Making Wireless, Not Ethernet, the Heart of the Network 346
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."
The number of devices is not most relevant (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
I can tell you where to shove your iPad
Re:The number of devices is not most relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
You are using an iPad on a corporate LAN and accessing "boatloads of data"? Haha.
Some people have real work to do.
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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
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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
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Not mentioning wifi will banned from most schools and public libraries in France, given the speed at which people complain.
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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.
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But that versus my wife's head, it'll be a no brainer.
I don't think I need to add anything here.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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?)
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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.
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They said the same with computers. I do work on my ipad. Why couldn't anyone?
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The number of devices is not most relevant (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 bos
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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No, but your company loses money, and maybe go out of business, if you have a security breach and disclose vital data.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anyway, you forgot all the pencil-pushing bureaucrats.
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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
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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... or more spectrum, or more efficient use of the spectrum to already have ...
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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.
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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 comme
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Re:The number of devices is not most relevant (Score:4, Interesting)
> 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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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)
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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 tha
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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 pr
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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) frakkin
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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.
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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 fu
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Too bad it won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
High latency, low throughput, and a shared collision domain.
What's not to like?
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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
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No, can't be done. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Well, we can. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
wireless networks in critical infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 net
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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 integrit
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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?
Why are these things using WiFi? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Printers? Haven't seen any but one or two low-end consumer models. All professional installs I've seen use good old Ethernet. /very/ low speed data back up the power lines.
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
So, no, WiFi isn't everywhere. It's just a good add-on for portable devices and stuff that does
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Re:Why are these things using WiFi? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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They're not artefacts of an ancient civilization; if there's no Ethernet port where you need it, get one installed.
Security, Availability, Expandibility. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Is not reliable enough (Score:2)
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 connecti
Re: (Score:2)
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 ).
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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.
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There's nothing wrong with the protocols, you just have bad equipment.
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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 w
Re: (Score:2)
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.
wifi 'core' (Score:2)
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..
Borg (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Ethernet != Wired! (Score:2)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Limitations exist on shared media (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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 tha
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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.