Time To Cut the Ethernet Cable? 496
coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Re:Ethernet cabling at home (Score:3, Informative)
If I had a laptop, I might want to sit on the couch and compute, but I wonder what the bandwidth difference between wireless and cabled? I've used wireless and it seems zippy, but I've never done any serious downloading with it.
downloading something to or from from another PC on the lan? massive differences.
downloading something to or from the internet? virtually no difference, the internet is the bottleneck.
Re:practical limits? (Score:5, Informative)
And while you can have hundreds of parallel Gbit/sec cables running through the same building, each running at maximum speed, you can not have hundreds of parallel 802.11n-accesspoint each reaching maximum throughput at the same time.
Re:Ethernet cabling at home (Score:3, Informative)
If I had a laptop, I might want to sit on the couch and compute, but I wonder what the bandwidth difference between wireless and cabled? I've used wireless and it seems zippy, but I've never done any serious downloading with it.
In my experience transferring large files over the network, wired transfers at about 10 MB/sec (100 Mbit connection), vs about 2.5-3 MB/sec using the 802.11g wireless connection. My rule of thumb at home is if I'm doing light browsing on my laptop and want to be mobile, I just wifi it. If I need to do some serious data transferring it's wired all the way.
Re:Shared, not Switched (Score:4, Informative)
Not only half duplex, but as you say in your post title (not the text), the resources are shared between all users within a physical area. Aggregate throughput drops quickly as the number of users on a WLAN increases.
If we replaced our copper connections with WLAN at my company, the network would become effectively useless. Too many users.
Another way to think of it is: For a typical user, even a 100Base-T wire to a switch will match even the latest and greatest MIMO high speed implementations (advertised 270-300, but in reality you'll be lucky to see 100 Mbps real world in a single direction).
Once you go above 2-3 users, the switch connections win hands-down.
Add gigabit into the mix (cheap nowadays) and wired wins by an even greater margin.
Re:What a bunch of Drivel.... (Score:3, Informative)
I'll contest the security thing. Disclaimer: I work for a government agency and we're not allowed any wireless access either, for the same reason, but I'm not sure I agree.
Wireless networks automatically have an extra level of protection over wired networks, their authentication. Wired networks do not require authentication just to receive a connection in the same way. So this is a toss up between physical access and security. A wireless connection may be vulnerable to attack from someone on the floor below with a tin of pringles and lax enough sysadmins to not notice someone unusual in, but a wired attack is more vulnerable to someone socially engineering their entrance. Get connected to a port, and it's like you broke the access point already.
Suffice to say, both approaches have distinct vulnerabilities, and I'd not be comfortable to say one is definitely worse than the other. I think the security concerns around wifi are anecdotal, and the policies in place mostly due to the relevant organisations being monolithic and resistant to change.
Re:I can think of a few (Score:5, Informative)
Steps to break a wireless network:
#1 - Pull up to parking lot. ...
#2 - Sniff advertised name of network
#3 - Put up your AP, set name to clone network's name
#4 - Record authentication attempts
#5
#6 - Profit!
Re:Not time yet (Score:3, Informative)
That's a nice sentiment... And I agree.
But I think the main point has to do with networking fundamentals. Wireless is a virtual shared media. All clients on a node share the same amount of bandwidth. 54Mb can start looking pretty slow with ten busy clients.
Modern switched wired networks segregate traffic between nodes, rather than working as a broadcast type network (wireless/thinnet). So you have a massive performance advantage by using wired networks. A quality 24 port 100Mb switch has an theoretical aggregate capacity of 4800Mb assuming all ports are used to capacity in full-duplex mode (And the backplane can handle it), 2400Mb in half duplex mode, where as a 54Mb wireless network only has 54Mb which is split up between every node on the network. The math is a no brainer. Even with real world non theoretical numbers, the performance difference is staggering.
Wired is the only way to go in a production environment with *supplemental* wireless access for roaming and mobile users.
One of the other advantages of cat5/e is it's use of inductive reactance to mitigate EM interference. The gauged twist in the pairs increases signal quality, but also mitigates the collapse of EM fields (mostly from local lightning strikes) and the unbridled voltage they create (which is directed right into your network electronics and connected nodes). Proper grounding aside- it doesn't help if the voltage is already in the circuitry.
Go 100% wireless in your office, and enjoy damage from all those wireless antennas picking up current from a collapsing EM field.
Every spring, we lose a couple of laptops, one or two wireless nodes, and a wireless camera or two. It's always after a storm and it's never the wired equipment.
Re:I can think of a few (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe for some... (Score:5, Informative)
It is a question of series vs. parallel. Any sort of wireless connection is going to be shared by multiple people using it in a serial fashion. This means that Ann can't send while Fred is sending. Period.
OK, if you have Ethernet cables running to both Ann and Fred then they can, absolutely both send at the same time. With switches linked by fiber and where everyone isn't banging on the same server you often acheive parallel communications all the way through the system.
If you are posting on Slashdot or reading email it may not make a big deal. Moving large files around, interacting with some remote graphic intensive application or just doing "office work" with lots of transactions can make this seems like a really silly idea.
Sure, wired connections are expensive to run and they shouldn't be run except for productivity or security. In my company, both of these are considerations and it would be unthinkable to rely on wireless.
Re:I can think of a few (Score:3, Informative)
1. Apparently you don't know why the pairs are twisted.
2. The very little incidental radiation from the signal cannot be reliably read as far away as a Wifi signal can.
Learn a thing or two or stfu.
Re:I can think of a few (Score:4, Informative)
Assuming we're talking a modern encrypted network, #5 is going to be hard to work out. The handshake algorithm is no longer vulnerable to replay attacks, so I'm not sure what you plan on doing with your recorded authentication attempts.
Re:Maybe for some... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What a bunch of Drivel.... (Score:4, Informative)
This is false.
Wireless does not require authentication. It only has authentication if you configure it with WPA/WPA2 and RADIUS. This is called 802.1x or EAP. In fact, you can configure your wired switches with 802.1x and RADIUS and get the same result, no connection without authentication. Just because many places do not use 802.1x on their wired LAN doesn't mean it isn't there.
Also, if the encryption is broken with wireless, I believe you can "listen" to the traffic from the other wireless clients and use that to steal information(I am almost certain this is the case with pre-shared keys, but I am not so sure with WPA/WPA2 RADIUS). With wired, even unencrypted, you can only listen to network traffic that is broadcast or directed to your MAC address. There are attacks where you can convince other computers that you are the router or you can DoS the switch into hub mode, but those attacks can be tricky to pull off and may depend on the network equipment used.
Re:Maybe for some... (Score:4, Informative)
Funner fact: Ethernet was based on the foundations laid by ALOHA, a wireless networking protocol.
Tube from the antenna (Score:5, Informative)
You've just made a serious breech of Slashdot protocol. You shouldn't post AC, when your comment would be modded funny..
Last time I checked, Funny gave no karma, and Overrated took away karma. So if moderators go into a Funny/Overrated mod war over a comment, the poster loses karma rapidly. Such mod wars have brought users from Excellent (posting at 2) down to Terrible (posting at -1) in one day.
On the wireless Internets, there are no tubes, so there are no tubes to get clogged.
The tube from the antenna to the AP that gets clogged more easily than the tubes on a wired switch. But residential Internet service is even easier to clog than the antenna tube.
Re:I can think of a few (Score:2, Informative)
Then he picked the wrong term, but his point still stands. Maybe he should've said that they failed to consider existing physical capital: You've already got the network, discarding the sunk cost means that using it is now free.