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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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