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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, D

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.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Same here. These corporate network engineers are wizards. When I was a kid, my father had a small WISP. Even that (done with consumer-level hardware) was super interesting. IMHO networking is surprisingly accessible though - it's well documented because the field is built on certifications.
  - dijit 5y ago
    > It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors. I promise sincerely that this is the kind of naivity that I was referring to. A single cell site has something like 36 "TRXs" (this is independent of 3/4g), but with 4G due to the fact there is better collision avoidance and a lot of work on the trailing and leading edges inferring meaning: you can have 36 calls without increased latency. You will notice this.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Naivity doesn't matter when you're there and it works. Repeatedly, reliably.
      - PedroBatista 5y ago
        It doesn’t, but it matters when you extrapolate and generalize that Wi-Fi is more than fine for most if not all the people ( even if that wasn’t you intention )
- tallanvor 5y ago
  A good RF engineer who specializes in WiFi deployment can absolutely design a solid environment. For the best deployments they're involved during the building design process to identify the general area where access points will be needed based on the expected building occupancy (and just as important, how people will be distributed in the building). Near the end of construction they'll be on-site to take reading and fine-tune the placement. After construction ends they'll often be on-site several times to take additional readings and adjust power levels (although large companies may have people who can take the readings so the engineer doesn't have to come on site to make updates). And honestly, even most conference facilities are able to provide acceptable WiFi for attendees. --I've participated in meetings where 100 people would be in one room and we all had decent connections. WiFi has it's problems in environments where the access point owners won't cooperate (home environments), but it's much better than it used to be.
hansel_der 5y ago
> I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi that's either due to ignorance or negligence

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.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Same here. These corporate network engineers are wizards. When I was a kid, my father had a small WISP. Even that (done with consumer-level hardware) was super interesting. IMHO networking is surprisingly accessible though - it's well documented because the field is built on certifications.
- dijit 5y ago
  > It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors. I promise sincerely that this is the kind of naivity that I was referring to. A single cell site has something like 36 "TRXs" (this is independent of 3/4g), but with 4G due to the fact there is better collision avoidance and a lot of work on the trailing and leading edges inferring meaning: you can have 36 calls without increased latency. You will notice this.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Naivity doesn't matter when you're there and it works. Repeatedly, reliably.
    - PedroBatista 5y ago
      It doesn’t, but it matters when you extrapolate and generalize that Wi-Fi is more than fine for most if not all the people ( even if that wasn’t you intention )
tallanvor 5y ago
A good RF engineer who specializes in WiFi deployment can absolutely design a solid environment. For the best deployments they're involved during the building design process to identify the general area where access points will be needed based on the expected building occupancy (and just as important, how people will be distributed in the building). Near the end of construction they'll be on-site to take reading and fine-tune the placement. After construction ends they'll often be on-site several times to take additional readings and adjust power levels (although large companies may have people who can take the readings so the engineer doesn't have to come on site to make updates). And honestly, even most conference facilities are able to provide acceptable WiFi for attendees. --I've participated in meetings where 100 people would be in one room and we all had decent connections. WiFi has it's problems in environments where the access point owners won't cooperate (home environments), but it's much better than it used to be.

hansel_der 5y ago

> I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi that's either due to ignorance or negligence