[HN Gopher] Their secret for workplace Zen? Landlines and Ethern...
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Their secret for workplace Zen? Landlines and Ethernet cords
Author : imartin2k
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-03-30 17:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I don't like doing any kind of daily team voice conversation on
| the telephone network. my colleagues globally and those on cell
| phones sound like complete garbage. I'd much prefer something
| like mumble or discord for daily team calls but alas..
| vidanay wrote:
| It's absolutely astounding how far phone call audio quality has
| fallen in the last 30 years. I'd kill to have routine narrow-
| band analog POTS phone calls again.
| gkop wrote:
| > in the last 30 years
|
| Isn't the biggest contributor the discrete transition from
| circuit-switched copper to packet-switched data? You imply
| some sort of gradual erosion..
|
| But anyhow yea, kids today will never know the special
| intimacy yielded by the low latency of a circuit-switched
| landline call.
| vidanay wrote:
| Yeah, for sure it was probably a five-year transition
| period, and crap since then.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe I'm showing my old age, but I never thought of Wi-Fi
| networking or mobile voice as anything other than "toy"
| technologies, unsuitable for SeriousBusiness(tm). Wi-Fi is what
| you use very temporarily at a coffee shop or something when you
| simply _have to_ log in to deal with an emergency while on the
| go. But, for serious daily driver usage, it 's wired all the way.
| First thing I did when I moved into my home was crawl under the
| crawlspace and run two CAT 6 drops to each room.
|
| If I were to be hired by a company and went into their office the
| first day, and they said, "so the corporate Wi-Fi SSID is..."
| well, I'd kind of not take them really seriously as a business. I
| realize with today's much better Wi-Fi and cellular technologies,
| that this is an emotional response and there's no rational facts
| behind the way I feel. Just an artifact of growing up with "wired
| = reliable".
| lizknope wrote:
| The last 3 companies I have worked at over the last 10 years
| all have wired connections in every office / cubicle as well as
| 3 separate WiFi networks.
|
| Wifi 1 is for if you disconnect your laptop from ethernet then
| it automatically connects to the internal corporate WiFi
| network. This is great if you go to a conference room and need
| to access to your remote desktop session in the compute
| cluster.
|
| Wifi 2 is for employees personal devices like mobile phones and
| is outside of the corporate network with no access to
| confidential data
|
| Wifi 3 is for guests and vendors who need network access for a
| demonstration etc.
| cryptoz wrote:
| What a take. So from your perspective, the developing world
| that has largely skipped wired connections for their
| connectivity is all doing 'toy' stuff, not real work? There are
| literally billions of people with Wifi/Cell but no wired
| connection, you're just going to write them off as never having
| what it takes to do SeriousBusiness (tm)?
|
| That you're privileged enough to consider, even emotionally,
| the majority of the world's connections as 'toys' is something
| you should recognize. Way more SeriousBusiness happens on
| Wifi/Cell than I think you expect, and writing off that large
| (and growing) group is honestly ridiculous.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk,
| etc, did/do so much of their work on Wifi/Cell only that it
| seems insane to think that they are just doing 'toy' stuff as
| well.
|
| I was on a plane about 10 years ago working on a global network
| of barometers for weather forecasting research using phones as
| sensors, and the flight attendant told me rudely to 'put away
| my toys now'. I've been upset at this ever since, so I'm sorry
| if this comes off as rude too, but honestly, wtf. I'm working
| on real stuff, nothing to do with 'toys', as are so many
| people.
|
| Belittling the Wifi/Cell revolution is a mistake IMO.
| carlio wrote:
| I'm not sure "I refuse to adapt or change" is a desirable trait
| in a new employee anyway so probably the relationship would be
| mutually suspicious.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise
| APs all over the office with certificate authentication. IME,
| ever since 802.11ac (~2014), wifi has been fast enough to not
| need to be wired in.
| dijit wrote:
| Honestly this reads as painfully naive. Maybe you've never
| worked with radio communications before in which case I
| definitely give you the benefit of the doubt for not knowing
| this:
|
| But wifi (just like other radio tech like 4G) has limited
| capacity, and that capacity is shared across all radio
| systems- this sounds obvious but when you realise how few
| devices can be talking simultaneously you will understand
| what an absolute pain this is.
|
| Most of the huge gains in wifi technology (and 3g-4g) is not
| just making assumptions about what a signal is based on the
| leading and trailing edge of the wave of the transmission:
| mostly it's about collision detection algorithms.
|
| Collision detection, by necessity, adds undeterminable
| latency to your connection, it's literally how it works.
|
| So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using
| wifi: you're going to have a bad time. Worse: that room full
| of people is not _just_ that room full of people. Wifi works
| in 3 dimensions, you'll be competing with your upstairs and
| downstairs neighbours too.
| titzer wrote:
| My workstation doesn't have a WiFi adapter, and I'm glad.
| It's gigabit ethernet plugged straight into the cable modem.
| I'm happy to keep tinkering away, even watching videos and
| such on my laptop, but a big black tower with a keyboard is a
| holy thing that needs a big pipe jacked into the wall, and
| you can't convince me otherwise :)
| [deleted]
| legitster wrote:
| I bought a giant spool of Cat-6 cable and now I run around like
| Johnny Ethernet-seed upgrading my friends' internet.
|
| For most homes, you know exactly where your datahogs are going to
| be - computer desk, smart tv, consoles, etc. People are addicted
| to the convenience of running everything through the air, but an
| hour in a crawlspace and you've got something faster and more
| reliable.
| uneekname wrote:
| An ethernet connection is a must for me. Unless I'm traveling
| somewhere and need to log in on someone else's network, it's a
| pain to deal with wifi's slow speeds and connection issues, even
| in 2022.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| This is probably highly subjective, but I rarely have WiFi
| issues. I think primary driver there is investing in a stable
| home networking equipment.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Based on the anecdote Inread home wifi works great, other
| network APs do not.
| nextos wrote:
| Even with high end networking equipment (at work), I have
| found WiFi introduces a lot of latency which is noticeable
| when e.g. SSHing to other machines.
| ericd wrote:
| I'm in no ways an expert on this, so someone please correct
| me if it's wrong, but one of the things that I learned that
| was surprising was that one client with marginal reception
| can really dominate the airtime with retries, effectively
| DOSing your wifi network. So good coverage is also pretty
| key.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Can you quantify "a lot of latency"? It should be...a few
| microseconds more latency? I have to guess the high end
| networking equipment was configured incorrectly or
| something. I ssh to machines on my network from wired and
| wireless devices and it is impossible to tell what kind of
| network you're on when doing so.
| coward123 wrote:
| I agree with you, but:
|
| -- It took a lot of years to get here.
|
| -- It took expensive equipment to get here.
|
| -- I'm lucky that my house doesn't have a lot of brick or
| steel or some other material that blocks signals
|
| -- I still believe that wired is more secure.
|
| -- When it's wired, I _know_ it 's either working or it's my
| ISPs fault. When it's wireless, I'm left doubting.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/SFhwq
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