Their secret for workplace Zen: Landlines and ethernet cords
wsj.com
wsj.com
For most homes, you know exactly where your datahogs are going to be - computer desk, smart tv, consoles, etc. People are addicted to the convenience of running everything through the air, but an hour in a crawlspace and you've got something faster and more reliable.
Value of the knowledge on how to make the cables and have exact lengths: priceless.
WiFi is nice for what it's good for: mobility. Like when I want to work in the backyard for an hour because it's so nice outside, or when I need to walk around the house laptop in hand for some reason.
But any spot where I'll be online for more than like an hour a week, I install ethernet and wall jacks.
Ethernet cables are round and have twisted pairs inside for a reason.
CAT6 etc. have a plastic spine running down the middle for a reason.
Flat cables are NOT ethernet and they are not "CAT" anything. They don't comply to any standards whatsoever.
Don't waste your money supporting an industry making products that should not exist.
> Flat cables are NOT ethernet
Is this perhaps confusing signalling with the medium?
If I take a modern home network and swap out all the cables with RJ-45 connectors for "flat" versions, and is still works and machines still talk to one another... what kind of network should we be calling that if not "Ethernet?
Does the one true Ethernet require coaxial cables and vampire-taps of the 1970s, and everything in the last few decades has been mislabeled?
Your ethernet signal is basically an A/C pattern of square waves going down the wire.
This is the analog manifestation of your digital data and it behaves like other analog signals going through wires.
A twisted pair of wires naturally rejects outside interference better than a random arrangement.
However truly parallel wires can be almost as effective under many conditions.
An outer well-grounded shield sheath surrounding one or more sensitive conductors can provide even more isolation from nearby signals or noise.
Unintended diodes caused by corrosion, unsoldered connections, or dissimilar metals can sometimes compromise analog representations of digital signals by causing assymetry during zero-crossing events.
I chose a Ubiquiti "Access Point AC In-wall." It's a WiFi AP, with 4 GbE ports, and draws PoE, which means no plugs needed at the point of installation. It looks very clean, just a neat rectangular box affixed to the wall, delivering both WiFi and 4 wired jacks (one doesn't work, oh well).
Using a manual drywall saw, I cut a hole in my wall, at the point of installation but smaller than the faceplate, so it would be covered. Next I used an 18 inch spade bit to drill through the sill plate of my floor. This part was the most nerve-wracking: I couldn't see what I was doing through the drywall, and sill plates are very hard. Eventually I busted through, and left the drill bit in the hole as a marker.
I climbed down into the crawlspace and fished the Ethernet cable up through the hole, with some help from my wife. I then ran the other end to the living room, just in the crawlspace dirt (stapling it to studs was possible but didn't seem important); the other side had a pre-drilled hole for cable and I fished it up through.
I'm not especially handy but wiring my home for Ethernet was a manageable adventure, give it a try!
Or... train a pet rat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_rat
Rats have been used for networking since the 90s, it's apparently an easy trick to get them to do.
The owner of Cragside House in Northumberland [0] used his hunting ferrets to install under-floor cables in 1880 (or so). This was preferable to ripping up the extensive wooden floors.
[0] For example: https://www.homedepot.ca/product/klein-tools-1-4-inch-wide-s...
Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.
Pull off the face plate and check to see what kind of wire they used. Chances are that it is cat-5/6/7/8 and you MIGHT be able to use it as an ethernet outlet if it was installed appropriately.
This was done in a former property of mine and I went through the place and replaced certain RJ-11 outlets with RJ-45 ones.
And I’m always grabbing a laptop and taking it to another room; I have a separate desktop. So I prefer to keep my laptops untethered as much as possible.
The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots.
We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived.
I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
Nah. Two houses ago I couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working. Turns out the builders had wired it up completely randomly, i.e. it didn't go orange-white, orange, green-white, brown... and each termination was different. I had to redo them all.
[0] T-568B
[1] Normally this would be the green and orange pairs, resulting in T-568A. Modern Ethernet ports are pretty much all auto-sensing and will handle being connected either straight-through or crossed-over regardless of what device is on the other end.
Until something happens near your home (big event, accident, terrorism, etc), mobile cells crap out under the strain of thousands trying to call at the same time, and you're left with no connection.
I keep a landline only for that - emergencies.
If I were to be hired by a company and went into their office the first day, and they said, "so the corporate Wi-Fi SSID is..." well, I'd kind of not take them really seriously as a business. I realize with today's much better Wi-Fi and cellular technologies, that this is an emotional response and there's no rational facts behind the way I feel. Just an artifact of growing up with "wired = reliable".
The building is getting structured cabling.
I've known a lot of people who were amazing at their job, but shitty at running a business. I guess I would have tried to help these lawyers and explain their wrongheaded tech decisions to see what their next move would be. That would give me a better understanding of whether they were an outfit worthy of my time.
On a side note, I have no idea why pgp is not more common in that industry. It's completely insane. In some ways, you'd be better off sending your legal correspondence on a postcard with attorney/client priveledge disclaimer at the bottom.
> Case in point: just a few weeks ago Goldman Sachs mistakenly sent a sensitive email with account information to a random Gmail user because someone fumbled some keystrokes and sent to a “gmail.com” account instead of a “gs.com” account. The email contained such sensitive information that the only recourse Goldman had was to get a court order to require Google to retract the message. Just this month, the UK’s Information Commissioner “sounded the alarm” for lawyers in an attempt to get them to realize that unencrypted email is an unacceptable risk for privacy.
It is by far the weakest link in terms of law firm information security these days.
Maybe because pgp is still the same pain the butt it was back in the 90's. Nothing significant has been done to improve the user experience.
Meanwhile, roll forward to 2022 and there are now dozens of good quality secure document sharing platforms, all of which have full web, desktop and phone/tablet integration.
There are long established standards such as 802.1X which involves mutual TLS encryption for wifi. This is generally called "Enterprise WPA" or something like that. This means that all wifi traffic is encrypted to what I would call: a decent standard.
I hope your friend did a proper analysis of the wifi offering and didn't simply discount it out of hand because it is wifi.
There are a lot of issues here and the wifi vs wired thing is bloody complicated but make sure you understand all of the issues before pontificating about one vs the other ... 8)
(edit: 51 year old commentard here)
Wi-Fi is a shared medium in a crowded and noisy spectrum environment. I can see a dozen networks from my house, and I'm in a (dense) neighborhood of single family homes--it's much worse in a high rise office building. It can have decent bandwidth (almost a gigabit when it gets going) but reliability, latency, and jitter are bad.
I've had another neighbour buy a wireless landline from China that was because "sometimes the phone would crackle, and i hated that" meanwhile it would bring every 5ghz wifi network to its knees when she was taking a phone call.
So, there are other cases, maybe this is a bit more prevalent in countries closer to those with lax spectrum laws.
The licensed frequency bands, in contrast, are congestion free and more polite let’s say. I’d be willing to pay a monthly fee for use of one of those frequency bands. But good luck getting permission from the FCC to do that.
You mean a cordless phone?
> For both wired and wireless access, Google uses RADIUS servers to assign devices to an appropriate network, based on 802.1x authentication. We use dynamic, rather than static, VLAN assignment. This approach means that rather than relying on the switch/port static configuration, we use the RADIUS servers to inform the switch of the appropriate VLAN assignment for the authenticated device. Managed devices provide their certificate as part of this 802.1x handshake and are assigned to the unprivileged network, while unrecognized and unmanaged devices on the corporate network are assigned to a remediation or guest network. - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Yes BeyondCorp does allow access to corporate resources outside of the intranet, but as part of a managed device + identity + network evaluation.
Then you do your "due diligence" etc. I think we should all understand at a fairly basic level how wifi and wired works and what to do.
Fire up the VPN!
If I were a corporation looking to hire a law firm, this would be a serious down-check for them, as I don't want the details of any cases they're handling for me exposed on a shared network.
This could also be considered weak protection of client-attorney communications, and get the state Bar Association involved.
Wifi 1 is for if you disconnect your laptop from ethernet then it automatically connects to the internal corporate WiFi network. This is great if you go to a conference room and need to access to your remote desktop session in the compute cluster.
Wifi 2 is for employees personal devices like mobile phones and is outside of the corporate network with no access to confidential data
Wifi 3 is for guests and vendors who need network access for a demonstration etc.
Wifi 2 for employee personal devices has the password on an internal website and it changes once a month
Wifi 3 changes passwords every 24 hours. It is only for vendors who need internet access to do a demo of their product. When we meet the vendor in a conference room we have to get the password off another web site and then they also get a wifi login screen where they have to list their company name and reason for visit etc.
I have no proof, but given the actions of one employer I believe 2 was for indirectly monitoring what people were doing on their personal devices.
May as well just use one outside the network AP for everyone, just an easy password everyone knows to prevent parking lot users.
Entry to the corporate network? That'd be the VPN (or wireguard, etc) just as if they were off site.
You are old enough (I assume) to remember really dodgy wifi but it has moved on and APs from nearly all vendors are really rather good. ISPs in the UK (I can't comment elsewhere obviously) have generally woken up to delivering really quite decent "hubs" instead of a shonky Thompson Rainbow type device. That said, even those have some mileage with a firmware change.
It's all about tools for the job. You know as well as I do what drywall/plasterboard does to wifi or what a skin of bricks does to wifi propagation, compared to generally wooden construction.
Yes, running a CATn cable will nearly always trump a wifi connection but it's fixed. I personally stick to CAT5e at home instead of 6 but I won't rule it out in future. 5e -> 1Gb/s over 100m. 6 ... which one? 6 is nominally 10Gb/s and 6A is 40 I think. 6A needs the shielding to be earthed properly.
I run most things over wifi if I can. My servers have fixed ethernet and things like my doorbell obviously get a PoE CAT5e connection. ... ... ... obviously!
Here I am with 12" thick stone walls and wifi can barely make it from the next room. I'm so glad the previous owner ran a little bit of ethernet cable!
Say what you will about ad tech, I think there’s no denying these are “serious” tech companies.
Their wifi was pretty ok though. I went a month or so without noticing that my personal usb nic had stopped working after an macOS update (needless to say, I'm not a fan of macs after experience using one at that job).
Work is done at a desk with a large display (or two) and a network port. The laptops come out for meetings, not coding.
Some people prefer hiding with their laptop and coding, but I find the added latency of wifi when using remote desktops is painful. Code is _not_ allowed on the laptop's storage.
Some people who do use laptops as primary machines will have a dock to let them use the wired network and large displays.
It depends on your job function, for sure, but I had to download multiple large device images each day, and having a 10G link was pretty convenient for doing that.
-written from my wifi connected laptop at Netflix
Apple basically just sells boutique whitegoods.
If any of these companies ceased to exist, it wouldn't inconvenience anyone other the shareholders.
true, hn'ers obviously excluded :)
> but you aren't putting food on tables
i tend to agree, but then again, most "value" is created by businesses that revolve around unnecessary things.
And the employees.
Staircase's ramp here at home is beautiful but the metallic balusters acts as a Faraday cage. Wife's MacBook M1 doesn't have an ethernet port either but she's using a little USB-C hub providing ethernet (and connection to a proper monitor): I think these adapters cost like $25 or something (my brother had one laying around and just gave it to me).
The line I use in the house is, "if it's staying in one place and can be wired, it should be." My iMac is wired, all the AppleTVs are (now) wired, Linux servers are wired, etc.
Weirdly, until the 4K launched, on the AppleTV 4's was actually faster to use wifi (they only had a 10/100 Ethernet port, but support 802.11ac.)
To be fair, Wifi has gotten a lot better than the bad ol' 802.11b and WEP days. My Unifi access points are fairly solid (even if the company behind them is acting less so recently) and I very rarely have any wifi problems that aren't specific to a device. Like printers. I constantly fight with printers falling off the wifi. But I just prefer to be wired if possible.
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.
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.
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.
>...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.
IME wifi problems are purely administrator capability issue. And I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi...
I would recommend spending 50 minutes of your life watching this: 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.
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.
I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.
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.
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.
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.
that's either due to ignorance or negligence
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.
Here's a speed test I just ran, on my home wi-fi:
Ethernet adds on a few hundred extra Mbps but I usually don't need that unless I'm downloading something huge.
WiFi in your business is for smart phones/tablets and guests.
Early on in my career, I made a living designing network solutions for companies. Warehouses and retail stores in particular needed large, highly available Wi-Fi networks. Some providers tried to build proprietary protocols/networks, but ultimately, they failed.
These days, I'd question working for, or doing work for a company WITHOUT Wi-Fi.
I am probably your age or older. I've interfaced with COBOL systems, for example...
That you're privileged enough to consider, even emotionally, the majority of the world's connections as 'toys' is something you should recognize. Way more SeriousBusiness happens on Wifi/Cell than I think you expect, and writing off that large (and growing) group is honestly ridiculous.
On the other end of the spectrum, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, etc, did/do so much of their work on Wifi/Cell only that it seems insane to think that they are just doing 'toy' stuff as well.
I was on a plane about 10 years ago working on a global network of barometers for weather forecasting research using phones as sensors, and the flight attendant told me rudely to 'put away my toys now'. I've been upset at this ever since, so I'm sorry if this comes off as rude too, but honestly, wtf. I'm working on real stuff, nothing to do with 'toys', as are so many people.
Belittling the Wifi/Cell revolution is a mistake IMO.
It's like keyboards, as measured by Dan Luu [1]. I can totally feel the difference between some listed on that web.
Stacks are adding up a lot of latency, and I'm trying to remove as much as I can from my configuration.
An extreme comparison is to run Emacs in text mode with Ethernet, a good wired connection and USB Magic Keyboard vs Emacs on a heavy desktop environment, WiFi and a laggy wireless keyboard. Night and day difference. On the second one, there's a lot of lag.
Depending on signal strength, contention, hardware quality, WiFi mode, etc, you'll get multiple milliseconds.
Right now I checked and got 20ms+/-5. 802.11n, decent signal strength, very low interference (rural location).
More typical latency figures: https://hpbn.co/wifi/#measuring-your-wifi-first-hop-latency
-- It took a lot of years to get here.
-- It took expensive equipment to get here.
-- I'm lucky that my house doesn't have a lot of brick or steel or some other material that blocks signals
-- I still believe that wired is more secure.
-- When it's wired, I know it's either working or it's my ISPs fault. When it's wireless, I'm left doubting.
i often wonder if the popularity of sms and texting in general was largely fueled in the early days by the horrific high latency, lossy compression that made up early tdma, cdma, pcs and gsm mobile to mobile voice channels.
latency and mobile to mobile "hd calling" have improved, but i still think landlines were more natural. multihour phone calls were comfortable... now they're exhausting.
My current workplace is pretty serious about call fluidity so we all have $300 podcaster mics and open backed headphones and shit and all that was blown away by two fucking landlines a couple states apart.
I wonder if there is a market for two data-lines into a home, one that emphasizes low latency and another that emphasizes large volume. The lag in current video/audio communications is pretty bad.
problem is that there's a fair bit of fixed delay. a/d and d/a have fixed minimum latencies, as do codecs (although i think there's been focus and improvement there over the years), and then there is, of course, the public internet with its various hiccups that are often smoothed over with additional buffering/latency.
i do wonder how much energy has been put into reducing perceived latency and the psychophysical aspects though. (also a very interesting domain)
hard to beat the latency of a local analog signal though!
There’s no cheating the physics or the underlying network. You can’t interact with the “inner” musicians as the data only flows one way.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/docs/common/JackTrip.html
i wonder how well it works...
also, since we're going down memory lane, who remembers the album isdn by the future sound of london?
the name comes from the fact that they used hardware that was designed for musicians to jam over isdn digital calls (or more likely high latency high quality calls for audio distribution, given the state of audio codecs at the time), to produce the album across a large geographical area, if i remember right..
PRI was 1.5mbit, but i'm not sure you could dial out all the constituent channels. (i think it was designed to either behave like a standard leased line or as an endpoint for BRIs to dial into)
edit: looks like you can dial those out... but in practice it's either 2 channels at 128k or 6 at 384k. still not a lot of bandwidth for video (but probably great fixed latency)
fun fact: i looked at starting up an isdn based isp in the 90s. isdn calls were charged by the minute back then, which wasn't great for that purpose... but if you set up a centrex (the phone company's managed cloud pbx as a service), then you could make intercom calls for free between stations... so, the isp would have been a business with each customer site as a branch office. :)
Isn’t the biggest contributor the discrete transition from circuit-switched copper to packet-switched data? You imply some sort of gradual erosion..
But anyhow yea, kids today will never know the special intimacy yielded by the low latency of a circuit-switched landline call.
What? The calls where the network saves bandwidth by dropping audible frequencies from each party's voice, so everyone sounds bizarre over the telephone?
That's not the kind of thing I associate with "audio quality".
If your device has wifi capabilities, you suddenly gained wonderful features: like for example your smart TV using your neighbour's Amazon echo (or whatever the latest evil scheme is these days) to report your viewing habits to advertizers.
I've got WiFi for my "fun" computer: a Mac M1 laptop for the couch. For my serious computer (a high end Linux desktop machine with a gigantic screen) it's ethernet.
The other transformative thing for me was moving to fibre to the home. The fibre to the cabinet in the area suffered massive contention issues (didn't matter who your provider was because they all used the same cabinets). In the old days when the copper cabinets reached capacity they would stop taking new subscribers, but in recent years they've just been wiring more and more people in and hoping not too many people would use it at once. Which of course they did when the working from home and home schooling started 2 years ago, leading to everyone in the area having multiple sometimes multi-hour internet outages a day, which was a complete nightmare. The recently-installed fibre to the home removes the contention issues, so when combined with the HomePlug/Powerline wired connections where-ever possible, everything has been rock solid. Only mentioning the fibre to the home as an example of where new technology does actually make things significantly better rather than worse.
Fibre to the home, on the other hand ... super amazing. Rock solid 1Gb full duplex (and for busy torrents I actually hit 120Mb/s!) ... but it's all about the latency: I have (according to mtr) <85ms with StdDev<1 from home in .NL to OVH in .QC.CA.
I also installed a mesh wifi network, but installed one that would do the backhaul to the router over ethernet (and powerline) rather than via an extra wifi channel.
I've asked people to try a network cable and they are baffled by my words.
edit: at the very least if no cable connection is possible use 2.4GHz since it goes through walls better.
What is true is that the 2.4GHz band can get a bit crowded, because every one of those standalone houses has multiple overpowered APs, plus other devices using (or interfering with) that band. On 5GHz, with more channels and less range, it's not so bad. With modern gear that can do MIMO and automatically select the least crowded channel, plus a wired backhaul between router/APs, those issues disappear entirely. It has been months since I or any other member of my family has noticed any issues at all with our wifi network, never any related to neighbors' activity, and we're in a completely typical part of town. You just have to use something other than the POS that Verizon/Comcast provides.
(In case anyone's wondering: Netgear Orbi, one for every ~1000sf, all connections via Ethernet except for one that's G.hn powerline. Before that I had Synology MR2200s on a wireless backhaul, very occasional bad moments, and then one fried itself.)
I’m so tired of trying to convince friends to get a mesh Wi-Fi network. Guys, it’s 2022: get a Wi-Fi device per room (or one per two rooms) and be happy with your gigabit bulletproof Wi-Fi network.
It’s expensive? Yeah. No pain no gain.
Why? 2,4Ghz networks are from an era where Wi-Fi networks were rare and thus you had no interference.
Today, you are surrounded by (literally) hundreds of networks and your tiny packages need to fight for airtime on those 11 channels.
The only viable solution is 5Ghz Wi-Fi (not to be confounded with 5G mobile network). It comes with much more channels and it doesn’t traverse walls so well (it’s a good thing, because your neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal won’t interfere in yours). So you need at most a wall between you device and the wifi router.
So, nowadays the solution is: several routers on the house, interconnected via a wireless link (not regular Wi-Fi) in a mesh network.
You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.
My neighbor has mesh WiFi. Correction - my neighbor THREE HOUSES OVER has mesh WiFi. How do I know this? Because his multiple access points show up in a scan with ridiculous output power, at nearly the same power as the AP in my own house. WiFi packet captures show these things are enormously chatty, constantly occupying the channels with management traffic to perform their mesh thing.
You want to live out in the country with no one around you for half a mile? Have at it. You live in a dense neighborhood with many APs where channel selection is limited? Fuck anyone and everyone that uses mesh WiFi in this situation. Literally everyone around you suffers so you can have your "very very low latency and super reliability". It's like lighting up a cigar in a crowded train car with no regard for anyone around you.
There is no such limited channel selection in 5Ghz. In 2.4 sure, but 5ghz surely not, with over a hundred channels and poor material penetration.
Meshed 5Ghz is neighbour friendly, not the other way around. Is a saner way of doing wireless network in crowded environments.
Some equipaments even use proprietary protocols and licensed radiobands for the trunk traffic, thus alleviating even more the 5Ghz range.
On which planet do you reside in which this is remotely true?
Many devices (clients and APs alike) do not properly implement DFS. Which leaves the number of usable channels around a dozen or so. And that's in 20 MHz mode. In his quest for more speed, my neighbor runs his network in 40 MHz or 80 MHz mode (can't remember which) which cuts the amount of usable channels in half / quarters. So the rest of the neighborhood deals with interference while he binges 4K Netflix with his Y-fronts around his ankles on the toilet.
The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole, but in my case I'm regularly seeing ~500Mbps both ways and very consistent latency with no sudden spikes.
Most wireless problems are due to there being a single AP that's barely within reach causing tons of retransmissions which makes any real-time application (such as calls) unusable. It doesn't help that Wi-Fi signal strength meters are completely useless (maybe they should measure actual packet loss instead of RSSI which is only part of the picture) so end-users are unable to tell what's actually going on.
Having APs always within line of sight of the client device solves all these problems.
Certainly not. At home right now I'm getting 566Mbs, but my personal router is 2x2. At work, I get consistently 1.2gigabit on imac.
I’ve played realtime games over it, and haven’t had too much issues, so I guess it’s working well enough for my use case.
It’s possible the actual speed is higher though, and the occasional bursts of nothing are still there (the link to my home is 2Gbit).
They certainly aren't, but most routers can run in AP mode and cost way less than a dedicated AP. One AP per room is pretty overkill, if you do that, you definitely want to turn the transmit power down to help clients roam.
this is the way.
Or you can plug a cable in your notebook and be happy.
Would you mind sharing what equipment you use?
While I now have wired connectivity to my access points, I have friends who don't have that option and would greatly benefit from better wifi. I would love to help them.
2000s? You'd expect better fact checking from the WSJ. I take it the author is young enough for all of this stuff to just blend into an amorphous chunk of history corresponding vaguely to "what my parents mean when they speak of the olden days".
The timeframe where Ethernet ascended to displace other modes of networking was mostly the 90s, though its history dates back to much earlier time periods.
The only thing that's peculiar about the early 00s is that this marks the time period when PCs had already squarely displaced mainframes in business contexts and also found their way into private homes and WiFi hadn't yet broken into the mass market. (Wikipedia tells me the WiFi alliance was founded in late 1997, but I don't personally remember anyone using it until the early 00s).
So, maybe in an "oral history" sense a reference to the early 00s seems justifiable as that may be what one's personal associations are. But, then again, that's the exact thing I'm poking fun at when I say "amorphous chunk of history" corresponding to the "olden days".
Dr. Ozimek knew, in his heart, that no one he wanted to talk to was ringing. And yet.
“That’s how we were raised. You run to answer the phone,” he says. “It’s like if someone walks up to you and says hello and you were to just stare them in the face and not respond.”
After a few months of nonstop ringing, he gave up and unplugged it.
Dr. Ozimek has evidently completely forgotten the other part of a wired telephone: the answering machine. It's like voice mail except it's in a little box next to your phone that plays the message as it's being recorded, and automatically stops if you pick up the phone.
Which did lead to messages like "Hello? Hello, Peggy? I know you're there. Pick up the phone. Pick up pick up pick up... Okay, I guess you're out. Um, I got your thing, call me when you get back and we'll talk about pickup times. Monday and Thursday evening next week are probably good for me."