4 ms·

Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. IME, ever since 802.11ac (~2014), wifi

Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. IME, ever since 802.11ac (~2014), wifi has been fast enough to not need to be wired in.

dijit 5y ago
Honestly this reads as painfully naive. Maybe you’ve never worked with radio communications before in which case I definitely give you the benefit of the doubt for not knowing this: But wifi (just like other radio tech like 4G) has limited capacity, and that capacity is shared across all radio systems- this sounds obvious but when you realise how few devices can be talking simultaneously you will understand what an absolute pain this is. Most of the huge gains in wifi technology (and 3g-4g) is not just making assumptions about what a signal is based on the leading and trailing edge of the wave of the transmission: mostly it’s about collision detection algorithms. Collision detection, by necessity, adds undeterminable latency to your connection, it’s literally how it works. So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time. Worse: that room full of people is not _just_ that room full of people. Wifi works in 3 dimensions, you’ll be competing with your upstairs and downstairs neighbours too.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  And yet countless massive office buildings across NYC and every city seem to allow dozens of people to work from a conference room without issue simultaneously over the air every day... must be magic.
  - serf 5y ago
    >without issue >...must be magic. i'd believe the second line if the first one were true, but fact is that although your experience may be very good, people have issues with WiFi constantly -- and more importantly; a lot of people are having issues without even realizing it. An AP that hits 40% of it's projected performance metrics isn't down, but to say it is issue-free is malarkey. Air-congestion is very real, and it affects all of us. Average latency is more chaotic now than it ever has been -- even if the low numbers are very low. Is WiFi effective? Absolutely. I have no illusions that an office worker filling out spread-sheets is going to be totally hindered by a bit less predictable latency numbers -- I just think that it paints an incomplete picture by not realizing that we ARE losing something for the convenience of network-over-the-air. And just to throw an anecdote out there , i'm often one of those conference room workers in one of the massive office buildings when contracted , and with a brand new XPS I still see all the same old issues with congested WiFi nearly everywhere I go. "Convention Wifi" is such a meme that most people expect it to fail 1st or 2nd day of any specific Con. It's not all that uncommon for me to encounter corporate groups that have specific APs for video conference that aren't allowed for general-employee use; the fact that this trend sprung up in the first place presumably indicates that not everyone is getting the performance they need from the arrangement.
- emteycz 5y ago
  I worked in a purely wifi-based office of hundreds of people. Seamless roaming, speeds in hundreds of Mb/s, low ping - while everyone restored their NPM deps, Docker image layers and had video conferences all the time. Don't know what you're talking about. IME wifi problems are purely administrator capability issue. And I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi...
  - dijit 5y ago
    I don’t want to sound flippant but honestly where you worked has somehow defied the laws of physics. I would recommend spending 50 minutes of your life watching this: https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8 https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8 While many access points will state that they support 250+ clients, what they mean is that 250+ clients can theoretically be “connected” as in pinging the base station. Actual throughput will be limited. Having worked in high density setups I simply cannot believe your experience. Even with low power and many APs there would be too much crosstalk/overlap. It cannot be the way you claim it to be unless you were 10 people and had isolation from other APs.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      They just had like 100 APs and well configured roaming. I guess they carefully managed power levels and channels of each AP. It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors. IME from where I live, mobile data work well even when standing in the middle of protests of 10k people (many of them live streaming on FB and Instagram, sending selfies and photos and videos...). 100k becomes a problem though.
      - worthless-trash 5y ago
        I'd love to see this done right, The only company I've seen go close was using ubiquity hardware and they had custom engineering work done to make it work well. I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.
        5y ago
- Kon-Peki 5y ago
  > So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time You aren't wrong [1], but at the same time you are missing that it is entirely possible to provision a wifi setup that can support a large number of devices in a small space. In an office setting, you should be incredulous if they don't have it right. But at home, with consumer networking gear (like the WSJ is talking about)? No way, ethernet is going to outperform it - it will be like night and day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_domain
  - dijit 5y ago
    Thanks for clarifying the point, I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer. WiFi devices can support many devices in small spaces, but you will have increased latency and diminishing returns on throughput for the reasons I mentioned. Downvolting radios will only get you so far.
    - Kon-Peki 5y ago
      I can remember when most wired consumer gear were hubs, not switches. The network would become nearly unusable when you had even a tiny LAN gaming party. Now, I'm not sure that you can even buy an ethernet hub.
titzer 5y ago
My workstation doesn't have a WiFi adapter, and I'm glad. It's gigabit ethernet plugged straight into the cable modem. I'm happy to keep tinkering away, even watching videos and such on my laptop, but a big black tower with a keyboard is a holy thing that needs a big pipe jacked into the wall, and you can't convince me otherwise :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
trebligdivad 5y ago
Yes; you can get it right; lots of places don't, but you can. And it's very good for people constantly shuffling between meeting rooms. That's a real use
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. OK but companies with a large enough IT department shall also have shitloads of employees / contractors using desktops plugged into ethernet all over the place. They're not mutually exclusive.
acranox 5y ago
The bandwidth is good enough, but it’s the latency that gets me.

dijit 5y ago

Honestly this reads as painfully naive. Maybe you’ve never worked with radio communications before in which case I definitely give you the benefit of the doubt for not knowing this: But wifi (just like other radio tech like 4G) has limited capacity, and that capacity is shared across all radio systems- this sounds obvious but when you realise how few devices can be talking simultaneously you will understand what an absolute pain this is. Most of the huge gains in wifi technology (and 3g-4g) is not just making assumptions about what a signal is based on the leading and trailing edge of the wave of the transmission: mostly it’s about collision detection algorithms. Collision detection, by necessity, adds undeterminable latency to your connection, it’s literally how it works. So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time. Worse: that room full of people is not _just_ that room full of people. Wifi works in 3 dimensions, you’ll be competing with your upstairs and downstairs neighbours too.

wildrhythms 5y ago
And yet countless massive office buildings across NYC and every city seem to allow dozens of people to work from a conference room without issue simultaneously over the air every day... must be magic.
- serf 5y ago
  >without issue >...must be magic. i'd believe the second line if the first one were true, but fact is that although your experience may be very good, people have issues with WiFi constantly -- and more importantly; a lot of people are having issues without even realizing it. An AP that hits 40% of it's projected performance metrics isn't down, but to say it is issue-free is malarkey. Air-congestion is very real, and it affects all of us. Average latency is more chaotic now than it ever has been -- even if the low numbers are very low. Is WiFi effective? Absolutely. I have no illusions that an office worker filling out spread-sheets is going to be totally hindered by a bit less predictable latency numbers -- I just think that it paints an incomplete picture by not realizing that we ARE losing something for the convenience of network-over-the-air. And just to throw an anecdote out there , i'm often one of those conference room workers in one of the massive office buildings when contracted , and with a brand new XPS I still see all the same old issues with congested WiFi nearly everywhere I go. "Convention Wifi" is such a meme that most people expect it to fail 1st or 2nd day of any specific Con. It's not all that uncommon for me to encounter corporate groups that have specific APs for video conference that aren't allowed for general-employee use; the fact that this trend sprung up in the first place presumably indicates that not everyone is getting the performance they need from the arrangement.
emteycz 5y ago
I worked in a purely wifi-based office of hundreds of people. Seamless roaming, speeds in hundreds of Mb/s, low ping - while everyone restored their NPM deps, Docker image layers and had video conferences all the time. Don't know what you're talking about. IME wifi problems are purely administrator capability issue. And I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi...
- dijit 5y ago
  I don’t want to sound flippant but honestly where you worked has somehow defied the laws of physics. I would recommend spending 50 minutes of your life watching this: https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8 https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8 While many access points will state that they support 250+ clients, what they mean is that 250+ clients can theoretically be “connected” as in pinging the base station. Actual throughput will be limited. Having worked in high density setups I simply cannot believe your experience. Even with low power and many APs there would be too much crosstalk/overlap. It cannot be the way you claim it to be unless you were 10 people and had isolation from other APs.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    They just had like 100 APs and well configured roaming. I guess they carefully managed power levels and channels of each AP. It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors. IME from where I live, mobile data work well even when standing in the middle of protests of 10k people (many of them live streaming on FB and Instagram, sending selfies and photos and videos...). 100k becomes a problem though.
    - worthless-trash 5y ago
      I'd love to see this done right, The only company I've seen go close was using ubiquity hardware and they had custom engineering work done to make it work well. I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.
      - 5y ago
Kon-Peki 5y ago
> So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time You aren't wrong [1], but at the same time you are missing that it is entirely possible to provision a wifi setup that can support a large number of devices in a small space. In an office setting, you should be incredulous if they don't have it right. But at home, with consumer networking gear (like the WSJ is talking about)? No way, ethernet is going to outperform it - it will be like night and day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_domain
- dijit 5y ago
  Thanks for clarifying the point, I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer. WiFi devices can support many devices in small spaces, but you will have increased latency and diminishing returns on throughput for the reasons I mentioned. Downvolting radios will only get you so far.
  - Kon-Peki 5y ago
    I can remember when most wired consumer gear were hubs, not switches. The network would become nearly unusable when you had even a tiny LAN gaming party. Now, I'm not sure that you can even buy an ethernet hub.

titzer 5y ago

My workstation doesn't have a WiFi adapter, and I'm glad. It's gigabit ethernet plugged straight into the cable modem. I'm happy to keep tinkering away, even watching videos and such on my laptop, but a big black tower with a keyboard is a holy thing that needs a big pipe jacked into the wall, and you can't convince me otherwise :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

trebligdivad 5y ago

Yes; you can get it right; lots of places don't, but you can. And it's very good for people constantly shuffling between meeting rooms. That's a real use

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication. OK but companies with a large enough IT department shall also have shitloads of employees / contractors using desktops plugged into ethernet all over the place. They're not mutually exclusive.

acranox 5y ago

The bandwidth is good enough, but it’s the latency that gets me.