Free stuff (UK) again

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Thu Jul 8 15:03:35 2004

On Jul 8, 9:40, Jules Richardson wrote:

> (Interestingly, there seems to be a huge drive toward wireless at the
> moment, and people only find out how slow and unreliable it is when
it's
> too late - all I've heard from real installations so far are horror
> stories and nothing along the lines of "oh yeah, it works fine")

Yeah, we keep getting asked why we're not putting wireless in our
residences, offices, and everywhere else.. The fact is that wired is
cheaper, especially given the steel in many of the buildings, which
limits wireless range. Many people who've tried wireless see 54Mbps
and think it's fine; even if they realise that the true throughput is
limited to about half that, they've usually never seen the graphs that
show what happens when you have multiple clients (for those who don't
know, the total useful bandwidth falls dramatically for every client
you add; the net effect is that bandwidth per client falls off
approximately exponentially). And when we upgraded our Cisco access
points it took us a day or so to realise why the range dropped off --
it turns out Cisco made a small miscalculation, and all our tests done
with the old firmware were using illegally high power levels. Someone
at Cisco hadn't realised the difference between radiated power and EIRP
when you have 2.2dB antennae.

Wireless is great for some types of point-to-point, casual use, a very
small number of users in a small area, or devices that must remain in
contact while moving about. Otherwise it sucks.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Thu Jul 08 2004 - 15:03:35 BST

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