliberately designed to have similar frame formats, but they are most definitely not the same. You cannot simply emit a WIFI frame on Ethernet and expect it to work.

Both utilize the same LLC layer (upper half of layer 2) specified in (IEEE 802.2).

So, no Ethernet is not a Layer 2 technology, and it most definitely implies a wired connection.

Re:How much of this is wireless?

[magamiako1]

Adequate hardware?

You do know that the technology used there was powered by *miles* of fiber cable, right? With probably millions in contracting fees to get it all run.

Limitations exist on shared media

[gavron]

The limitations of a shared medium preclude its being the "core" of any LAN that is actually seeing sustained use.

History (skip if tl;dr)
Ethernet, as originaly designed by Digital, Intel, and Xerox (DIX) was a shared medium. Transceivers sat on very think cable with vampire-taps piercing the cable to provide station connections. That is 10Base5. (10Mbps, 500meter max length). An improvement in technology allowed switching to 75ohm coaxial cable with BNC connectors, three-way connectors instead of vampire taps, and allowed four repeaters instead of the previous two. (10Base2 was commonly called Thinnet, as the coax cable was much thinner than its predecessor.)

Both of those are shared-media. That means every station receives every other station's transmissions. It's half-duplex in that only one side can transmit in any one time. The concept of "Collisions" and collision-backoff intervals were employed to minimize multiple stations transmitting at the same time.

With the advents of twisted-wire Ethernet (10Base-T) and having stations "home run" to a master repeater, this didn't change much other than the way in which cable was laid. HOWEVER, it prepared the ground for the existence of "smart repeaters" which would "learn" where each Ethernet MAC address was, and only forward frames to the right ports. This switching capacity led to them being called ... switches.

NON-Shared Medium comes into existence:
Switches now allow treating the network as a NON-shared medium. For example, Alice's PC can talk to Printer Bob, while Charlies PC talkes to file-server David, and neither's Ethernet frames interfere, hold up, or affect each other. That's what wired Ethernet is like in today's "modern" network.

WiFi however is a shared medium. AT THE VERY BEST it would be like going back to pre-switch days. If Alice's PC is transmitting, neither Printer Bob nor Charlie's PC or file-server David can be transmitting. Everybody queues up, and overall throughput drops by a function of the number of transmitting stations. But wait, WiFi has other issues which means it's not "at its very best." Some of these include hidden-nodes, RFI, limitation on channel-use, and adjacency issues. Additionally, most WiFi devices will transmit at the speed of the slowest station. So if you have a 802.11b node, it will slow down the 802.11g or 802.11n traffic. In other words, a WiFi network is worse than pre-switch wired networks by a significant amount.

CORE vs EDGE:
When you design a product (and a LAN is a product... it's used by everyone in the house/office/factory,etc.) a design should be based on accomplishing the goals. With LANs that's usually HIGH throughput, LOW cost, LOW errors. For that to work, the "bottlenecks" should not be in the center of this great star cluster of communication, but at the edge.

That is why the core needs to have the MOST bandwidth. (For some 100Mbps full-duplex wired is sufficient. For some of my clients 10Gbps is not enough.) The edge, where small-bandwidth devices exist (e.g. Android Phone, iPhone, Netbook, laptops) is the ideal deployment of WiFi for three reasons:
1. These devices are mobile. It makes sense they should be able to connect everywhere.
2. These devices use little bandwidth. It is unlikely they would normally saturate the wireless network.
3. These devices typically are complementary... so if a user has BOTH an Android phone AND a laptop... it's unlikely both will be using lots of data at the same time.

Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ

P.S. "Wireless" as used her is "WiFi" which is wireless Ethernet. So it's not really "Wireless vs Ethernet" but rather "Wireless vs Wired".

Re:Limitations exist on shared media

[hechacker1]

Thanks for that informative post!

So basically, we would need the FCC to open up the airway for more frequencies, thus reducing collisions and allowing switching when one channel is in use.

AFAIK, almost every wireless device in my house is around 2.4GHz.

Re:Really people?

[Joe U]

Wireless is ludicrously insecure, to the point where any busyness today should be shot for even giving a 100% corporate wireless network more than 10 seconds worth of thought, unless they live in a sealed lead bunker. If you don't agree, please go work for a competitor.

A pPoorly designed wireless is ludicrously insecure. I can design a secure wireless network that would be insanely hard to break. However, it wouldn't be as easy to configure.

WPA2, IPSec,a proxy server, VPN, no DHCP, MAC locked, NLA, etc etc..

Re:My company seems to "get it".

[Tacvek]

Very true. For such a setup what are your options for a wired connection? As far as I can you you have 2 options. Basically you can either provide two sockets, or you can use a VLAN to separate the network, with known MAC addresses receiving one VLAN tag, and unknown MAC addresses receiving another.

Neither of those two work nearly as well as having two SSIDs. Granted you are probably still assigning a VLAN based on SSID, but that is a much better way to do it than a MAC address list that would need to be uploaded to all the edge switches.

Australian NBN

[AbRASiON]

I was going to moderate some people but I thought I'd pipe up and say just how incompetent some of our politicians (and general public) are.

There's been a small but consistent amount of talk about the NBN being silly because of the "advances in wireless technology" and people genuinely seem to think it's a viable option for a country the size of Australia, to do all the internet (and phones!) for over 20 million people, wirelessly.

Sad but true.

Well, we can.

[Cyberax]

4 years ago I've helped to manage a mesh WiFi network for a fairly large enterprise. It covered a large building with about 1000 people working simultaneously. It was first intended as a temporary network (they had to relocate quickly, because of a fire in their old building). But it worked well enough to become the main network.

Keys to success: low-power APs with WDS, and gigabit Ethernet trunks + switches with STP. We used WPA with pre-shared password for wireless security and then IPSec for IP-level security (it was used with the wired network earlier so no setup was required).

As far as I remember, an average access point served about 15 clients. We manually set all the access points to the lowest possible power level, but apart from that we did no additional setup.

Re:Well, we can.

[Archangel Michael]

This is why going with a Managed WIFI Solution simply rocks. Stick the WAPs in Lightweight mode, put them in the field, and let the controller set the power, channel and VLAN setup for you. That way, if the neighbor sets his WIFI up the controller auto tunes all the WAPs for you to new frequencies and power levels.

Forget having to manage 100 Configurations. And yes, 15 is about pushing it for anything other than casual use. For casual use, you might get 30 clients to a WAP.

Re:Well, we can.

[lanner]

PSK on a "fairly large enterprise". Yep. That's what he said.

Re:Well, we can.

[Cyberax]

Yep. Exactly, PSK on a large enterprise.

And THEN real security using IPSec. What's the point of protecting the wireless transmissions if anybody can plug anything into a nearest switch and sniff everything in their network segment?

Fascinating repeat of history

[Eric Green]

When personal computers came out, IT said "personal computers are toys and useless for real work, we do not allow them in our facility." When the first commercial Linux arrived in late 1995, I heard IT say "Linux is a toy and useless for real work, we do not allow it in our facility." Now I read in this very thread people saying "iPads are toys and useless for real work, we do not allow them." Hint to IT: It didn't work when you said that in 1980, it didn't work when you said that in 1995, and it won't work when you say that today.

I've heard all the excuses over the past 30 years over why IT can't allow the latest technology, and in the end they all ram up against reality. Mordac the Preventer of Information Services may have short-term victories, but in the end the wheels of progress grind him up. Reality simply *IS*. You aren't going to stop the executives from bringing in those things because they outrank you and your rear end will be out on the street if you try to stop them, not to mention that if you don't provide a secure wireless network capable of handling the iPads and other wireless devices that people want to use in your facility, you're going to end up with wildcat devices, often in the hands of untouchables -- people you can't touch, because they outrank you / are mission critical to the company / are close personal friends with the CEO / whatever. I've seen this dynamic -- IT trying to stop new technology from entering the workplace, and being bypassed -- so many times over the years, that you'd think IT would get a clue and get ahead of the technology curve rather than trying to downplay the new technology as "just a toy and useless for real work." Yet reading the comments on this article I see IT people doing the same thing that didn't work in 1995, that didn't work in 1980, that won't work today -- trying to keep technology they don't understand / don't like / have no personal use for themselves out of the workplace.

Hint: You might as well start trying to figure out how to make your environment work for ubiquitous wireless devices, because it is *not* a "fad" that's going away. An iPad isn't a substitute for a desktop computer, just as a desktop computer isn't a substitute for a mainframe, but clearly people are finding the things to be useful for *something* if they're wanting it on the work network, and it's not your job as IT to tell them that no, it's *not* useful (when clearly the reality is that it darn well *is* useful for something, even if you don't understand what), it's your job to accept that reality and figure out some way to get the things on your network in a secure and reasonably speedy fashion. Because it will happen regardless -- so you might as well do it right, instead of the futile fight against insecure wildcat access points in the hands of untouchables that will otherwise happen.

Rampant encryption/decryption

[SpaghettiPattern]

Try running X over a slow connection whereby the idiot owning the slow connection really digs VLANs but you still need an SSH tunnel. WiFi would be the 3rd encryption in the chain and would make everything even more unlikely. Kick out WiFi and you're better off. Persuade the VLAN idiot -although the fscking bastard will go to great lengths in order NOT to understand you- and you're almost fine.

Repeat with me: wireless = wired

[__aancvu2993]

Wake me up when my ESX hosts connect to the SAN wirelessly

PoE

[TuringCheck]

Oh, and PoE is a lifesaver for anyone who has ever deployed IP phones.

If regular / cheap switches and routers would allow at least one PoE port it would be much easier than being forced to run the wires to the few PoE capable switches - and even those can power only 4-8 ports of a total of 16-24.
In most cases I end up adding a power brick next to the IP phones.