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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm showing my old age, but I never thought of Wi-Fi networking or mobile voice as anything other than "toy" technologies, unsuitable for SeriousBusiness™. Wi-Fi is what you use very temporarily at a coffee shop or something when you simply have to log in to deal with an emergency while on the go. But, for serious daily driver usage, it's wired all the way. First thing I did when I moved into my home was crawl under the crawlspace and run two CAT 6 drops to each room.

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".

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I have a friend who is an experienced senior paralegal. (Experienced paralegals are sought after because the best ones often leave the job quickly to go to law school.) She started work at a new boutique law firm founded by prominent litigators. She was to head up the paralegal department within the firm. She quit days later. Key to her decision, she told me, was the fact that their IT plan apparently involved using the building WiFi instead of setting up an internal wired network. She figured that this was such a red flag regarding the firm’s administrative competency that she was going to have a rough time.

There's nothing wrong with wifi per se. It is simply another type of medium - instead of a wire, you use electromagnetic waves to transmit the signal. That's how your mobile phone works and so does your radio and TV (if you have them and don't just use Netflix - you know what I mean here).

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)

I think the person in GP's story objected to the fact that the network connection she was told to use was not even limited internally to that law firm, but was astonishingly just whatever semi-private "building wifi" network happened to exist in the (presumably shared) building. If I were a lawyer and cared about client confidentiality, that would at least give me pause, regardless of whether the physical network was wired or wireless.

"If I were a lawyer"

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!

That’s essentially what Google does. The outside-most network is not a security boundary.

Google doesn't use shared building wifi in their corporate campuses

> 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.

Wi-Fi is surprisingly bad. Sitting less than 10 feet from my access point (802.11ax) with a clear line of sight, my ping to Google.com varies from 7.4 ms to 88.6 ms. SSH-ed into my router, which is connected directly to Comcast fiber, it varies from 5.74 ms to 5.83 ms (less than 90 microseconds jitter).

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 am guessing this point is totally unnecessary based on how overall well-informed your comment was, but in case you weren’t aware, it is frequently helpful to run a wifi analyzer of some sort to figure out which channels are heavily utilized in your area so you can set your router to one with less interference. I used to use the Mac network utility that I think may have been deprecated, but it worked like a charm. I do this for my friends all the time and it dramatically improves their network performance in 90% of cases. The only places I found it was pointless were in the middle of nowhere and my own apartment not too far from MIT’s campus, where I assume I was surrounded by equally (probably much more) knowledgeable nerds so the neighboring networks were surprisingly evenly distributed across the available channels.

Most of the modern APs actually move their channel around, so this helps less!

Thanks, it's appreciated. I'll give it a shot sometime.

Other places where it is useless is when your neighbours move in bringing dodgy out-of-spec 5g and 2.4ghz wireless trash like baby monitors or "Security cams" that smash the entire spectrum.

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.

Problem with unlicensed spectrum is that it becomes tragedy of the commons. Much like SF, anyone is free to loiter and shit on the street, shoot up heroin, other kinds of degeneracy and whatnot.

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 say tragedy of the commons, but IMHO the unlicensed spectrum is by far the most economically productive spectrum allocation ever made.

>wireless landline

You mean a cordless phone?

There's nothing wrong with WiFi technology. The problem is the traffic is passing over someone else's network (the shared building WiFi).

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.

If stuff is being used from a stationary position it should ideally be wired. I’m sympathetic to the notion that wires look cluttered and nobody resents how thick and ungainly Ethernet cables are more than me, but defaulting to WiFi is just a waste of electricity. You get slower, higher latency internet. Especially in crowded settings where there’s a ton of congestion at those radio frequencies.

Nothing wrong with two cans and a line of string, either.

My decade of experience with lawyers is that most of them aren't great with technology. If I had a dollar for every lawyer I knew with an AOL email address I would be writing this sat on the beach.

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.

Technology is definitely not a core competency for most lawyers. With data breaches recently hitting several prominent law firms, however, clients are increasingly scrutinizing their law firms' data security practices.

I recently worked with an architect who was incredulous when I specified structured cabling be added to the plans for the building (a 16,000 sq. ft. building housing 3 separate office suites). The architect assured me it's very uncommon today, in their firm, to see "outdated" technology like wired networking used.

The building is getting structured cabling.

Architects sometimes feel like the Mac users of the engineering world. Maybe it's not fashionable anymore to have headphone jack, but the utility of it is immeasurable and you'll really miss it when you need it.

Architects are just designers that design how the building looks - then engineers need to come and do something from those nice visualisations.

How do they run power to the access points without using "outdated" tech?

The kind of person that considers Ethernet to be "outdated" tech also thinks that a single access point hidden somewhere in a basement is sufficient to cover the entire property, so no need to run Ethernet for PoE either.

I was too shocked to ask. Now that I think about it, though, off-brand mesh APs hanging from wall warts situated on filing cabinets, cube walls, top the the refrigerator in the break room, etc, was probably the "enterprise" strategy they had in mind.

That's something she should make sure comes up in her future job interviews, especially if her firm deals in the tech industry...if I had an attorney with those sorts of concerns I'd feel pretty good about my legal council.

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.

Your confidential agreememnt along with the nuclear codes is attached to this email in a zip file, password is your year of birth.

Password will be sent under separate cover in an email right after this one. LOL.

> I have no idea why pgp is not more common in ...

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.

Having used some of those secure document sharing services, I don't feel very confident in them. They seem more like a checkbox getting ticked off for the sake of offloading some liability. pgp is a real dinosaur and a nightmare to set up, but for sharing legal docs digitally, I can't think of a better tool.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed but getting stakeholders (not only lawyers, but clients, even clients at tech companies) to give up email is an uphill battle: https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/09/insecure-email-fix-it...

> 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.

The last 3 companies I have worked at over the last 10 years all have wired connections in every office / cubicle as well as 3 separate WiFi networks.

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.

What's the difference between 2 and 3?

3 typically requires no password, in the setups like this I've seen. So, bring the VPN.

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.

Or 2 could be a "carrot" to prevent people from connecting their personal devices to 1.

If you implement client machine certs, then only corporate imaged machines can connect to 1 in the first place - wired or wireless. 2 and 3 are a bit same-y from my perspective, but the selling point might be “you get a bigger share of the office pipe than the totally open guest network, and fewer restrictions” for 2.

Wifi 1 is only allowed for corporate issued laptops. We don't even know what the password is.

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.

Wifi is always an external network segment. Maybe run different SSIDs to make the use cases clearer or do some kind of QoS; however there isn't really enough spectrum (at least pre 6e) to worry about that in most places.

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.

I think you are both right and wrong!

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!

"drywall/plasterboard", "skin of bricks"... I wish!

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!

Employees at Facebook and Google use Wi-Fi for their daily work. Maybe there’s a way to run an Ethernet cable to one’s desk, but e.g. my MacBook doesn’t even have an Ethernet port.

Say what you will about ad tech, I think there’s no denying these are “serious” tech companies.

I’ll let my employer know they’re not a serious business.

-written from my wifi connected laptop at Netflix

I think a lot of people don't consider FAANG serious business, profitable yes, but you aren't putting food on tables (other than the shareholders)

I don't know anyone that isn't taking Amazon or Apple seriously now. Lots of people don't take Meta or Alphabet seriously, but still buy or click online advertisements.

I'd say Amazon is the most "serious" of them, but only the import/export side of the business.

Apple basically just sells boutique whitegoods.

If any of these companies ceased to exist, it wouldn't inconvenience anyone other the shareholders.

Well, one could imagine some small inconvenience if Gmail disappeared...

Seems like your definition of "serious business" probably amounts to about 10% of the overall economy at this point? It doesn't seem very relevant or useful.

How does that reflect on the usefulness of the economy

congrats on having the worst hn take of the year

Hard pill to swallow, I know

> you aren't putting food on tables (other than the shareholders)

And the employees.

> I think a lot of people don't consider FAANG serious business

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.

> but e.g. my MacBook doesn’t even have an Ethernet port

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).

That's not my experience.

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.

I ssh into an insane desktop machine, which has a wired connection. Effectively, this is WiFi for the shell commands, and wired for the actual heavy lifting.

When I was at Facebook, they had network to my desk, and it often worked; with 802.1x too (certs automanaged by the corporate spyware). You could get a usb nic out of a vending machine if you had a poorly specified machine that doesn't have an ethernet port. If the vending machine doesn't have a compatible nic, the helpdesk probably would (they did for me, my corporate issued macbook had usb-a and the vending machine only had usb-c nics; I had been using a personal 10/100 usb nic for some time, but needed 1G for something eventually).

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).

I worked at Apple and had a 10GbE fiber optic hub underneath my desk where I was able to pull 6Gbps over the public internet.

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.

I'm kinda with you, though I am more willing to use wifi as an alternative when wiring is impossible or impractical.

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.

I was pretty surprised to learn that my 2021 OLED TV only has a 10/100 ethernet port. Apparently previous models had USB 3.0 ports so you could workaround it by adding a USB gigabit ethernet adapter but in newer models they've reverted back to USB 2.0 ports, for whatever reason.

The same reason they didn't shove in a 1000mbit Ethernet port; it saved them 2 cents a TV across 10 million TVs.

It really bothers me my Brother laser printer only has wifi as a network connection.

Most likely there is an almost identical model having an RJ-45 along with wifi or in place of it, in addition to USB.

I'm not sure "I refuse to adapt or change" is a desirable trait in a new employee anyway so probably the relationship would be mutually suspicious.

To me "I refuse to adapt or change" is one of the most undesirable traits for an employer when some type of innovation needs to be accomplished then deployed.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Naivity doesn't matter when you're there and it works. Repeatedly, reliably.

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 )

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.

> I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi

that's either due to ignorance or negligence

> 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

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.

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.

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 :)

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

> 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.

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

I crawled around my attic and basement and ran cat 6 to a few rooms. I never use it. I've been working from home for years, all on wifi. Never had an issue with it. Wires are just ugly dust collectors and things to trip over.

Because of various renovations in my house, I always had Cat 5 (and speaker wire) run when walls were open. I do used wired connections when convenient but I don’t generally see any difference.

If I want to go "really fast" I use ethernet, but otherwise wi-fi has been more than enough for me in the places I use here.

Here's a speed test I just ran, on my home wi-fi:

https://imgur.com/orc2hkD.png

Ethernet adds on a few hundred extra Mbps but I usually don't need that unless I'm downloading something huge.

A real enterprise WiFi rollout might provision 1 access point for 1-4 people to keep access speeds high, depending on cube or office layout. WiFi shouldn't be expected to penetrate walls well. If you take normal WiFi hardware and try to go with normal household usage patterns it doesn't work great.

I don't think my feelings about it are as extreme as yours, but I agree otherwise. Using WiFi as a primary connection is just asking for a lot of extra crap to troubleshoot for no good reason at best, and giving people unreliable and slow connections at worst.

WiFi in your business is for smart phones/tablets and guests.

You need to get out more. :)

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...

Having Wi-Fi and making it the primary method of accessing a network from your cubicle are two different things.

I'd wager employees at the majority of tech companies today (including those at the scale of Google and Facebook) use Wi-Fi by default for all day-to-day operations. Whether they are "serious" businesses or not is for you to decide.

Like most things, it depends... and you get what you pay for. If you have an enterprise grade or "prosumer" level access point (Ubiquiti, for example), wifi is solid. If you're using a garbage router/wifi combo, like the ones provided by most ISPs, you're definitely going to have issues.

What a take. So from your perspective, the developing world that has largely skipped wired connections for their connectivity is all doing 'toy' stuff, not real work? There are literally billions of people with Wifi/Cell but no wired connection, you're just going to write them off as never having what it takes to do SeriousBusiness (tm)?

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.

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