I would appreciate an opinion from someone with internal network wireless voice and data experience

[eculp]

Hi, Rainer.

Quoting Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de>:

>
> Am 12.05.2008 um 17:39 schrieb eculp:
>
>>
>
> [...wireless office...]
>
>>
>> I'm asking this because this is the first time I have seen anyone  
>> trying to do a 100% wireless office and the idea is cool but only  
>> if it works;)
>
>
> Indeed. I'm no expert in wireless stuff either, but I know a couple  
> of things for sure:
>  - it's a shared medium. Like original ethernet. So, bandwidth is  
> limited, unlike in a switched ethernet, where it depends mostly on  
> the backplane-bandwidth of the switch

That is the base of the problem.

>  - whatever you do with your APs/Repeaters - they all share the same  
> spectrum (shared medium, see above)
>
> Who sold them on this "wireless everything stuff"?
> I hope it wasn't you ;-)

No just the opposite, they asked my opinion because of the difficulty  
and cost of wiring the antique building and I told them - NO - in no  
uncertain terms.  The contractor and his technical sub-contractor sold  
them a dream.  Dreams are soooo much easier to sell than reality;)   
Plus I told them that if they did it to be sure that the contract  
contain basically a satisfaction guaranteed or money back clause and  
they were romanced out of that also.


>> More general information:
>>
>> The individual workstations will be running freebsd or maybe one of  
>> the pc versions.  I haven't tried them.  Initially there will be  
>> about 25 of them so they could be used as repeaters, I guess.
>>
>> The reason for the type of construction and the disregard for FCC  
>> on output is that I'm not in the US.
>>
>> The telephone equipment is linksys SPA941 that I don't find in  
>> there page anymore.  Maybe it was discontinued for technical  
>> reasons.  Haven't checked that yet.
>>
>> If this doesn't work the solution is to wire all that is not that  
>> easy or inexpensive now the the remodeling is completed.

> Indeed.
> But wireless is not meant to shuffle around big amounts of data. At  
> least, last time I looked. Maybe it has changed with Draft-N - but  
> there are no drivers (yet) for Draft-N in FreeBSD anyway, and it's  
> still a shared-medium.
> Back when we had 10BaseT, files were also much smaller, nobody was  
> sending around 20 MB PPT presentations and downloading a DVD ISO in  
> 3 hours would have been an out-of-body experience.

Rainer, thanks again for your common sense look at the problem.  Since  
I am basically forcing them to wire at probably double the original  
cost, I, like your mentioning, "the last time I looked", want to be  
sure that I'm not missing something that has changed.

ed