Wired wireless network



  • I don't know what is the "state of the art" way of connecting people to the internet around the world, but in France, the fight of ISP is set at a quite high level.

    The trendy way of getting internet seems to be having an ADSL box providing not only internet access but ADSL-TV, VoIP.... Now every ADSL box is not only DSL modem but router too. A router with 1 ethernet port (It's your problem to get a switch), 1 USB port (a major WTF... since people are asking for 5m and over USB cable ;)) ) and.... a WiFi access point (if you pay an additionnal fee to get the WiFi aerial to plug on router).

     Every ISP is making ads with "wireless is more practical", "no cables" and "you can connect every home computer without making any hole in walls, nor hanging any disgracious cable through the house". But no one is explaining that WiFi is slowest than wired ethernet, and every one suposes that WiFi is always working with the theorical bandwith of 54Mbps.

     I've seen a lot of benchmarks on independants website that explained how much bandwith you can hope, what are the test conditions... I've seen an ADSL/ethernet/WiFi box at my parent's giving more than 95% bandwidth in the whole house, though it is in a metal locker at the 1st floor. I've seen another combined DSL/ethernet/WiFi is giving up to 60% at the 1st floor of the house, and more than 90% on the ground floor. I can see internet connection of my neightbours form my flat, and I can get 75% of their WiFi bandwidth. So I have an idea of the mean bdanwidth you can get.

    But I've never seen before as bad connection as told in the paranoïdest tech article about WiFi ; last week-end, I saw a box from the bigest French ISP (Historical monopolistic telecom operator) giving only a 87% signal at 0.5 meter from the source. In the nearby stairs : 75%. On the first floor, nearby the stairs : 60% (it was only 2.5meters from the access point through the ground mortar). In the room above the DSL box's room : 25~30% if the PC aerial was above 10cm from the ground. The only device that catched more than 80% of the signal was my PSP, when laid dwon on the ground, exactly upright the DSL box location.

    The Sunday tech support finished with plugin a 3m USB cable from a PC to the naerby stairs. The USB dongle was hanging between 1st and ground floor, 2meters from the acces point through air.... to get a poor 80%. But it was so great now comparing to last situation....
    So : 2 meters of wireless + 3 meters of wired, against 5meters of fully wired...
     

    Radio-interference ? Yes, but I don't know what it is since I'm a not IT techie but only a bigest-french-telecom-operator's customer that had not been noticed about that... Since no ISP is telling you about this problem that can cast you backward in the early 90's when modem didn't exceed 14000bds, it is a big commercial WTF. No ISP let you try WiFi one week or one moth for free.

    So WTF ?
     



  • Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.



  • [quote user="un.sined"]Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.
    [/quote]

    You're assuming that France has both ? :D




  • Problem with WiFi in densely populated areas...

    There's only provision in WiFi for the full-bandwidth overlap of 3 APs, at the most. And that's with optimal channel allocation and spacing (and that requires coordination). But most people leave their AP at the default (channel 6), so everyone is fighting for the exact same bandwidth, and there is a lot of interference. And not like RF interference, but protocol-level wait for clear channel/retry type interference. Like being on a busy hub ethernet subnet instead of a fully switched network.



  • [quote user="un.sined"]Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.
    [/quote]

    FYI, in france, in major cities, 24Mbps (burst) DSL is the norm, down to 8Mbps (still burst) the further you go from the DSLAM. 100Mbps (burst) is also available in the biggest cities, and is spreading. Some areas of Paris are wired for speeds in the order of several Gbps (pretty stupid, your network card becomes the bottleneck here... but they -France Telecom in this case- are doing it anyway). So in near future (few years) 54Mbps wi-fi will not be enough.



  • [quote user="Reweave"]

    [quote user="un.sined"]Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.
    [/quote]

    FYI, in france, in major cities, 24Mbps (burst) DSL is the norm, down to 8Mbps (still burst) the further you go from the DSLAM. 100Mbps (burst) is also available in the biggest cities, and is spreading. Some areas of Paris are wired for speeds in the order of several Gbps (pretty stupid, your network card becomes the bottleneck here... but they -France Telecom in this case- are doing it anyway). So in near future (few years) 54Mbps wi-fi will not be enough.

    [/quote]

     

    The OP did specifically say 5m (I suppose it could be meters, but it didn't make sense to me in context).  Either way I'd like to have faster Cable or DSL here in Seattle...
     



  • [quote user="un.sined"][quote user="Reweave"]

    [quote user="un.sined"]Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.
    [/quote]

    FYI, in france, in major cities, 24Mbps (burst) DSL is the norm, down to 8Mbps (still burst) the further you go from the DSLAM. 100Mbps (burst) is also available in the biggest cities, and is spreading. Some areas of Paris are wired for speeds in the order of several Gbps (pretty stupid, your network card becomes the bottleneck here... but they -France Telecom in this case- are doing it anyway). So in near future (few years) 54Mbps wi-fi will not be enough.

    [/quote]

     

    The OP did specifically say 5m (I suppose it could be meters, but it didn't make sense to me in context).  Either way I'd like to have faster Cable or DSL here in Seattle...
     

    [/quote]

    [quote user="Kilwch"] 

    [...] 1 USB port (a major WTF... since people are asking for 5m and over USB cable ;)) ) [...]

    [/quote] 

    I think he means that sometimes you find people looking for usb cables that are over 5 meters long, because they want to use the modem USB connectivity feature instead of ethernet (small wtf #1). There are also people insisting on using wi-fi to connect their one and only PC to the modem... which is sitting atop said PC, or within a 1-2 meters range (small wtf #2).
     



  • [quote user="Reweave"][quote user="un.sined"][quote user="Reweave"]

    [quote user="un.sined"]Wireless (802.11b/g) is still faster than your 5mb DSL.
    [/quote]

    FYI, in france, in major cities, 24Mbps (burst) DSL is the norm, down to 8Mbps (still burst) the further you go from the DSLAM. 100Mbps (burst) is also available in the biggest cities, and is spreading. Some areas of Paris are wired for speeds in the order of several Gbps (pretty stupid, your network card becomes the bottleneck here... but they -France Telecom in this case- are doing it anyway). So in near future (few years) 54Mbps wi-fi will not be enough.

    [/quote]

     

    The OP did specifically say 5m (I suppose it could be meters, but it didn't make sense to me in context).  Either way I'd like to have faster Cable or DSL here in Seattle...
     

    [/quote]

    [quote user="Kilwch"] 

    [...] 1 USB port (a major WTF... since people are asking for 5m and over USB cable ;)) ) [...]

    [/quote] 

    I think he means that sometimes you find people looking for usb cables that are over 5 meters long, because they want to use the modem USB connectivity feature instead of ethernet (small wtf #1). There are also people insisting on using wi-fi to connect their one and only PC to the modem... which is sitting atop said PC, or within a 1-2 meters range (small wtf #2).
     

    [/quote]

    OK, you win. :)  I guess that's what I get for living in a country where we're taught to think in feet (thinking meters didn't actually come about until I'd re-read it several hours later, after the 3rd cup of coffee).

    Well, and I thought about the speed of USB, and remembered that it was actually quite a bit faster than 5mb.

    Regardless, I use wi-fi at home to connect all three of my PC's to the router that I've got.  Cable only comes into the house at one place, and it's not where we want our PC's.  Of course, we get a total of maybe 8mb at home.

     



  • I'm still of the opinion that real Men and Women use cables to network their computers.  Wi-Fi has always been sub-par and flaky for me. It's quite annoying when you're doing something network-intensive and your OS' networking stack drops out from under you because someone turned on their hair dryer.


     



  • I agree, I've always thought that using Wi-Fi to network desktop computers is silly. WiFi is great for laptops and other mobile devices though. I hardly ever connect a ethernet cable to my laptop, but I'd never even consider connecting a WiFi card to my desktop (or server for that matter).

    The other issue with WiFi is reliability... we use access points with WDS to connect a couple buildings together because there are no cables between them. While it usually works and is quite cheap, unless you have the access points really close together or use external antennas, it degrades badly every now and then. Either someone manages to move the access points or the weather kills the connection. As a result you have a packet loss of something on the order of 19/20 and your inbox fills up completely with nagios emails (I got ~309 last night).



  • [quote user="Reweave"]

    FYI, in france, in major cities, 24Mbps (burst) DSL is the norm, down to 8Mbps (still burst) the further you go from the DSLAM.

    [/quote]

     Note that 24Mbps is not burst but ATM : it is the terminal ISP bandwidth (DSLAM ATM bandwidth). But 24Mbps ATM is meaning 20Mbps on DSL line between DSLAM and customer building.

    [quote user="Reweave"]
    100Mbps (burst) is also available in the biggest cities, and is spreading. Some areas of Paris are wired for speeds in the order of several Gbps (pretty stupid, your network card becomes the bottleneck here... but they -France Telecom in this case- are doing it anyway). So in near future (few years) 54Mbps wi-fi will not be enough.
    [/quote]

    100Mbps ?? Where ? I leave 25km from Paris and only heard about 2 ISPs setting up optical fiber to building, but only inside Paris, and only some quarters (for beta testing). In my city, ADSL is 512kbps (I'am 4km far from my DSLAM grrr...)

    I know Coreans are connected with 10 to 100Mbps, this this the advantage of a recent network.

     I remmeber a story : a old friend reported me that in the 90's, as the French historical ISP was installing the first 56kbps lines, some geeks bought 128kbps modem from USA and burned operators terminals with a to high frequency. I don't know if it relly burned, but the telecom operator was experiencing major faillures on terminals linked to customers having those 128kbps modems.
    But now, thos days are past and internet access is secure : a lots of DSL/WiFi boxes from this ISP are set up with WEP or nothing by default. Crack the WEP key with a WiFi monitor, use the acess point as internet gateway and you have a free internet access ; go to ISP's homepage and you'll see "you have emails"  : click on the link to see the victim's emails..... Yes, this ISP consider that every HTTP conection from its domain is surely from the guy who ordered the inetrnet access.....
     

     



  • [quote user="Benanov"]

    I'm still of the opinion that real Men and Women use cables to network their computers.  Wi-Fi has always been sub-par and flaky for me. It's quite annoying when you're doing something network-intensive and your OS' networking stack drops out from under you because someone turned on their hair dryer.

    [/quote]

    More like your microwave; guess where in the RF spectrum it runs



  • [quote user="Kilwch"] I remmeber a story : a old friend reported me that in the 90's, as the French historical ISP was installing the first 56kbps lines, some geeks bought 128kbps modem from USA and burned operators terminals with a to high frequency. I don't know if it relly burned, but the telecom operator was experiencing major faillures on terminals linked to customers having those 128kbps modems 
    [/quote]


    That's got to be an urban legend.  Modems in the USA are restricted to 56kbps, and will always negotiate down if they can't connect at a high speed.  The only way to get 128kbps over a phone line is via ISDN or DSL.


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