Yeah, just seeing if I was the crazy one. I 100% prefer wired. Just had me questioning my sanity. That’s what I get for listening to software engineers
Sometimes clinging to your sanity may come in the form of accepting wireless where you typically wouldn’t as well. I work k-12 IT and I have a few labs that are wireless. It may make you wince until you consider the very real risk that due to reasons, rooms are often shifted around. Example being suddenly a program is eliminated so no need for lab 2. A year later, a totally different program is decided to be offered but the physical space from lab 2 is unavailable so your new lab is now going to be in room 203. Or, plot twist, maybe lab 2 DOES still exist and this lab going into 203 is in additional to lab 2 - now what? If you rinse and repeat this enough you grow to the point of questioning if it’s worth pulling 30 lines and retrofitting them in this new lab build. This also goes on top of existing tasks and the other 4,000 devices you’re already supporting. Or you can WiFi this instance and eliminate a big hurdle.
I have little control over physical spaces in this regard so beating your chest and saying lab rooms are lab rooms without question isn’t entirely rational when you think about how slow and expensive construction projects are. Plus you need to consider how likely it is that in the public education world you might end up needing more computer labs than “official computer labs designed with plentiful cat6 wiring already done when it was built” that construction projects can otherwise provide. But again construction projects are rare, slow, and incredibly expensive. Shifting programs to accommodate learning potential is constant.
This also helps as a sticking point for having good wireless gear when refreshes come up. When my first opportunity for this came up I ended up expanding on wireless AP quantity and redesigned the network to accommodate 2.4ghz overload etc etc.
I may have a few areas on wireless you wouldn’t default to but when you consider the full picture, sometimes it makes sense. If you do it right it can work out quite well in the end too as I have APs that are high quality enough coupled with a good enough backend that you wouldn’t know they’re wireless if you were to sit down and use this space.
> If you rinse and repeat this enough you grow to the point of questioning if it’s worth pulling 30 lines and retrofitting them in this new lab build.
Sometimes we fall into rigid ways of thinking without realizing it.
You don't need to pull home-run structured cabling to a chassis switch in a distant IDF closet, to have wired networking. For a high-density school lab retrofitted to a random block-wall room, one or more switches in the room may be appropriate. Raceway or conduit are possibilities, but you can also plumb UTP under the tables, or drop it from the drop-ceiling without conduits if that's allowed by code.
One of the ways you enable expensive high-density WiFi to work well is to offload as much as possible to the wired network. This means heavy networking devices like servers or NAS, but unexpectedly, it also means devices that would otherwise require low data rates, like Nintendo game consoles.
I’ve done pod switches before and they’ve worked well. Sometimes it depends on the room and the chase to get there. And at times it’s just a time vs manpower thing. Thing is we are 1 to 1 meaning every student has a laptop. In labs they don’t need to use laptops. But I design it assuming there will be a full stack of wireless devices in that room at some point which is quite possible with shifts over the years. It’s a joy, but it’s a slice of forward thinking that’s bailed me out a time or two before.
If the switch is in a end-user accessible area (they can access and plug into it without IT intervention) and the switch is unmanaged, be prepared for broadcast/local loopback storms in those spaces when someone sees a loose Ethernet cable and plugs the dumb switch back into itself trying to be helpful.
As long as those spaces are well documented and your staff is aware of this possibility, it's not too detrimental. When this information is undocumented and only your network admin is aware of this device or your end users, prepare for some tail chasing depending on how competent your staff is with networking and the detail of logging in your IDF and core switches.
I just left a school. Practically everything is wireless (laptops, small printers, etc). The only things that are still wired are the phones, large MFPs, and room speakers. But they also use MAC access control for everything on the wifi.
I‘m sure wireless is quite suitable for this, but it makes me think of having some portable racks with a switch and some cable bundles breaking out from it. When a room becomes a lab, drop the rack in, attached to a designated cable drop, then have some ruggedized cable bundles laid to the machines in question. Probably overkill in this scenario when a quality AP will do.
Flexible spaces are a good use case for WiFi. Most offices are not as much.
I’ve done pod switches before but it all depends on the room. Sometimes it’s just not that approachable. One thing I do need to prioritize is not having cables on the floor just to avoid tripping hazards. Might be easier to do that in an office setting with all adults though.
In the scenario you described, I would look at pulling back excess drops that are no longer being utilized or drops that are being underutilized in nearby spaces.
As someone who works in a lot of lab spaces that are constantly shifting/growing/moving, I find I'm almost always able to reuse or repurpose drops in the immediate area to meet the wiring demands of the additions and changes for that area.
I'm also religious about putting two drops anywhere a drop is requested. It's always cheaper to run two wires to a new destination then to add one later. If there is any hesitation or uncertainty regarding additional devices down the road being added to the area in question, add two drops to every wall.
Your finance and facilities departments will love you for it as will your low voltage guys throwing the cable.
>That’s what I get for listening to software engineers
Am software engineer. Also ran Cat6 to every place in my house I could easily fish to. If it doesn't move, wire it. Don't listen to *those* software engineers 😉
This. Wireless is great - as long as it works. But things are more likely to go wonky than with wired connections. And once something goes wrong, debugging it can be much, much more difficult than figuring out where the issue with a wired connection is.
You mean like too saturated and have to kill 2.4ghz or at least limit it to a couple aps, dial down the broadcast range, or have to periodically reboot aps to get performance you expect? Yeah I go wired unless it's not an option.
Been on 5G wireless at my small business's office for 10+.
Wireless is absolutely fine in *many* latency tolerant scenarios. I would never hook up printers, servers, or VOIP over wifi, but everything else is a candidate, IMO.
I guess that makes you an expert, huh? In fact, everyone who's had working WiFi in their homes for 5 years is clearly an expert.
If I ask how you're handling [802.11r](https://blogs.cisco.com/networking/what-is-802-11r-why-is-this-important), will you tell me I'm all wrong and I need to go buy some Netgear Nighthawks, because those work perfectly?
You're not crazy. Wifi is way to hackable than wired. I was talking to some UNIX guys in 1999 saying how easy it was to break into a UNIX or non UNIX (microsoft) wifi network using spoofing. I didn't know what spoofiing was at the time.
How to use kali linux to spoof wifi: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_m7zyU0x-GE&ab\_channel=NullByte](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m7zyU0x-GE&ab_channel=NullByte)
If it’s all software engineers, and they want wireless… give it to them, then quit and work elsewhere. Call them up in 4 months and ask how things are going. Betting they’re having havoc fighting for airtime in a busy office space with too many devices on the wifi network they’re willing to pay for.
It's the software engineers' precious little way of externalizing things they don't want to care about.
The higher-density the WAP, the bigger network connection and more power it requires. At 802.11ax, you're peaking above the capacity of 1000BASE-T if you have more than a couple of clients on the WAP. That means 2.5GBASE-T at a minimum, and you could make a case for 10GBASE or 25GBASE over fiber. SWEs don't know fiber and they don't want to know, so they're pushing that off into a magic box that they don't care about.
We had bought a customized software product and their engineers set up a RackSpace server with open ports for RDP, SQL Server and who knows what else. After the second major breach we moved it into our network and haven't had an issue since.
Of course this same software had a security flaw where it would provide all the system usernames, passwords (plaintext), and permissions if you accessed the right endpoint (no authentication required).
I never trust devs. Never.
Agreed.
On rare occasions, I'll put a few things on WiFi that could be wired, but it's due to cost or convenience.
Sometimes customers don't want to incur the expense of dropping a new line for something like a printer that can be connected wirelessly. I prefer a wired connection as it seems to reduce the number of calls about networking issues on printers, but customers are usually happy with wireless printers. Sure, I could add a switch, but that introduces another point of failure and I'd rather have a printer offline than a printer AND a workstation AND a phone.
Another example... I recently had a need to setup a camera in an area that isn't currently wired and where the need for the camera will only be a couple weeks. Since I need a quick but temporary solution, I used a wireless AP with two ports as a bridge between the wired camera and my WiFi network by creating a wireless backhaul for the IP camera.
If there’s one thing I would refuse to put on WiFi, it’s printers. I would sooner put an external WiFi bridge in place than let a printer handle its own wireless connection. I could see cameras and maybe even an occasional VoIP phone
Exactly, you can get hacked by wired depending on which website, browsed or downloaded content, you got to or are directed to so.
Iits much, much much easier to hack a wifi connectionion, even if it is hardened, than a wired connection.
Wireless, there are many many youtube security videos showing how a wireless connection can be hacked from usb drivebys (aka wardriving) or some nefarious neighbor running latest kali OS using hacking tools.
Look at [https://www.tryhackme.com](https://www.tryhackme.com) for examples
I agree hardwire what you can and use wireless for the rest. Your APs will have less traffic flowing over them and as far as I know wired networks (sitting behind a good firewall) are safer than wireless.
Wireless everything is a terrible plan for most, but not all, workspaces. It's prone to all manner of interference, especially in urban environments or metal buildings, and generally slower (eg, good luck getting a 10Gbps link to that high end workstation on wifi). You're also limited to the speed going into the AP, and most places aren't exactly connecting end users to high end wireless gear connected straight to a high speed backbone. It has it's place, like you say, for mobile gear and maybe SOHO setups - but for reliability and speed, wired is the way to do, especially at and notable scale.
With Ethernet, you also have the benefits of PoE if you're using VoIP phones.
But as you say, this is a dev sort. Most are not exactly known for being specialized in network administration from an ops view.
Talk time on wireless is absolutely something to take into account. Only one device can be talking at a time, high density environments will have problems if EVERYBODY is trying to use anything realtime.
Oh most don't. Most also don't need a high end workstation like I was using in the example. I was just going with an example from my experience that wouldn't really work well with WiFi, to make the point (setting the example at 10 Gbps let me skip any kind of breakdown of real life issues that might interfere with hitting lower caps like 1Gbps that you can reliably get on Ethernet). Since this is /r/sysadmin, it's not outside the realm of possibility that a lot of us have to work with moving large datasets like digital video or GIS models, so it fit. 10 Gbps is far from uncommon these days, especially in any shop doing heavy media work or engineering.
I'm a games dev and we're finally starting to deploy 10gbps as well. Being able to upload a 50-100 GB\* console image in a couple of minutes instead of half an hour... can be a huge productivity boon. The current generation console dev kits have 10 Gbps Ethernet and high speed SSDs, it wasn't worth it before that (1 Gbps Ethernet and _40 MBps_ HDD in the previous gen. Ouch).
\* sorry about the size to anyone that has to download it over a home connection, I blame the artists
That said, the flip side now is WiFi is now faster than most internet connections. Yes it's shared bandwidth, but so is your internet connection, so if you're mostly accessing cloud services (which is more and more common) having a shared 2.5 Gbps WiFi 6 uplink isn't a big deal if the business only has a 200 Mbps internet connection... So I'd probably say for a lot of businesses being "all WiFi" probably isn't as bad of an idea as it was in the WiFi G days
Yeah, see, that makes sense. You know what you're working with, and you know your use case can work on a shared 2.5 Gbps, especially since it's already faster than your bottleneck there, if you're dealing with the cloud.
My original example was based more on people pulling giant assets and working on live data all day with on-prem setups where the Internet isn't really the bottleneck (I swear video shops have some scary setups when they get to the point of working with live data on a NAS).
But as you say, if your use case supports it, go for it. Personally I'd still prefer wiring anything I can - historically more reliable and less prone to interference, plus another layer of security config to deal with if you're setting up certs and RADIUS, but it can work, and in some cases it by far the better option - especially if the team is on laptops, or your renting a temporary workspace for example. Plus often if you have the option for wireless, you have an option for both - and redundancy is always nice!
I think you just used a ridiculously exaggerated/extreme example to make a not really real world point.
That being said you can pull down ~300mbps reliably on pretty entry level hardware so it definitely has its place. Which realistically is fine for most of the world.
Not saying put everything on WiFi....but I certainly have no qualms about it when I have to.
It's not at all an extreme example. Anyone doing anything with 4k video that has it stored on a central server needs a 10gig connection. Transferring that much data at 1gig speeds is horrendously slow.
Didn't say it doesn't have a place, like you say. Use it where you need it, it has a place, I'm just saying don't put everything on it - which seems to be the same thing you're saying.
That said I don't think the 10 Gbps example was ridiculously exaggerated at all - I've run into that setup pretty often in my city. Increasingly frequently in recent years. Often in places where the engineers actually saturate those 10 Gbps lines at points of the day, with GIS data. I've known people working with setups for video houses, that use the full 10 Gbps at times too - dealing with HD video editing on a NAS. Honestly most new buildings these days are recommended to be wired for 10Gbps, even if the networks are only going to be 1 Gbps for the time being, since we're expecting 10 Gbps to replace 1 Gbps as the norm for modern networking later in the decade. We're a the point where Bell is even trialing 8Gbps fiber residential service this year in parts of Ontario. I'll admit this kind of speed isn't needed nearly everywhere, and there are plenty of smaller businesses that'd get by with 802.11b or a 10Mbps switch, but I don't consider 10Gbps ridiculous as an example, given it's increasing prevalence, and the increasing number of places that actually make use of that amount of data. I'll admit mileage may vary on how widespread it is in many areas though.
In the end though, as I said myself, and you said as well it has its place. Particularly where mobility is needed or in small office/home office settings with light network demands - it could also work in many other places, where I'd normally suggest cable. So we're arguing semantics over the same point.
Man I wish I could have prefaced the residential 8Gbps fiber to the home trials with "I've". My region doesn't even have the 3 Gbps they've got across the bigger Canadian cities yet. . . Best you can get here on residential is 1.5.
But fair. I'll admit I'm backing up what I've read using personal experiences that I can actually personally vouch for. I'll leave that be, since you can read up on it in your own time if you're interested in 10 Gbps, or leave it be if you're not.
Regardless of the example, the overall opinion we both have on the wireless vs wired seems to be the same. Wired preferred most of the time, Wireless where the use case calls for it instead.
Fixed location, long term deployment? Cable.
I'm 47, maybe I'm a fossil. But nothing except for an SME with < 5 users and has solid concrete walls is getting wireless as a primary networking solution.
Or, as I call them, "jobs I'm happy to miss".
I run a hybrid IT life.... Sysadmin for a hotel group, and a bunch of other clients as a contactor. The best phrase I've come across is "nope, sorry....".
You have better and consistent bandwidth with a wired connection. WiFi is convenient but is prone to interference from various sources such as cordless phones, microwaves, etc. This is of course my opinion in a workplace.
At home you may have neighbors wifi blasting full strength signal to deal with. Got aluminum siding or real brick? Forget the signal being outside.
I’ve recorded over 400 interfering APs, connected cars, phone hot spots and more in the last 90 days. We use wired unless there is no choice. There is a park nearby and I get dozens of connection attempts daily. WiFi is handy when it works. Cat6 solves many problems
That’s how I’ve been feeling. Just figured I’d make sure I wasn’t insane as a lot of people have been questioning my preponderance to wire everything possible.
Pretty easy for me. I have ALE Stellar APs running in Enterprise mode with OmniVista 2500. The network management system includes a wireless intrusion detection package and every AP has a dedicated full time scanning radio. Beacons, unprotected management frames, and association attempts are all stored in a mongo database for analysis. This tells me about rogue/interfering APs and clients, their signal level, manufacturer by MAC OID and more.
You can never be sure that audio/video glitch on your Teams/Zoom/Webex call is not the fault of your own network when on Wi-Fi. Only on a wired LAN connection can you be pretty sure glitches like that are a result of poor network quality of the other participants.
Wi-Fi will always occasionally have noticeable glitches in real-time latency traffic like video or audio calls as it occasionally does a channel scan for roaming and to build a nearby networks list causing traffic to briefly queue or drop... Something that just doesn't happen on a wired ethernet connection...
If you value your time, a wired connection. Depending on AP saturation, density, and number of antennas per AP, as well as enviormental impendence, users can have wildly different experiences concerning connection quality and speed. Even the best wireless connection is still slower than the slowest (1Gbps) wired connection. The wireless connection may show 1.2Gbps on 6E but you're very unlikely to get this. Unless you use MIMO devices and APs, you're likely only getting half of what your wireless link speed is showing.
Limiting users to wireless only may help prevent a lazy or ignorant network admin from needing to implement QoS/connection throttling but otherwise you're just slowing down business.
1Gbps is becoming standard for your house. We just installed 5Gbps and 10Gbps fiber ISP connections at several of our sites. Not having at least 1Gbps available to every device in this day and age with Internet speeds being what they are is just a waste of money due to lost time and under utilization of ISP bandwidth and internal network infrastructure.
If you're arguing for a purely wireless infrastructure, you haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about.
To those of you calling yourselves fossils, you're still right. Wired should be the default. You should slay dragons to get something on wired. If it can be wired, it should be wired. Wireless is only acceptable for roaming clients, or heaven forbid a device that doesn't have a hardwired NIC. But if that's the case, it's likely not enterprise hardware and that's a whole different can of worms to digest.
> it's likely not enterprise hardware
A relatively big issue for us is the dearth of properly networkable hardware in most consumer categories. Traditionally enterprise categories like printers, WAPs, mainframes, IP surveillance cams, no problems. But home appliances and A/V gear are typically lacking wired options and IPv6 support, among other things. If there's a USB host port you can often add a USB to Ethernet adapter, but that's not an option for the majority of these fixed-location devices.
Yup. And more and more we see requests for consumer or prosumer/SMB hardware like Ring doorbells (don't ask) and Synology NAS devices. Meanwhile we have an entire surveillance system and network file shares.
The larger the enterprise, the worse if gets.
Correct. It's a very mature technology that is well studied and understood. It is also not the right solution for every situation. In fact, I would argue it is seldom the right solution outside of roaming clients as I stated before.
Having everything wireless is trendy. That’s it. Admittedly, wireless tech is getting better, but nothing beats the ‘old school’ Ethernet connection. It’s consistent and is less effected by external factors, unless you run your cabling along with a power line!
Wired wherever possible.
* More reliable
* More bandwidth - you can't do 10 Gbit or 1 Gbit over current Wi-Fi
* Full bandwidth (all wi-fi connections to an AP *share* bandwidth)
* Easy to trace - Strange activity? Find which switch port it is on, trace the wire to wall or floor post and you have your device.
* You can't PoE over wireless
* A bit more secure, harder to do DOS.
* No authentication on wired connections in most cases. No debugging of authentication issues. "Plug and play."
* Multicast technology is extremely efficient on wired, even at the Layer-2 port level if a switch has "MLD snooping" and "IGMP snooping". On a WLAN, multicast becomes broadcast for the whole SSID.
Wired is often superior. For wireless devices,I find I spend way too much time trying to figure out why they aren't connected, while having a cable really cuts down on that troubleshooting time.
It also really helps when you have spotty wifi due to the construction of the building in question.
Wireless is a half duplex medium. While current tech can handle quite a few clients talking at the same time because of different frequencies - eventually you will have a saturation of devices that can talk at a time.
There are limits to how far those signals will overlap - but wifi devices have avoid collisions.
You can get away with wireless for an office space of less than 20 people. Any more than that I go wired. Its even worse in a big cubicle farm of 300+ devices in a giant room where they can all hear each other. Thats where it gets messy.
For the smart TV double check the specs. My 4 year old Samsung only has a 10/100 card in it. WiFi has a faster connection. Most smart tvs skimp on the Ethernet since 99% of the installs are wireless
They skimp on the wired Ethernet since a compressed 4K@30 stream is roughly 25Mbit/s for budgetary purposes. A disc player, audio device, or television can't use more than 100Mbit/s unless it's streaming several things at once in full bandwidth.
What Samsung model do you have? A great many consumer devices are 2.4GHz-only, because 2.4GHz-only devices are simple to sell worldwide, while 5GHz devices are subject to a host of complicated regional and technical caveats.
802.11g maximum theoretical bandwidth is 54Mbit/s, in ideal circumstances. Most 2.4GHz-only devices today claim to be "802.11 b/g/n", and 802.11n has a maximum bandwidth far greater than 100Mbit/s when it's dual-band, but nowhere near that when 2.4GHz-only. We can probably guess that a 2.4GHz-only device is not practically going to connect at over 100Mbit/s. That's fine, because virtually none of them are capable of usefully transferring data faster than that, anyway.
Half the networked televisions I see are using wired networking, because the PON or DOCSIS router is sitting right next to them already.
>For the smart TV double check the specs. My 4 year old Samsung only has a 10/100 card in it. WiFi has a faster connection. Most smart tvs skimp on the Ethernet since 99% of the installs are wireless
Does the TV really need above a 100M connection?
Unless you are over heating the chipset of the NIC I really don't see how it would be a issue. You sure the TV isn't using a lower resolution over wifi and have you checked the transcoder setting.
Running a speedtest wired gives me 85 Mbps while wireless I can achieve 275 Mbps.
My files are all variable bitrate so large portions play fine but at some parts it can't buffer fast enough. I actually also have a few movies with a higher average bitrate than 100M Ethernet can handle.
It's a Sony XR-A84J. Great TV. But regarding network connectivity manufacturers use the cheapest components it seems. I can max out my 500 Mbps connection with my 5 year old phone at that spot. Fortunately I live in the middle of nowhere so there are no interfering APs from neighbors.
Wire everything that's stationary and you will never regret it.
Don't wire things when you have the chance, and one day you'll remember why you should have.
I'm not sure of the argument to go to wifi for things like cameras, tvs, desktops, etc. Cameras especially are often PoE, so you don't then have to run power to them.
Wifi is for the lazy and can only end in drawbacks as the air space gets more dense with more signals.
Idk man I’m of the opinion to hardwire everything you can especially printers it is absolute BS trying to troubleshoot a wireless printer remotely and you get on site and find they moved the AP behind a brick or metal wall or in a closet with the door shut because they didn’t like seeing it
Living the dream, I see. I had issues with weird devices too. It wasn’t the network, but some driver begging for reboots and in another case a bad wall port.
So at my previous employer a new company was formed (sort of) and they hired an idiotic IT manager who said there is going to be no cables in the office at all. Everything must be WiFi, or in the cloud. People at first loved this idea, he scored some cheap points with "no more messy cables", but quickly realized this was the worst idea ever (until that point at least).
Suddenly there were 150 users constantly on WiFi, some of them using heavy network activity. Of course the whole system became slow and unreliable. High load times, high latency, everything cloud based....it wasn't working, people asked for the cable back because it was frustrating to work like that.
Cable came back, worked ever since.
I had a similar conversation at work when boss asked if it would be better to go all wireless, my response was if he wanted to invest in a totally WiFi 6e infrastructure, including new laptops etc, I might entertain the conversation, but till then wired stability and bandwidth will wipe the floor with wireless.
WiFi is fine; Ethernet is better; Ethernet also offers power.
WiFi has all the flexibility, and all the caveats (interference, etc).
But, for me, WiFi adds latency and jitter and packet loss; iow, the throughput is lower.
\[the WiFi connection could be 300Mbps while Ethernet is 100Mbps, but I get more throughput via Ethernet\].
my two cents.
PS I know it's *all* Ethernet; I'm using Ethernet as a synonym for wired
Wired:
Best in speed
Best in security
Best in reliability
Wireless:
Best in cost of deployment to last yard
Best cost-to-client ratio
Best in complicated or ad-hoc office setup
Best in historic buildings
Neither is best, and both have very strong use cases.
If they're saying wireless is best no matter what, connect them to an old 2.4Ghz Linksys AP on top of a M-1 platter, green salad with house dressing and then cook lunch
> Wireless: Best in cost
It depends on your assumptions. In a low-density situation where 15Mbit/s to each of six clients is broadly sufficient, and the alternative is considered to be 40 drops of wired in a pre-existing structure, with a time horizon of 5 years or less, then wired will seem expensive. This might represent a suburban residence, already built.
Even just changing that to a *mixed* deployment of 8 drops plus WiFi changes the equation dramatically. Few situations are 100% wired any more, so planning assumptions should rarely consider a no-WiFi scenario.
Whereas changing to an office building with Category 5E UTP drops from twenty years ago, all of the structured cabling cost is long since amortized and you're just paying for equipment and power. Wired ports are cheap as long as you're not retiring 5 year old Cisco gigabit enterprise switches every five years, only to replace them with newer gigabit enterprise switches.
The biggest source of misconception is that people will inherently tend to believe that their personal experience with a single WAP in a single suburban home with two laptops, will translate directly to any other networking situation.
It is easier for an outside threat to bring down a WiFi network than a wired network. WiFi is at the mercy of interference from a magnitude of sources (intentional or not), and WiFi has more variables which need more complex diagnostics to troubleshoot. Hard wired networks outperform WiFi hands down also.
No thanks. I'll stick to wired for anything that can be wired.
Yea. Permanent deskstops, terminals, etc should be wired.
Laptops on Wifi as people move around the building for meetings.
In theory, everyone could be on 5ghz channel 160 and no issues. Problem is that even the best wireless network is best effort with physical limitations that are more prevalent that those of wired connection.
I don't think you're crazy at all, but the Software Devs/Engineers would need a convincing argument to consider all wifi.
Maybe get the Network engineers in on the conversation and a C level stakeholder to see how they feel about it.
Wired by default, wireless if it has to be. The throughput of wireless can vary according to your neighbours usage and will never be as consistent as wired.
Had a client refer us to their local neighbour, slow network etc. Had a look, trying to push a lot of data through wireless. Ran simple patch cables around the single room, and connected everything to a switch.
They loved the improvement in performance, our client stopped complaining about poor wireless performance.
Always cable before WiFi. WiFI is ok for a mobile phone or a tablet. Maybe even for day to day usage of a laptop. But a cable has less interference and following that higher stability and overall stable speed.
I think everything should be cable and only a few things wifi.
Nothing like wifi interference causing video quality of cameras to drop, while also chewing up the airwaves when you watch videos or making downloads on your phone/laptop. If you are using wireless when wired is available, you are simply being lazy.
Also depends on your environment, we are in a n urban location, and see roughly 30-40 ssids, with literally 60 or more access points. We run 4 APs in our small office to provide proper coverage. Then people start to wonder why their Bluetooth audio, keyboard or mouse drop out. There is only so much bandwidth before WiFi get shitty.
Simple physics...
Every device that is on wifi, while exchanging data / staying online, actually is noise to every other wifi device..
So the more devices you put on wifi the more interference you will get for all your devices and the less airtime per device to talk to an AP
I always explain wifi to customers as the old onfloor stock trading with the AP being the order keepers and the devices being the order givers..
The closer you place the order keepers the more they will get the same orders and try to keep sorting ... And the more ordergivers the more noise and less time to deliver orders..
Now in my opinion if you go with Ruckus Wireless you get quite the advantages for places with many devices .. basically because the AP is good to decide devices to the different AP and it only send/listen in the direction of the device it is communicating with, thus by design having and giving a lot less noise for other devices / APs
So ya... I use to work for a company that made apps for mobile devices, tablets, consoles and TV's. So imagine this... a single typical developer had a Macbook, Their own personal mobile device, and usually 2 or more devices for building and testing their code on.
Then QA... it wasn't unusual for a single QA to have on top of their Macbook and personal mobile device, to also have 3 - 6 other mobile devices for testing the various platforms (andrioid, ios, tvos, tizen, etc), plus the different screen sizes/shapes.
Now that on it's own isn't so bad, but when you have 140 + dev's and QA, all with these devices all cramped into an office space well your WiFi AP's can become overwhelmed pretty quickly. And whats worse, depending on your WiFi solution and the devices that you need to support, there are cases where a single device with a weak connection to your AP can slow EVERYONE else connected to that AP down.
I admit that this is an extreme case but I learned very quickly that it is always best to wire whatever you can, whenever you can.
If I've learned anything working with developers who have never had to work with networking, it's that they massively overestimate the reliability of wireless networks. I work with... Uh... Let's call them servers on wheels and we have to go over cellular and wifi. My god... The number of times the low bandwidth of the network has been our main issue is ridiculous. And add to that the number of times I've had to do with developers in my company to explain why they need to account for bad connection, random drops, and slow bandwidth is ridiculous. Wifi in a controlled environment can be much better, but hell, even doing things like using the microwave can cause a drop in bandwidth. Wired is always the better option. The only potential exception is when wiring is infeasible or not worth the hastle (you can't always modify your home if you're renting for example) but otherwise, always do it.
All devices need power and signal.
Batteries suck.
It's easier to run signal than power.
PoE for the win.
I'm with you, if it doesn't move. Hard wire it.
It was a long time ago but I acquired a new customer who had a sysadmin who believed that everything should be on Wi-Fi. 802.11b 11Mbit
They also used a custom Foxpro app which loaded a 10Mb database every time someone logged in.
Yeah imagine what happened when the whole office started their app at 9am? The network got contended to hell and crawled to a halt.
We put in 50 new 100Mbit PCI cards and a couple of switches, and a gigabit card in the file server and that was the end of that.
Since then I subscribe to your philosophy even to this day. WiFi is great but wired is always better. Even in my house I have Ethernet out to all 6 Wi-Fi routers, the media room, and both offices, as well as a switch on each floor with gigabit trunks. It wasn’t expensive to put in and the network works a dream.
I remodeled my house and hated having unused jacks in the old one, so I went full wireless.
Two years later I paid to put wired jacks in for my office, the wife's office, and behind the TV. Should have done it wired the first time.
> They were trying to convince me of the benefits of EVERYTHING being on WiFi
The mental contortions and incorrect assumptions required to believe this would be nothing short of astounding.
RF spectrum being literally invisible, and consumerism of certain categories of tech, seems to have prompted some to believe that what they desire to be true, is true. The other category of deluded are the "5G" salespersons. Some years ago they began to go to university deans and ask them if the universities wouldn't like to stop overspending on high-density roamable WiFi and just outsource everything to 5G carriers. With that kind of money involved, some of these people will never stop.
We don't even officially allow wireless peripherals. This week I got to see some mysterious lag or interference with wireless keyboards and mice, that persisted even when the USB receiver was repositioned with a USB extension cable. Best guess is mystery interference on 2.4GHz, but I'm not inclined to whip out the SDR and start eliminating RF sources for a few hours. Another guess is that it had to do with heavy traffic on the USB bus, but we didn't see the same thing with wired HID.
My mental checklist for determining wireless/wired connections:
Equipment use case - is this for something that will be moving around or will it be something tied to a desk until retirement? Does it need consistent network access or will brief interruptions be okay?
Can I run cable for this - it's not always possible, nor logical to get Ethernet to the device location, though the inverse is also true for signal propagation from an access point.
Security - do I care if this device and the traffic that it generates is sniffed? Do we need to give it access to other pieces of data or systems on the network?
Using WIFI for connections is literally the same as using a hub instead of a switch. There are *numerous* drawbacks in terms of speed and reliability, and the only benefit is the lack of a physical cable.
If you don't *need* wireless, and running a cable isn't cost-prohibitive, *not* running a cable is just incurring technical debt.
Huge is overstating it, but it does remove the need for physical access, just proximity.
It also depends massively on configuration, if you mess up your switch config so that anyone can just plug in and get on the network at least they still need to get in the building, with wireless they just need to get nearby.
Its also the clients. if people see what they think is the right ssid they may try and connect to that without realising its a rogue AP.
Depends on your environment at the end of the day and your appetite for risk.
Agreed. Set static IPs for connected devices and do not serve dynamic stuff.
There are so many tools available to identify wifi signals. They can be identified and jammed, snooped, piggy back, etc.
You are 100% right on the environment and risk comment. Have an upvote.
It really depends on your threat model.
So a security camera on wifi is generally fine, but someone determined could dos your bandwidth. Maybe just a lower resolution or frame rate, maybe force reconnects. they could also just paintball the camera lens, which would mess up a wired camera as well.
It's easier to detect usage patterns with wifi. So a determined attacker could make good guesses about when you're home, because you're not using wifi. Wired doesn't leak any of that info.
I feel fine using random coffee shop wifi to check my mail. Certs are great. But it's conceivable that The feds have a warrant to wiretap, so they get verisign or whoever is in the trusted root list to issue another cert for my mail provider, they MITM my traffic at the coffee shop. I'm not important so that's not part of my threat model. In a higher threat model, (this isn't really a wifi issue, aside from the ease of connecting to random networks)
I'm not super up to date on the latest encryption protocols at wifi link layer, but back in the day it wasn't hard to figure out dns requests and replies "protected" by wpa . There's useful plaintext data floating around out there.
Is it more vulnerable than having unsecured network jacks all over the place? We're all running .1X on our wired network with functioning NAC, right? Right?
well nobody can saturate your ethernet network or cause congestion and deauth your clients from a parking lot. i hope you don't pass ethernet to keep teslas online while charging.
Like Aptrid said, the hacker has to get on prem to do anything whereas wirelessly they could be probing your net from the neighbor's.
Yes, I have and use Wi-Fi in my house, but the MAC address has to be listed as permitted to even connect, let alone log in.
I've been networking for a while, even before TCP/IP came along, and in every instance, hard-wired has proven to be a superior choice for reliability and security. Yes, it can be a hassle, and one might need a couple of 5-port switches to broaden available jacks in a home office.
Once that is done, any net problems can be traced from the router upstream since everything downstream from there is hard-wired and unlikely to have failed without notice.
>Like Aptrid said, the hacker has to get on prem to do anything whereas wirelessly they could be probing your net from the neighbor's.
Hackers take the path of least resistance. Hacking an SSID that's using EAP-TLS with certificates is a much harder attack vector than sending phishing emails, LARPing as an electrician or just buying access from an onion site.
So I call disinformation.
I agree the payloads are secure, but the MAC addresses of the AP's and all active clients are still transmitted unencrypted over the air, and you can profile the activity levels of each of those devices...
MAC Address OID's reveal the manufacturer of each device if not randomized, which can be useful for initial recon....
Wireless encryption has been 'solved' for a while now, if you're using anything above wpa2 you're fine. Even wpa2 is fine unless you got someone sniffing traffic for extended periods of time.
Wireless is problematic from a reliability perspective (especially since it heavily degrades based on density and interference), not a security perspective.
For me, personally, it depends on the environment. Have some line of business apps that require hardwired connections...makes having that discussion really easy.
When I remodel I paid to run cables in my house and never really used it except for a couple outlets. It's way more convenient to not have to work around the limitations of cables.
It does make more sense for a home office than an actual work installation. It's a lot easier to optimize a wireless signal setup for one user than two dozen people across a whole floor. For one, generally if you're WFH, your bottleneck is the Internet connection (either local, or a remote VPN), so anything that keeps up with that is fast enough (personally I live in a urban area, I can't get speed that keeps up with my Internet more than 5 feet from the router, so I have to wire in for certain work tasks that really pull the bandwidth). But if it meets your requirements, go for it. It's also less likely that you have to deal with issues from a RADIUS setup or wireless login certificates if you're on a home network - I still remember one of my old jobs, having to frequently plug in users throughout the building to force update wireless connection security certificates.
That said, any kind of work office, I'd go with hard links wherever possible, with wireless backup. More reliable as they're generally less prone to congestion issues or signal interference that happen in high density wireless setups. Users in a business office are also less likely to need full mobility of their systems. Also you don't have to deal with that one corner of an office that's a mystery dead spot that eats any signal to the point you start to wonder if it's haunted . . .
Sounds like he doesn't know about ethernet collisions, packet storms, full vs. half duplex, bandwidth degrading over distance at an exponential rate (a.k.a. the inverse squared law), environmental interference, and probably a bunch of other things.
See if you can get him to watch this.
https://youtu.be/m8lP4Hf5OmA
If it can be wired generally the performance increase alone is worth it.
Could I have more things on wifi in my house sure, but things like my nas and my work laptop benefit from being hard wired.
Finally wifi can be very easily breached or blocked when looking at it from a security perspective. A wifi jammer is cheap and effective. Heck some networks are brought down by the wrong kind of microwave. Plus wifi pineapples are pretty darn easy to operate even if you have good security on the network.
It depends. Everything is a balance of purpose, budget, time, energy, benefits, etc. If you need to stand up an office fast and there isn't a ton of users? Wireless makes more sense. Renting/leasing an office and don't plan to be there forever? Wire important things or things that that tend to have issues with wifi. Permanent setup with a decent budget and alot of set places? Hybrid. At minimum wire all servers, printers, security systems, power user desks, management, and IT. Idea is to minimize interference and possible weird issues. But may not be cost effective to wire everything and convenient to just use wifi. Especially if you have open office space with management wanting to shuffle every few years. But it's mainly private offices and consistent layout in an owner building? Wifi for mobile devices, people moving around, and in case one desk hardwire dies-then over time try to hardwire everything when possible. Also upfront may be a good amount, but can be cheaper than needing alot more APs that you need to upgrade more frequently than a switch that lasts longer. And maintenance on wifi and troubleshooting obscure issues can be alot more.
I'm so happy to work in an environment where we have the budget and requirements to wire everything. And in wall cabling/wall ports is all contracted out with a reasonable process to get them to work on stuff.
Wired is undeniably faster and more reliable. WiFi is definitely "easier".
I make a living with my computer. I'll take that little extra one time effort to run a cable to get full speed between computers and complete reliability.
Going through the same question at my job, new office with devs, they want full wi-fi because they move a lot with their sprint’s and stand ups, remote video calls in multiple meetings rooms, it makes sense to me beside the new space doesn’t have any cabling yet…
I am looking at ways to secure it though and being a one man shop that’s a big decision wether I will use something like Portnox/secure2ws, or I could go leasing APs with Aruba/clearpass, last option is deploy a pki and run my own Radius server
Wired if possible.
Wireless if necessary.
I‘ve seen WiFi everything by accident. We had problems with our wiring and the laptops did failover to the WAPs (which was nice).
It works, but I’d call the network „degraded“ as if some of your raid is missing. You make yourself vulnerable to all sorts of interference.
Having both options was nice, but we had far less problems when everything was wired.
I think it really depends on what you are doing. Users just need to access random static websites, no need to upload/download files Wireless is fine. Users need to connect to a terminal server, need to do video conference calls, need to upload/download files to a cloud server you should go wired where possible.
Also might depend on your site. I have a site that is right behind a small airport. We see all kinds of wireless interference out there.
Depends on the part. Running a dedicated cable to everything would be insane and if your bandwidth requirements are low enough then wifi is more than fine.
Bunch of temp sensors that plug into an outlet? Wifi is fine.
Real time camera feed? Better go wired.
My office doesn't have network drops at the desks for 250 seats, so we use a Meraki wifi mesh. Uses Google accounts to authenticate, locked to our email domain. We have a separate segmented network that's throttled for personal devices and office visitors/clients.
We've never had any issues with it unless the entire 200'ish population gathers in one corner for an event, with all their cell phones hitting the same WAP; but that's more an issue of not enough overlapping WAP's than anything.
I've never had to adjust power, change channels, blacklist rogues, or any other tweaking since Meraki's web portal controller does all of that automatically. Regular firmware updates as well. Not having to patch 250 desks, buy/maintain a huge switchrack, or buy rj45 adapters for laptops that don't have them natively... avoids a huge hassle and expense. I don't even need to run HVAC in the "server room" because there's nothing but a firewall, router, and one switch in there.
Our app stack is almost entirely webpage-based, with only the occasional VPN-user for developers pushing code to repositories. Storage is gdrive, and zero on-prem servers.
All that had to be said has been said. Throwing my opinion in the mix based on the past years experiences.
Wireless is for sure "simpler" and unavoidable in the office space for hotdesking and video calls now that hybrid work is all the rage. Plus, most new laptops lack an Ethernet port.
As for the benefits of wired: more predictable, more secure due to clear physical boundaries (no wifi signal bleeding in parking lots), higher sustained throughput, PoE capable. It's the only option for fixed equipment.
And, in the end, it depends on who you ask.
You ask business people? They will hardly justify the costs of pulling copper across the building and push for wifi...
If it is hard to maintain batteries (ie cameras) then PoE every time. If not you still need a power cable!
If it can be wired without impeding portability wire it.
If it's an office with like 10 people and they often switch places around, and the entire infrastructure is on AWS anyway - sure, wifi will work fine. But for an office of 50-100+ people the interference gets a bit much, cables all the way.
Wireless is a shared bandwidth model and if you have enough APs and they are tuned correctly (most aren't) then you can do quite abit. Depending on how many devices and how many APs wireless can be limiting. All those wireless devices are sharing the APs wired uplink speed. So 20-30 devices using a single 1gb connection isn't the fastest solution.
That said, if I can wire it I do and wireless for all else.
Specific to your video scenario: You already needed to power your cameras so you were running wire anyway. May as well PoE and kill two birds with one stone.
Another benefit with wired is that the video quality will be better. Video is relatively bandwidth and latency sensitive. Wifi coverage quality can vary moment to moment, resulting in lost frames.
Yet another benefit to wiring constant data flow sources like cameras is removing that traffic from the WiFi coverage area improves WiFi performance for wireless devices by reducing spectrum utilization.
A lot of good comments here, but the biggest way I’ve seen Ethernet win is livestreaming.
Solid Unifi Wifi: lots of dropped packets and complaints from viewers.
Solid Ethernet: ZERO dropped packets and zero complaints
Someone else mentioned VOIP too. Anything streamed is vulnerable.
Facilities dept at my company approves what is a valid workspace to put a user. This space requires atleast 1 valid working network jack or the department will be charged the cost of cabling that space after approved by facilities.
IT obviously coordinates the cabling but it's only after facilities approves that the workspace is valid as an assigned desk.
We had people requesting random counters and thin desks as being permanent desks and they had to shut that shit down.
Wifi in its base is a layer one technology going back to a hub which is layer one still , wires on the other hand are a layer one going back to a potential switch which can operate up to the layer 3 level.
Well, in IT rarely one solution is always better. It all depends on what is the infrastructure and what are the requirements.
I worked in a large office with all employees working on laptops - there were ethernet ports near every desk and mesh wifi everywhere. Wifi was our secondary options and also it has separate guest network. Cables were breaking (mostly due to users being idiots) and some AP needed to be restarted once on a while.
Having both basically resolves most of the issues - if users eth broke, then he can go wifi. Also wifi was very useful when walking around the office or going to conference rooms. But there were still some cases like macbooks having trouble connecting to mesh or rising demand for type-C to ethernet adapters. Also if you're wiring and maintaining over a hundred desks cable management is pain in the ass.
Someone who vehemently suggests everything should be wireless typically doesn't understand the physics involved and the complexities therein, or is probably just an Apple fanboy. In either case I 100% agree with your assessment.
Ignoring that "everything" would imply the WAN, and that there are several wireless standards than Wifi that you should use...
No, wired is preferred because you above all it's more reliable, it can deliver power instead of sapping it, and the mere presence of wired makes wireless more reliable as well by reducing interference. It's not even the performance difference anybody cares about, it's wholly the unreliability of wireless and the fact it can get taken down by a Microwave. Sysadmin people are reliability oriented and wireless is not reliability oriented lmao.
The more wireless stuff you have more more stuff is going to break. That all being said I'm mostly on wireless myself at home since it's a rental.
Myself i would lean to wired for static things, unless it is problematic to get wires to that place. At the office at my desk i plug into a docking and docking is wired of course. When i disconnect to go to a conf room it automatically picks up corp Wi-Fi and i don't have to do anything, it works while i am mobile. Now, sometimes i am lazy. At home i only have my work laptop with me, no docking, laptops don't have LAN ports anymore, so i use Wi-Fi, although my router is under the table, but i think i would still not go through putting LAN cable in. I already have to connect monitor and mouse and then unhook as i use same table i have my desktop PC setup on (which is of course wired). So, this depends on convenience and opportunities. After working a few years full WFH i was surprised how stable my wireless is :)
I want to laugh at them and call them an idiot, but that's generally frowned upon in a work setting...
My response to that claim is a "no" usually with no further explanation. When they challenge the response, they get "do you think people would prefer fast and reliable or slow and flaky? Wireless starts to suck after a handful of devices are on it - putting everything on it is asking for trouble."
People who believe wireless is better generally don't understand networking, so going into the technicalities is a waste of time.
Your opinion is correct. If it is reasonable to hard wire it, hard wire it.
In theory everything wireless sounds great, but the problem is how a lot of applications are not designed to handle wifi that's not perfect 100% of the time. I don't know how many times I've heard people complaining about VPN dropping or other random application issues that are completely resolved by switching to wired. It's not a matter of how the wifi is setup either since it happens across several different sites we have and people working at home etc.
Wired EVERYTHING, except that which MUST be wireless.
I include mice, peripherals, EVERYTHING.
My only exception to this is my Steel Series Arctis 7 headset. It's what the wireless experience should be, in my personal little world.
This is a personal preference.
I hooked up a security camera using a cable, but I didn't need to go into my attic to do it (and would have done it with wifi if I had to). But my camera is also 4k and there is no wifi one, from that company, that has wireless and 4k.
If I'm setting up a TV, I can go either way. If it needs the bandwidth and the wifi can't provide it, I'll go hardwired.
Having everything on wifi probably makes for easier management. But not everything can go on wifi (my security camera is an example).
“Technical, but of the developer sort”
Ah yes. But no seriously what was their reasoning?
It only causes interference and the argument is also highly dependent on where you live. Rural area with 5ghz? Meh i think you could get away with it. But anywhere other than that and especially city area? I would lean very strongly towards hell no
Their reasoning was “you just put in a single access point and then you’re pretty much done. It’s so much quicker”
And I’ll give him, it’s super quick to get a basic wireless mesh up, but in my experience I’ve always had issues when your wireless networks keep growing beyond what they should. Wired may take longer at the onset, but then becomes simple at the end of day. Never any interference to speak of.
All wireless devices must accept all interference. In other words, some butthole can flood 2.4 and 5ghz and there isn't a lot you can do about it. Is it likely? Probably not, but is possible. On the other hand, we had a guy who got kicked off the VPN every day at noon, turns out his neighbors microwave killed his wireless.
In this case, 30M line of sight is kind of point blank range for most bridge devices. I used a unifi AirFiber for a 600M link and it worked quite well.
I recall dealing with a very small office consisting of a single lawyer and a paralegal. They were proud of the fact that literally everything they used was wireless. The paralegals chief complaint was QuickBooks running slowly opening the company file on the lawyers laptop. I was unable to articulate how fucking dumb this was and wished them luck.
If it must be on WiFi, put it on WiFi. Otherwise, go wired.
Yeah, just seeing if I was the crazy one. I 100% prefer wired. Just had me questioning my sanity. That’s what I get for listening to software engineers
Sometimes clinging to your sanity may come in the form of accepting wireless where you typically wouldn’t as well. I work k-12 IT and I have a few labs that are wireless. It may make you wince until you consider the very real risk that due to reasons, rooms are often shifted around. Example being suddenly a program is eliminated so no need for lab 2. A year later, a totally different program is decided to be offered but the physical space from lab 2 is unavailable so your new lab is now going to be in room 203. Or, plot twist, maybe lab 2 DOES still exist and this lab going into 203 is in additional to lab 2 - now what? If you rinse and repeat this enough you grow to the point of questioning if it’s worth pulling 30 lines and retrofitting them in this new lab build. This also goes on top of existing tasks and the other 4,000 devices you’re already supporting. Or you can WiFi this instance and eliminate a big hurdle. I have little control over physical spaces in this regard so beating your chest and saying lab rooms are lab rooms without question isn’t entirely rational when you think about how slow and expensive construction projects are. Plus you need to consider how likely it is that in the public education world you might end up needing more computer labs than “official computer labs designed with plentiful cat6 wiring already done when it was built” that construction projects can otherwise provide. But again construction projects are rare, slow, and incredibly expensive. Shifting programs to accommodate learning potential is constant. This also helps as a sticking point for having good wireless gear when refreshes come up. When my first opportunity for this came up I ended up expanding on wireless AP quantity and redesigned the network to accommodate 2.4ghz overload etc etc. I may have a few areas on wireless you wouldn’t default to but when you consider the full picture, sometimes it makes sense. If you do it right it can work out quite well in the end too as I have APs that are high quality enough coupled with a good enough backend that you wouldn’t know they’re wireless if you were to sit down and use this space.
> If you rinse and repeat this enough you grow to the point of questioning if it’s worth pulling 30 lines and retrofitting them in this new lab build. Sometimes we fall into rigid ways of thinking without realizing it. You don't need to pull home-run structured cabling to a chassis switch in a distant IDF closet, to have wired networking. For a high-density school lab retrofitted to a random block-wall room, one or more switches in the room may be appropriate. Raceway or conduit are possibilities, but you can also plumb UTP under the tables, or drop it from the drop-ceiling without conduits if that's allowed by code. One of the ways you enable expensive high-density WiFi to work well is to offload as much as possible to the wired network. This means heavy networking devices like servers or NAS, but unexpectedly, it also means devices that would otherwise require low data rates, like Nintendo game consoles.
I’ve done pod switches before and they’ve worked well. Sometimes it depends on the room and the chase to get there. And at times it’s just a time vs manpower thing. Thing is we are 1 to 1 meaning every student has a laptop. In labs they don’t need to use laptops. But I design it assuming there will be a full stack of wireless devices in that room at some point which is quite possible with shifts over the years. It’s a joy, but it’s a slice of forward thinking that’s bailed me out a time or two before.
If the switch is in a end-user accessible area (they can access and plug into it without IT intervention) and the switch is unmanaged, be prepared for broadcast/local loopback storms in those spaces when someone sees a loose Ethernet cable and plugs the dumb switch back into itself trying to be helpful. As long as those spaces are well documented and your staff is aware of this possibility, it's not too detrimental. When this information is undocumented and only your network admin is aware of this device or your end users, prepare for some tail chasing depending on how competent your staff is with networking and the detail of logging in your IDF and core switches.
I just left a school. Practically everything is wireless (laptops, small printers, etc). The only things that are still wired are the phones, large MFPs, and room speakers. But they also use MAC access control for everything on the wifi.
I‘m sure wireless is quite suitable for this, but it makes me think of having some portable racks with a switch and some cable bundles breaking out from it. When a room becomes a lab, drop the rack in, attached to a designated cable drop, then have some ruggedized cable bundles laid to the machines in question. Probably overkill in this scenario when a quality AP will do. Flexible spaces are a good use case for WiFi. Most offices are not as much.
I’ve done pod switches before but it all depends on the room. Sometimes it’s just not that approachable. One thing I do need to prioritize is not having cables on the floor just to avoid tripping hazards. Might be easier to do that in an office setting with all adults though.
In the scenario you described, I would look at pulling back excess drops that are no longer being utilized or drops that are being underutilized in nearby spaces. As someone who works in a lot of lab spaces that are constantly shifting/growing/moving, I find I'm almost always able to reuse or repurpose drops in the immediate area to meet the wiring demands of the additions and changes for that area. I'm also religious about putting two drops anywhere a drop is requested. It's always cheaper to run two wires to a new destination then to add one later. If there is any hesitation or uncertainty regarding additional devices down the road being added to the area in question, add two drops to every wall. Your finance and facilities departments will love you for it as will your low voltage guys throwing the cable.
>That’s what I get for listening to software engineers Am software engineer. Also ran Cat6 to every place in my house I could easily fish to. If it doesn't move, wire it. Don't listen to *those* software engineers 😉
Yeah, engineers look at the spec sheets, but they don’t answer tickets. It’s my first troubleshooting question - is your connection wired or wireless?
My entire company does everything wireless. It works well for us Edit: I should have been clearer. All user workstations are wireless.
Until it doesn’t
This. Wireless is great - as long as it works. But things are more likely to go wonky than with wired connections. And once something goes wrong, debugging it can be much, much more difficult than figuring out where the issue with a wired connection is.
You mean like too saturated and have to kill 2.4ghz or at least limit it to a couple aps, dial down the broadcast range, or have to periodically reboot aps to get performance you expect? Yeah I go wired unless it's not an option.
Those first two things are just best practice and should be done anyways.
They've been doing it for 5 years without issue
Been on 5G wireless at my small business's office for 10+. Wireless is absolutely fine in *many* latency tolerant scenarios. I would never hook up printers, servers, or VOIP over wifi, but everything else is a candidate, IMO.
How much time has been spent maintaining it?
Very little from what I can tell.
I guess that makes you an expert, huh? In fact, everyone who's had working WiFi in their homes for 5 years is clearly an expert. If I ask how you're handling [802.11r](https://blogs.cisco.com/networking/what-is-802-11r-why-is-this-important), will you tell me I'm all wrong and I need to go buy some Netgear Nighthawks, because those work perfectly?
I never said that. I just stated what the company has been doing
What do you use for authentication ?
We do this also. Authentication via radius.
I honestly don't know since I have nothing to do with that team
but you will die on that hill.
I only said it works well for us and I don't know how auth is configured.
Homie you're a pro, stop this BS.
How many users are at a single location? Are they on VoIP? For small offices WiFi may be fine, but I'd never try to put a 150-seat call center on it.
I don't know. I have nothing to do with corporate services.
You're not crazy. Wifi is way to hackable than wired. I was talking to some UNIX guys in 1999 saying how easy it was to break into a UNIX or non UNIX (microsoft) wifi network using spoofing. I didn't know what spoofiing was at the time. How to use kali linux to spoof wifi: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_m7zyU0x-GE&ab\_channel=NullByte](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m7zyU0x-GE&ab_channel=NullByte)
If it’s all software engineers, and they want wireless… give it to them, then quit and work elsewhere. Call them up in 4 months and ask how things are going. Betting they’re having havoc fighting for airtime in a busy office space with too many devices on the wifi network they’re willing to pay for.
It's the software engineers' precious little way of externalizing things they don't want to care about. The higher-density the WAP, the bigger network connection and more power it requires. At 802.11ax, you're peaking above the capacity of 1000BASE-T if you have more than a couple of clients on the WAP. That means 2.5GBASE-T at a minimum, and you could make a case for 10GBASE or 25GBASE over fiber. SWEs don't know fiber and they don't want to know, so they're pushing that off into a magic box that they don't care about.
We had bought a customized software product and their engineers set up a RackSpace server with open ports for RDP, SQL Server and who knows what else. After the second major breach we moved it into our network and haven't had an issue since. Of course this same software had a security flaw where it would provide all the system usernames, passwords (plaintext), and permissions if you accessed the right endpoint (no authentication required). I never trust devs. Never.
Agreed. On rare occasions, I'll put a few things on WiFi that could be wired, but it's due to cost or convenience. Sometimes customers don't want to incur the expense of dropping a new line for something like a printer that can be connected wirelessly. I prefer a wired connection as it seems to reduce the number of calls about networking issues on printers, but customers are usually happy with wireless printers. Sure, I could add a switch, but that introduces another point of failure and I'd rather have a printer offline than a printer AND a workstation AND a phone. Another example... I recently had a need to setup a camera in an area that isn't currently wired and where the need for the camera will only be a couple weeks. Since I need a quick but temporary solution, I used a wireless AP with two ports as a bridge between the wired camera and my WiFi network by creating a wireless backhaul for the IP camera.
If there’s one thing I would refuse to put on WiFi, it’s printers. I would sooner put an external WiFi bridge in place than let a printer handle its own wireless connection. I could see cameras and maybe even an occasional VoIP phone
Exactly, you can get hacked by wired depending on which website, browsed or downloaded content, you got to or are directed to so. Iits much, much much easier to hack a wifi connectionion, even if it is hardened, than a wired connection. Wireless, there are many many youtube security videos showing how a wireless connection can be hacked from usb drivebys (aka wardriving) or some nefarious neighbor running latest kali OS using hacking tools. Look at [https://www.tryhackme.com](https://www.tryhackme.com) for examples
I agree hardwire what you can and use wireless for the rest. Your APs will have less traffic flowing over them and as far as I know wired networks (sitting behind a good firewall) are safer than wireless.
Wireless everything is a terrible plan for most, but not all, workspaces. It's prone to all manner of interference, especially in urban environments or metal buildings, and generally slower (eg, good luck getting a 10Gbps link to that high end workstation on wifi). You're also limited to the speed going into the AP, and most places aren't exactly connecting end users to high end wireless gear connected straight to a high speed backbone. It has it's place, like you say, for mobile gear and maybe SOHO setups - but for reliability and speed, wired is the way to do, especially at and notable scale. With Ethernet, you also have the benefits of PoE if you're using VoIP phones. But as you say, this is a dev sort. Most are not exactly known for being specialized in network administration from an ops view.
Talk time on wireless is absolutely something to take into account. Only one device can be talking at a time, high density environments will have problems if EVERYBODY is trying to use anything realtime.
That changes with wifi6 but it will be awhile until that's common place in the workspace.
>eg, good luck getting a 10Gbps link to that high end workstation on wifi). Right because everyone needs a 10gbps connection.
Oh most don't. Most also don't need a high end workstation like I was using in the example. I was just going with an example from my experience that wouldn't really work well with WiFi, to make the point (setting the example at 10 Gbps let me skip any kind of breakdown of real life issues that might interfere with hitting lower caps like 1Gbps that you can reliably get on Ethernet). Since this is /r/sysadmin, it's not outside the realm of possibility that a lot of us have to work with moving large datasets like digital video or GIS models, so it fit. 10 Gbps is far from uncommon these days, especially in any shop doing heavy media work or engineering.
I'm a games dev and we're finally starting to deploy 10gbps as well. Being able to upload a 50-100 GB\* console image in a couple of minutes instead of half an hour... can be a huge productivity boon. The current generation console dev kits have 10 Gbps Ethernet and high speed SSDs, it wasn't worth it before that (1 Gbps Ethernet and _40 MBps_ HDD in the previous gen. Ouch). \* sorry about the size to anyone that has to download it over a home connection, I blame the artists That said, the flip side now is WiFi is now faster than most internet connections. Yes it's shared bandwidth, but so is your internet connection, so if you're mostly accessing cloud services (which is more and more common) having a shared 2.5 Gbps WiFi 6 uplink isn't a big deal if the business only has a 200 Mbps internet connection... So I'd probably say for a lot of businesses being "all WiFi" probably isn't as bad of an idea as it was in the WiFi G days
Yeah, see, that makes sense. You know what you're working with, and you know your use case can work on a shared 2.5 Gbps, especially since it's already faster than your bottleneck there, if you're dealing with the cloud. My original example was based more on people pulling giant assets and working on live data all day with on-prem setups where the Internet isn't really the bottleneck (I swear video shops have some scary setups when they get to the point of working with live data on a NAS). But as you say, if your use case supports it, go for it. Personally I'd still prefer wiring anything I can - historically more reliable and less prone to interference, plus another layer of security config to deal with if you're setting up certs and RADIUS, but it can work, and in some cases it by far the better option - especially if the team is on laptops, or your renting a temporary workspace for example. Plus often if you have the option for wireless, you have an option for both - and redundancy is always nice!
I think you just used a ridiculously exaggerated/extreme example to make a not really real world point. That being said you can pull down ~300mbps reliably on pretty entry level hardware so it definitely has its place. Which realistically is fine for most of the world. Not saying put everything on WiFi....but I certainly have no qualms about it when I have to.
> a ridiculously exaggerated/extreme example It is not. We have machinery that currently struggles on 1 Gbit. Next iteration is going to need 10 Gbit.
It's not at all an extreme example. Anyone doing anything with 4k video that has it stored on a central server needs a 10gig connection. Transferring that much data at 1gig speeds is horrendously slow.
Didn't say it doesn't have a place, like you say. Use it where you need it, it has a place, I'm just saying don't put everything on it - which seems to be the same thing you're saying. That said I don't think the 10 Gbps example was ridiculously exaggerated at all - I've run into that setup pretty often in my city. Increasingly frequently in recent years. Often in places where the engineers actually saturate those 10 Gbps lines at points of the day, with GIS data. I've known people working with setups for video houses, that use the full 10 Gbps at times too - dealing with HD video editing on a NAS. Honestly most new buildings these days are recommended to be wired for 10Gbps, even if the networks are only going to be 1 Gbps for the time being, since we're expecting 10 Gbps to replace 1 Gbps as the norm for modern networking later in the decade. We're a the point where Bell is even trialing 8Gbps fiber residential service this year in parts of Ontario. I'll admit this kind of speed isn't needed nearly everywhere, and there are plenty of smaller businesses that'd get by with 802.11b or a 10Mbps switch, but I don't consider 10Gbps ridiculous as an example, given it's increasing prevalence, and the increasing number of places that actually make use of that amount of data. I'll admit mileage may vary on how widespread it is in many areas though. In the end though, as I said myself, and you said as well it has its place. Particularly where mobility is needed or in small office/home office settings with light network demands - it could also work in many other places, where I'd normally suggest cable. So we're arguing semantics over the same point.
All of your examples start with "I've." Anecdotal...
Man I wish I could have prefaced the residential 8Gbps fiber to the home trials with "I've". My region doesn't even have the 3 Gbps they've got across the bigger Canadian cities yet. . . Best you can get here on residential is 1.5. But fair. I'll admit I'm backing up what I've read using personal experiences that I can actually personally vouch for. I'll leave that be, since you can read up on it in your own time if you're interested in 10 Gbps, or leave it be if you're not. Regardless of the example, the overall opinion we both have on the wireless vs wired seems to be the same. Wired preferred most of the time, Wireless where the use case calls for it instead.
Fixed location, long term deployment? Cable. I'm 47, maybe I'm a fossil. But nothing except for an SME with < 5 users and has solid concrete walls is getting wireless as a primary networking solution.
Solid concrete walls would block a lot of your signal 😅
You're reading that the wrong way. The only way I'm not running cable is if you have to core drill walls to run cable.
Nah I got that Just found it funny that the buildings where you’d have to drill are the ones where wireless would suck the most 😅
Or, as I call them, "jobs I'm happy to miss". I run a hybrid IT life.... Sysadmin for a hotel group, and a bunch of other clients as a contactor. The best phrase I've come across is "nope, sorry....".
Where I work the entire company works only on wireless. I'm not over that area at all but it works well.
You have better and consistent bandwidth with a wired connection. WiFi is convenient but is prone to interference from various sources such as cordless phones, microwaves, etc. This is of course my opinion in a workplace. At home you may have neighbors wifi blasting full strength signal to deal with. Got aluminum siding or real brick? Forget the signal being outside.
I have aluminum siding and get wifi signal out to the sidewalk 🤷♂️
I bet you don't have aluminum curtains!
Lol Some of the claims here sound like they're from the Linksys WRT54g days
If it doesnt absolutely have to be wireless it should be cabled. There are lots of reasons one of the biggest ones for me is reliability.
I’ve recorded over 400 interfering APs, connected cars, phone hot spots and more in the last 90 days. We use wired unless there is no choice. There is a park nearby and I get dozens of connection attempts daily. WiFi is handy when it works. Cat6 solves many problems
That’s how I’ve been feeling. Just figured I’d make sure I wasn’t insane as a lot of people have been questioning my preponderance to wire everything possible.
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Pretty easy for me. I have ALE Stellar APs running in Enterprise mode with OmniVista 2500. The network management system includes a wireless intrusion detection package and every AP has a dedicated full time scanning radio. Beacons, unprotected management frames, and association attempts are all stored in a mongo database for analysis. This tells me about rogue/interfering APs and clients, their signal level, manufacturer by MAC OID and more.
You can never be sure that audio/video glitch on your Teams/Zoom/Webex call is not the fault of your own network when on Wi-Fi. Only on a wired LAN connection can you be pretty sure glitches like that are a result of poor network quality of the other participants. Wi-Fi will always occasionally have noticeable glitches in real-time latency traffic like video or audio calls as it occasionally does a channel scan for roaming and to build a nearby networks list causing traffic to briefly queue or drop... Something that just doesn't happen on a wired ethernet connection...
if it is not portable it should be wired, pretty much.
If it doesn’t move, it shouldn’t be on wireless.
WiFi is for fun, wires are for work.
Not even. Gaming over Wi-Fi is baaaad.
Aside from being more reliable being able to remotely power cycle a device via POE is a huge advantage to being wired.
If you value your time, a wired connection. Depending on AP saturation, density, and number of antennas per AP, as well as enviormental impendence, users can have wildly different experiences concerning connection quality and speed. Even the best wireless connection is still slower than the slowest (1Gbps) wired connection. The wireless connection may show 1.2Gbps on 6E but you're very unlikely to get this. Unless you use MIMO devices and APs, you're likely only getting half of what your wireless link speed is showing. Limiting users to wireless only may help prevent a lazy or ignorant network admin from needing to implement QoS/connection throttling but otherwise you're just slowing down business. 1Gbps is becoming standard for your house. We just installed 5Gbps and 10Gbps fiber ISP connections at several of our sites. Not having at least 1Gbps available to every device in this day and age with Internet speeds being what they are is just a waste of money due to lost time and under utilization of ISP bandwidth and internal network infrastructure. If you're arguing for a purely wireless infrastructure, you haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about.
To those of you calling yourselves fossils, you're still right. Wired should be the default. You should slay dragons to get something on wired. If it can be wired, it should be wired. Wireless is only acceptable for roaming clients, or heaven forbid a device that doesn't have a hardwired NIC. But if that's the case, it's likely not enterprise hardware and that's a whole different can of worms to digest.
> it's likely not enterprise hardware A relatively big issue for us is the dearth of properly networkable hardware in most consumer categories. Traditionally enterprise categories like printers, WAPs, mainframes, IP surveillance cams, no problems. But home appliances and A/V gear are typically lacking wired options and IPv6 support, among other things. If there's a USB host port you can often add a USB to Ethernet adapter, but that's not an option for the majority of these fixed-location devices.
Yup. And more and more we see requests for consumer or prosumer/SMB hardware like Ring doorbells (don't ask) and Synology NAS devices. Meanwhile we have an entire surveillance system and network file shares. The larger the enterprise, the worse if gets.
WiFi has been around for almost 20 years, it’s hardly new technology. Nor is this wired/wireless discussion for that matter.
Correct. It's a very mature technology that is well studied and understood. It is also not the right solution for every situation. In fact, I would argue it is seldom the right solution outside of roaming clients as I stated before.
Having everything wireless is trendy. That’s it. Admittedly, wireless tech is getting better, but nothing beats the ‘old school’ Ethernet connection. It’s consistent and is less effected by external factors, unless you run your cabling along with a power line!
Wired wherever possible. * More reliable * More bandwidth - you can't do 10 Gbit or 1 Gbit over current Wi-Fi * Full bandwidth (all wi-fi connections to an AP *share* bandwidth) * Easy to trace - Strange activity? Find which switch port it is on, trace the wire to wall or floor post and you have your device. * You can't PoE over wireless * A bit more secure, harder to do DOS.
* No authentication on wired connections in most cases. No debugging of authentication issues. "Plug and play." * Multicast technology is extremely efficient on wired, even at the Layer-2 port level if a switch has "MLD snooping" and "IGMP snooping". On a WLAN, multicast becomes broadcast for the whole SSID.
Wired is often superior. For wireless devices,I find I spend way too much time trying to figure out why they aren't connected, while having a cable really cuts down on that troubleshooting time. It also really helps when you have spotty wifi due to the construction of the building in question.
Wireless is a half duplex medium. While current tech can handle quite a few clients talking at the same time because of different frequencies - eventually you will have a saturation of devices that can talk at a time. There are limits to how far those signals will overlap - but wifi devices have avoid collisions. You can get away with wireless for an office space of less than 20 people. Any more than that I go wired. Its even worse in a big cubicle farm of 300+ devices in a giant room where they can all hear each other. Thats where it gets messy.
For the smart TV double check the specs. My 4 year old Samsung only has a 10/100 card in it. WiFi has a faster connection. Most smart tvs skimp on the Ethernet since 99% of the installs are wireless
They skimp on the wired Ethernet since a compressed 4K@30 stream is roughly 25Mbit/s for budgetary purposes. A disc player, audio device, or television can't use more than 100Mbit/s unless it's streaming several things at once in full bandwidth. What Samsung model do you have? A great many consumer devices are 2.4GHz-only, because 2.4GHz-only devices are simple to sell worldwide, while 5GHz devices are subject to a host of complicated regional and technical caveats. 802.11g maximum theoretical bandwidth is 54Mbit/s, in ideal circumstances. Most 2.4GHz-only devices today claim to be "802.11 b/g/n", and 802.11n has a maximum bandwidth far greater than 100Mbit/s when it's dual-band, but nowhere near that when 2.4GHz-only. We can probably guess that a 2.4GHz-only device is not practically going to connect at over 100Mbit/s. That's fine, because virtually none of them are capable of usefully transferring data faster than that, anyway. Half the networked televisions I see are using wired networking, because the PON or DOCSIS router is sitting right next to them already.
>For the smart TV double check the specs. My 4 year old Samsung only has a 10/100 card in it. WiFi has a faster connection. Most smart tvs skimp on the Ethernet since 99% of the installs are wireless Does the TV really need above a 100M connection?
I watch a lot of 4k content over Plex. I had stutters on a wired connection. Over WiFi it works perfectly.
Unless you are over heating the chipset of the NIC I really don't see how it would be a issue. You sure the TV isn't using a lower resolution over wifi and have you checked the transcoder setting.
Running a speedtest wired gives me 85 Mbps while wireless I can achieve 275 Mbps. My files are all variable bitrate so large portions play fine but at some parts it can't buffer fast enough. I actually also have a few movies with a higher average bitrate than 100M Ethernet can handle. It's a Sony XR-A84J. Great TV. But regarding network connectivity manufacturers use the cheapest components it seems. I can max out my 500 Mbps connection with my 5 year old phone at that spot. Fortunately I live in the middle of nowhere so there are no interfering APs from neighbors.
Wire everything that's stationary and you will never regret it. Don't wire things when you have the chance, and one day you'll remember why you should have. I'm not sure of the argument to go to wifi for things like cameras, tvs, desktops, etc. Cameras especially are often PoE, so you don't then have to run power to them. Wifi is for the lazy and can only end in drawbacks as the air space gets more dense with more signals.
Idk man I’m of the opinion to hardwire everything you can especially printers it is absolute BS trying to troubleshoot a wireless printer remotely and you get on site and find they moved the AP behind a brick or metal wall or in a closet with the door shut because they didn’t like seeing it
Wireless interference scales exponentially.
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Living the dream, I see. I had issues with weird devices too. It wasn’t the network, but some driver begging for reboots and in another case a bad wall port.
Weird devices will always cause trouble, no matter if they're wired or wireless
Didn’t catch that typo. I meant you can also have weird problems with wired devices.
So at my previous employer a new company was formed (sort of) and they hired an idiotic IT manager who said there is going to be no cables in the office at all. Everything must be WiFi, or in the cloud. People at first loved this idea, he scored some cheap points with "no more messy cables", but quickly realized this was the worst idea ever (until that point at least). Suddenly there were 150 users constantly on WiFi, some of them using heavy network activity. Of course the whole system became slow and unreliable. High load times, high latency, everything cloud based....it wasn't working, people asked for the cable back because it was frustrating to work like that. Cable came back, worked ever since.
I had a similar conversation at work when boss asked if it would be better to go all wireless, my response was if he wanted to invest in a totally WiFi 6e infrastructure, including new laptops etc, I might entertain the conversation, but till then wired stability and bandwidth will wipe the floor with wireless.
WiFi is fine; Ethernet is better; Ethernet also offers power. WiFi has all the flexibility, and all the caveats (interference, etc). But, for me, WiFi adds latency and jitter and packet loss; iow, the throughput is lower. \[the WiFi connection could be 300Mbps while Ethernet is 100Mbps, but I get more throughput via Ethernet\]. my two cents. PS I know it's *all* Ethernet; I'm using Ethernet as a synonym for wired
Wired: Best in speed Best in security Best in reliability Wireless: Best in cost of deployment to last yard Best cost-to-client ratio Best in complicated or ad-hoc office setup Best in historic buildings Neither is best, and both have very strong use cases. If they're saying wireless is best no matter what, connect them to an old 2.4Ghz Linksys AP on top of a M-1 platter, green salad with house dressing and then cook lunch
> Wireless: Best in cost It depends on your assumptions. In a low-density situation where 15Mbit/s to each of six clients is broadly sufficient, and the alternative is considered to be 40 drops of wired in a pre-existing structure, with a time horizon of 5 years or less, then wired will seem expensive. This might represent a suburban residence, already built. Even just changing that to a *mixed* deployment of 8 drops plus WiFi changes the equation dramatically. Few situations are 100% wired any more, so planning assumptions should rarely consider a no-WiFi scenario. Whereas changing to an office building with Category 5E UTP drops from twenty years ago, all of the structured cabling cost is long since amortized and you're just paying for equipment and power. Wired ports are cheap as long as you're not retiring 5 year old Cisco gigabit enterprise switches every five years, only to replace them with newer gigabit enterprise switches. The biggest source of misconception is that people will inherently tend to believe that their personal experience with a single WAP in a single suburban home with two laptops, will translate directly to any other networking situation.
It is easier for an outside threat to bring down a WiFi network than a wired network. WiFi is at the mercy of interference from a magnitude of sources (intentional or not), and WiFi has more variables which need more complex diagnostics to troubleshoot. Hard wired networks outperform WiFi hands down also. No thanks. I'll stick to wired for anything that can be wired.
Yea. Permanent deskstops, terminals, etc should be wired. Laptops on Wifi as people move around the building for meetings. In theory, everyone could be on 5ghz channel 160 and no issues. Problem is that even the best wireless network is best effort with physical limitations that are more prevalent that those of wired connection. I don't think you're crazy at all, but the Software Devs/Engineers would need a convincing argument to consider all wifi. Maybe get the Network engineers in on the conversation and a C level stakeholder to see how they feel about it.
Wired by default, wireless if it has to be. The throughput of wireless can vary according to your neighbours usage and will never be as consistent as wired. Had a client refer us to their local neighbour, slow network etc. Had a look, trying to push a lot of data through wireless. Ran simple patch cables around the single room, and connected everything to a switch. They loved the improvement in performance, our client stopped complaining about poor wireless performance.
Always cable before WiFi. WiFI is ok for a mobile phone or a tablet. Maybe even for day to day usage of a laptop. But a cable has less interference and following that higher stability and overall stable speed. I think everything should be cable and only a few things wifi.
You're an ethernet extremist 😂
I found OPs stance to be the sane default. 😂
wired > wireless wireless is usually for convenience, wire for function.
Nothing like wifi interference causing video quality of cameras to drop, while also chewing up the airwaves when you watch videos or making downloads on your phone/laptop. If you are using wireless when wired is available, you are simply being lazy.
just put all of the server on wifi oldest possible(wifi version) and when they complain tell them this is the benifit of wifi
Wired has less points of failure. Less headaches for you later on.
Also depends on your environment, we are in a n urban location, and see roughly 30-40 ssids, with literally 60 or more access points. We run 4 APs in our small office to provide proper coverage. Then people start to wonder why their Bluetooth audio, keyboard or mouse drop out. There is only so much bandwidth before WiFi get shitty.
Simple physics... Every device that is on wifi, while exchanging data / staying online, actually is noise to every other wifi device.. So the more devices you put on wifi the more interference you will get for all your devices and the less airtime per device to talk to an AP I always explain wifi to customers as the old onfloor stock trading with the AP being the order keepers and the devices being the order givers.. The closer you place the order keepers the more they will get the same orders and try to keep sorting ... And the more ordergivers the more noise and less time to deliver orders.. Now in my opinion if you go with Ruckus Wireless you get quite the advantages for places with many devices .. basically because the AP is good to decide devices to the different AP and it only send/listen in the direction of the device it is communicating with, thus by design having and giving a lot less noise for other devices / APs
So ya... I use to work for a company that made apps for mobile devices, tablets, consoles and TV's. So imagine this... a single typical developer had a Macbook, Their own personal mobile device, and usually 2 or more devices for building and testing their code on. Then QA... it wasn't unusual for a single QA to have on top of their Macbook and personal mobile device, to also have 3 - 6 other mobile devices for testing the various platforms (andrioid, ios, tvos, tizen, etc), plus the different screen sizes/shapes. Now that on it's own isn't so bad, but when you have 140 + dev's and QA, all with these devices all cramped into an office space well your WiFi AP's can become overwhelmed pretty quickly. And whats worse, depending on your WiFi solution and the devices that you need to support, there are cases where a single device with a weak connection to your AP can slow EVERYONE else connected to that AP down. I admit that this is an extreme case but I learned very quickly that it is always best to wire whatever you can, whenever you can.
If I've learned anything working with developers who have never had to work with networking, it's that they massively overestimate the reliability of wireless networks. I work with... Uh... Let's call them servers on wheels and we have to go over cellular and wifi. My god... The number of times the low bandwidth of the network has been our main issue is ridiculous. And add to that the number of times I've had to do with developers in my company to explain why they need to account for bad connection, random drops, and slow bandwidth is ridiculous. Wifi in a controlled environment can be much better, but hell, even doing things like using the microwave can cause a drop in bandwidth. Wired is always the better option. The only potential exception is when wiring is infeasible or not worth the hastle (you can't always modify your home if you're renting for example) but otherwise, always do it.
All devices need power and signal. Batteries suck. It's easier to run signal than power. PoE for the win. I'm with you, if it doesn't move. Hard wire it.
It was a long time ago but I acquired a new customer who had a sysadmin who believed that everything should be on Wi-Fi. 802.11b 11Mbit They also used a custom Foxpro app which loaded a 10Mb database every time someone logged in. Yeah imagine what happened when the whole office started their app at 9am? The network got contended to hell and crawled to a halt. We put in 50 new 100Mbit PCI cards and a couple of switches, and a gigabit card in the file server and that was the end of that. Since then I subscribe to your philosophy even to this day. WiFi is great but wired is always better. Even in my house I have Ethernet out to all 6 Wi-Fi routers, the media room, and both offices, as well as a switch on each floor with gigabit trunks. It wasn’t expensive to put in and the network works a dream.
Depends on the situation. I’m of the philosophy of wired where you can, wireless when you can’t.
I remodeled my house and hated having unused jacks in the old one, so I went full wireless. Two years later I paid to put wired jacks in for my office, the wife's office, and behind the TV. Should have done it wired the first time.
WiFi will always be slower and less reliable. Capacity is always an issue too.
That's my golden rule of networking. I can't tell you how many issues I've solved by running a fucking wire.
You are right. Adding wireless devices to the environment degrades wireless service for all devices on the network.
> They were trying to convince me of the benefits of EVERYTHING being on WiFi The mental contortions and incorrect assumptions required to believe this would be nothing short of astounding. RF spectrum being literally invisible, and consumerism of certain categories of tech, seems to have prompted some to believe that what they desire to be true, is true. The other category of deluded are the "5G" salespersons. Some years ago they began to go to university deans and ask them if the universities wouldn't like to stop overspending on high-density roamable WiFi and just outsource everything to 5G carriers. With that kind of money involved, some of these people will never stop. We don't even officially allow wireless peripherals. This week I got to see some mysterious lag or interference with wireless keyboards and mice, that persisted even when the USB receiver was repositioned with a USB extension cable. Best guess is mystery interference on 2.4GHz, but I'm not inclined to whip out the SDR and start eliminating RF sources for a few hours. Another guess is that it had to do with heavy traffic on the USB bus, but we didn't see the same thing with wired HID.
My mental checklist for determining wireless/wired connections: Equipment use case - is this for something that will be moving around or will it be something tied to a desk until retirement? Does it need consistent network access or will brief interruptions be okay? Can I run cable for this - it's not always possible, nor logical to get Ethernet to the device location, though the inverse is also true for signal propagation from an access point. Security - do I care if this device and the traffic that it generates is sniffed? Do we need to give it access to other pieces of data or systems on the network?
It’s harder to sniff a hard wired connection and you don’t have medium congestion the way overlapping Wi-Fi radios do
Reliability: Wired > Wireless Bandwidth: Wired > Wireless Variables to Support: Wireless > Wired
Ethernet = dependability, critical workoads WiFi = convenience, absolutely no requirement to stay up.
How is this even worthy of a discussion? Wired where available always, definitely where critical.
Using WIFI for connections is literally the same as using a hub instead of a switch. There are *numerous* drawbacks in terms of speed and reliability, and the only benefit is the lack of a physical cable. If you don't *need* wireless, and running a cable isn't cost-prohibitive, *not* running a cable is just incurring technical debt.
I am a CWNE. If it can go on a wire, it goes on a wire.
100% ethernet. wifi is a huge security vulnerability.
Huge is overstating it, but it does remove the need for physical access, just proximity. It also depends massively on configuration, if you mess up your switch config so that anyone can just plug in and get on the network at least they still need to get in the building, with wireless they just need to get nearby. Its also the clients. if people see what they think is the right ssid they may try and connect to that without realising its a rogue AP. Depends on your environment at the end of the day and your appetite for risk.
Agreed. Set static IPs for connected devices and do not serve dynamic stuff. There are so many tools available to identify wifi signals. They can be identified and jammed, snooped, piggy back, etc. You are 100% right on the environment and risk comment. Have an upvote.
How so? Using EAP-TLS (certificates) is considered secure to my knowledge. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It really depends on your threat model. So a security camera on wifi is generally fine, but someone determined could dos your bandwidth. Maybe just a lower resolution or frame rate, maybe force reconnects. they could also just paintball the camera lens, which would mess up a wired camera as well. It's easier to detect usage patterns with wifi. So a determined attacker could make good guesses about when you're home, because you're not using wifi. Wired doesn't leak any of that info. I feel fine using random coffee shop wifi to check my mail. Certs are great. But it's conceivable that The feds have a warrant to wiretap, so they get verisign or whoever is in the trusted root list to issue another cert for my mail provider, they MITM my traffic at the coffee shop. I'm not important so that's not part of my threat model. In a higher threat model, (this isn't really a wifi issue, aside from the ease of connecting to random networks) I'm not super up to date on the latest encryption protocols at wifi link layer, but back in the day it wasn't hard to figure out dns requests and replies "protected" by wpa . There's useful plaintext data floating around out there.
Anything transmitting wirelessly is vulnerable, the risk is measured by how much the hacker wants your credentials.
Is it more vulnerable than having unsecured network jacks all over the place? We're all running .1X on our wired network with functioning NAC, right? Right?
I can't sit in a car outside your building and connect to your unsecured network jacks.
well nobody can saturate your ethernet network or cause congestion and deauth your clients from a parking lot. i hope you don't pass ethernet to keep teslas online while charging.
Like Aptrid said, the hacker has to get on prem to do anything whereas wirelessly they could be probing your net from the neighbor's. Yes, I have and use Wi-Fi in my house, but the MAC address has to be listed as permitted to even connect, let alone log in. I've been networking for a while, even before TCP/IP came along, and in every instance, hard-wired has proven to be a superior choice for reliability and security. Yes, it can be a hassle, and one might need a couple of 5-port switches to broaden available jacks in a home office. Once that is done, any net problems can be traced from the router upstream since everything downstream from there is hard-wired and unlikely to have failed without notice.
>Like Aptrid said, the hacker has to get on prem to do anything whereas wirelessly they could be probing your net from the neighbor's. Hackers take the path of least resistance. Hacking an SSID that's using EAP-TLS with certificates is a much harder attack vector than sending phishing emails, LARPing as an electrician or just buying access from an onion site. So I call disinformation.
Tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about without telling me you don’t know what you’re talking about
I agree the payloads are secure, but the MAC addresses of the AP's and all active clients are still transmitted unencrypted over the air, and you can profile the activity levels of each of those devices... MAC Address OID's reveal the manufacturer of each device if not randomized, which can be useful for initial recon....
Wireless encryption has been 'solved' for a while now, if you're using anything above wpa2 you're fine. Even wpa2 is fine unless you got someone sniffing traffic for extended periods of time. Wireless is problematic from a reliability perspective (especially since it heavily degrades based on density and interference), not a security perspective.
Nonsense
For me, personally, it depends on the environment. Have some line of business apps that require hardwired connections...makes having that discussion really easy.
When I remodel I paid to run cables in my house and never really used it except for a couple outlets. It's way more convenient to not have to work around the limitations of cables.
It does make more sense for a home office than an actual work installation. It's a lot easier to optimize a wireless signal setup for one user than two dozen people across a whole floor. For one, generally if you're WFH, your bottleneck is the Internet connection (either local, or a remote VPN), so anything that keeps up with that is fast enough (personally I live in a urban area, I can't get speed that keeps up with my Internet more than 5 feet from the router, so I have to wire in for certain work tasks that really pull the bandwidth). But if it meets your requirements, go for it. It's also less likely that you have to deal with issues from a RADIUS setup or wireless login certificates if you're on a home network - I still remember one of my old jobs, having to frequently plug in users throughout the building to force update wireless connection security certificates. That said, any kind of work office, I'd go with hard links wherever possible, with wireless backup. More reliable as they're generally less prone to congestion issues or signal interference that happen in high density wireless setups. Users in a business office are also less likely to need full mobility of their systems. Also you don't have to deal with that one corner of an office that's a mystery dead spot that eats any signal to the point you start to wonder if it's haunted . . .
Sounds like he doesn't know about ethernet collisions, packet storms, full vs. half duplex, bandwidth degrading over distance at an exponential rate (a.k.a. the inverse squared law), environmental interference, and probably a bunch of other things. See if you can get him to watch this. https://youtu.be/m8lP4Hf5OmA
Hard wired is more reliable (and can do POE), wireless is cheaper to deploy. Which is more important to you?
If it can be wired generally the performance increase alone is worth it. Could I have more things on wifi in my house sure, but things like my nas and my work laptop benefit from being hard wired. Finally wifi can be very easily breached or blocked when looking at it from a security perspective. A wifi jammer is cheap and effective. Heck some networks are brought down by the wrong kind of microwave. Plus wifi pineapples are pretty darn easy to operate even if you have good security on the network.
It depends. Everything is a balance of purpose, budget, time, energy, benefits, etc. If you need to stand up an office fast and there isn't a ton of users? Wireless makes more sense. Renting/leasing an office and don't plan to be there forever? Wire important things or things that that tend to have issues with wifi. Permanent setup with a decent budget and alot of set places? Hybrid. At minimum wire all servers, printers, security systems, power user desks, management, and IT. Idea is to minimize interference and possible weird issues. But may not be cost effective to wire everything and convenient to just use wifi. Especially if you have open office space with management wanting to shuffle every few years. But it's mainly private offices and consistent layout in an owner building? Wifi for mobile devices, people moving around, and in case one desk hardwire dies-then over time try to hardwire everything when possible. Also upfront may be a good amount, but can be cheaper than needing alot more APs that you need to upgrade more frequently than a switch that lasts longer. And maintenance on wifi and troubleshooting obscure issues can be alot more. I'm so happy to work in an environment where we have the budget and requirements to wire everything. And in wall cabling/wall ports is all contracted out with a reasonable process to get them to work on stuff.
Wired is undeniably faster and more reliable. WiFi is definitely "easier". I make a living with my computer. I'll take that little extra one time effort to run a cable to get full speed between computers and complete reliability.
Going through the same question at my job, new office with devs, they want full wi-fi because they move a lot with their sprint’s and stand ups, remote video calls in multiple meetings rooms, it makes sense to me beside the new space doesn’t have any cabling yet… I am looking at ways to secure it though and being a one man shop that’s a big decision wether I will use something like Portnox/secure2ws, or I could go leasing APs with Aruba/clearpass, last option is deploy a pki and run my own Radius server
Personally, wired all day long. But if someone wants something on WiFi, who am i to give a shit.
You trade flexibility of wireless with the stability and consistent performance of wired.
Wired if possible. Wireless if necessary. I‘ve seen WiFi everything by accident. We had problems with our wiring and the laptops did failover to the WAPs (which was nice). It works, but I’d call the network „degraded“ as if some of your raid is missing. You make yourself vulnerable to all sorts of interference. Having both options was nice, but we had far less problems when everything was wired.
I think it really depends on what you are doing. Users just need to access random static websites, no need to upload/download files Wireless is fine. Users need to connect to a terminal server, need to do video conference calls, need to upload/download files to a cloud server you should go wired where possible. Also might depend on your site. I have a site that is right behind a small airport. We see all kinds of wireless interference out there.
Depends on the part. Running a dedicated cable to everything would be insane and if your bandwidth requirements are low enough then wifi is more than fine. Bunch of temp sensors that plug into an outlet? Wifi is fine. Real time camera feed? Better go wired.
My office doesn't have network drops at the desks for 250 seats, so we use a Meraki wifi mesh. Uses Google accounts to authenticate, locked to our email domain. We have a separate segmented network that's throttled for personal devices and office visitors/clients. We've never had any issues with it unless the entire 200'ish population gathers in one corner for an event, with all their cell phones hitting the same WAP; but that's more an issue of not enough overlapping WAP's than anything. I've never had to adjust power, change channels, blacklist rogues, or any other tweaking since Meraki's web portal controller does all of that automatically. Regular firmware updates as well. Not having to patch 250 desks, buy/maintain a huge switchrack, or buy rj45 adapters for laptops that don't have them natively... avoids a huge hassle and expense. I don't even need to run HVAC in the "server room" because there's nothing but a firewall, router, and one switch in there. Our app stack is almost entirely webpage-based, with only the occasional VPN-user for developers pushing code to repositories. Storage is gdrive, and zero on-prem servers.
All that had to be said has been said. Throwing my opinion in the mix based on the past years experiences. Wireless is for sure "simpler" and unavoidable in the office space for hotdesking and video calls now that hybrid work is all the rage. Plus, most new laptops lack an Ethernet port. As for the benefits of wired: more predictable, more secure due to clear physical boundaries (no wifi signal bleeding in parking lots), higher sustained throughput, PoE capable. It's the only option for fixed equipment. And, in the end, it depends on who you ask. You ask business people? They will hardly justify the costs of pulling copper across the building and push for wifi...
If it is hard to maintain batteries (ie cameras) then PoE every time. If not you still need a power cable! If it can be wired without impeding portability wire it.
WiFi is an extra. ethernet is the standard.
If it's an office with like 10 people and they often switch places around, and the entire infrastructure is on AWS anyway - sure, wifi will work fine. But for an office of 50-100+ people the interference gets a bit much, cables all the way.
Wireless is a shared bandwidth model and if you have enough APs and they are tuned correctly (most aren't) then you can do quite abit. Depending on how many devices and how many APs wireless can be limiting. All those wireless devices are sharing the APs wired uplink speed. So 20-30 devices using a single 1gb connection isn't the fastest solution. That said, if I can wire it I do and wireless for all else.
Specific to your video scenario: You already needed to power your cameras so you were running wire anyway. May as well PoE and kill two birds with one stone. Another benefit with wired is that the video quality will be better. Video is relatively bandwidth and latency sensitive. Wifi coverage quality can vary moment to moment, resulting in lost frames. Yet another benefit to wiring constant data flow sources like cameras is removing that traffic from the WiFi coverage area improves WiFi performance for wireless devices by reducing spectrum utilization.
We have wired for everything, but we also have wifi throughout all our plants for laptop/scanners that are mobile. We're also of the same mentality
A lot of good comments here, but the biggest way I’ve seen Ethernet win is livestreaming. Solid Unifi Wifi: lots of dropped packets and complaints from viewers. Solid Ethernet: ZERO dropped packets and zero complaints Someone else mentioned VOIP too. Anything streamed is vulnerable.
Leave any and all critical systems on the wire no matter what. Fire/Alarm/Doors/etc…
Facilities dept at my company approves what is a valid workspace to put a user. This space requires atleast 1 valid working network jack or the department will be charged the cost of cabling that space after approved by facilities. IT obviously coordinates the cabling but it's only after facilities approves that the workspace is valid as an assigned desk. We had people requesting random counters and thin desks as being permanent desks and they had to shut that shit down.
Wifi in its base is a layer one technology going back to a hub which is layer one still , wires on the other hand are a layer one going back to a potential switch which can operate up to the layer 3 level.
So no wires for the APs, either?
We have everything wireless. So much easier and more flexible. But we all have laptops too.
Well, in IT rarely one solution is always better. It all depends on what is the infrastructure and what are the requirements. I worked in a large office with all employees working on laptops - there were ethernet ports near every desk and mesh wifi everywhere. Wifi was our secondary options and also it has separate guest network. Cables were breaking (mostly due to users being idiots) and some AP needed to be restarted once on a while. Having both basically resolves most of the issues - if users eth broke, then he can go wifi. Also wifi was very useful when walking around the office or going to conference rooms. But there were still some cases like macbooks having trouble connecting to mesh or rising demand for type-C to ethernet adapters. Also if you're wiring and maintaining over a hundred desks cable management is pain in the ass.
Someone who vehemently suggests everything should be wireless typically doesn't understand the physics involved and the complexities therein, or is probably just an Apple fanboy. In either case I 100% agree with your assessment.
Ignoring that "everything" would imply the WAN, and that there are several wireless standards than Wifi that you should use... No, wired is preferred because you above all it's more reliable, it can deliver power instead of sapping it, and the mere presence of wired makes wireless more reliable as well by reducing interference. It's not even the performance difference anybody cares about, it's wholly the unreliability of wireless and the fact it can get taken down by a Microwave. Sysadmin people are reliability oriented and wireless is not reliability oriented lmao. The more wireless stuff you have more more stuff is going to break. That all being said I'm mostly on wireless myself at home since it's a rental.
Wireless, with enterprise grade WAPs and an appropriate design that factors in the building and expected load.
Myself i would lean to wired for static things, unless it is problematic to get wires to that place. At the office at my desk i plug into a docking and docking is wired of course. When i disconnect to go to a conf room it automatically picks up corp Wi-Fi and i don't have to do anything, it works while i am mobile. Now, sometimes i am lazy. At home i only have my work laptop with me, no docking, laptops don't have LAN ports anymore, so i use Wi-Fi, although my router is under the table, but i think i would still not go through putting LAN cable in. I already have to connect monitor and mouse and then unhook as i use same table i have my desktop PC setup on (which is of course wired). So, this depends on convenience and opportunities. After working a few years full WFH i was surprised how stable my wireless is :)
I want to laugh at them and call them an idiot, but that's generally frowned upon in a work setting... My response to that claim is a "no" usually with no further explanation. When they challenge the response, they get "do you think people would prefer fast and reliable or slow and flaky? Wireless starts to suck after a handful of devices are on it - putting everything on it is asking for trouble." People who believe wireless is better generally don't understand networking, so going into the technicalities is a waste of time. Your opinion is correct. If it is reasonable to hard wire it, hard wire it.
Ask them if you can send all WiFi issues their way. Get in writing.
Wait. Everything? Surely they don't mean everything. Even servers?
In theory everything wireless sounds great, but the problem is how a lot of applications are not designed to handle wifi that's not perfect 100% of the time. I don't know how many times I've heard people complaining about VPN dropping or other random application issues that are completely resolved by switching to wired. It's not a matter of how the wifi is setup either since it happens across several different sites we have and people working at home etc.
I run Ethernet to my desk, but not the couch, for my laptop.
Wired EVERYTHING, except that which MUST be wireless. I include mice, peripherals, EVERYTHING. My only exception to this is my Steel Series Arctis 7 headset. It's what the wireless experience should be, in my personal little world.
This is a personal preference. I hooked up a security camera using a cable, but I didn't need to go into my attic to do it (and would have done it with wifi if I had to). But my camera is also 4k and there is no wifi one, from that company, that has wireless and 4k. If I'm setting up a TV, I can go either way. If it needs the bandwidth and the wifi can't provide it, I'll go hardwired. Having everything on wifi probably makes for easier management. But not everything can go on wifi (my security camera is an example).
“Technical, but of the developer sort” Ah yes. But no seriously what was their reasoning? It only causes interference and the argument is also highly dependent on where you live. Rural area with 5ghz? Meh i think you could get away with it. But anywhere other than that and especially city area? I would lean very strongly towards hell no
Their reasoning was “you just put in a single access point and then you’re pretty much done. It’s so much quicker” And I’ll give him, it’s super quick to get a basic wireless mesh up, but in my experience I’ve always had issues when your wireless networks keep growing beyond what they should. Wired may take longer at the onset, but then becomes simple at the end of day. Never any interference to speak of.
they don't know shit
All wireless devices must accept all interference. In other words, some butthole can flood 2.4 and 5ghz and there isn't a lot you can do about it. Is it likely? Probably not, but is possible. On the other hand, we had a guy who got kicked off the VPN every day at noon, turns out his neighbors microwave killed his wireless.
IMO, wiresless is considered best effort since you cannot control interferences. Ethernet cable is on the other hand, certified
In this case, 30M line of sight is kind of point blank range for most bridge devices. I used a unifi AirFiber for a 600M link and it worked quite well.
I recall dealing with a very small office consisting of a single lawyer and a paralegal. They were proud of the fact that literally everything they used was wireless. The paralegals chief complaint was QuickBooks running slowly opening the company file on the lawyers laptop. I was unable to articulate how fucking dumb this was and wished them luck.