Why is arstechnica so cynical about specifically big tech?
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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There's plenty in Big Tech to be cynical about, whether you work for them or not. Ars can get away with it.
I know, but arstechnica could also write other kinds of articles.
Check out the Reuters article they are referencing, titled: "Google's newest office has AI designers toiling in a Wi-Fi desert". Now that's cynical, and mean.
Why the hell is a professional tech business not relying almost-exclusively in ethernet, anyway?
Because WiFi speeds have increased to the point where they rival wired connections, and most people use laptops which make wireless more convenient.
Wired nowadays only makes sense if you need to move massive amounts of data, want to use PoE, ...or are in a high interference area. Kind of ironic they'd design a building that makes it the latter.
Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.
Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.
Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.
If you're giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.
Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.
They mostly don't even give out desktops to devs these days, everything is in the cloud.
Do they not give out laptops with an Ethernet port? Or is the extra 2lbs too much?
At least in my faang office, there's essentially zero ports to plug into. If you have a desktop, there's a port, but that's the exception. I've never seen anyone plug a laptop in.
Because if you walk to a meeting room with your laptop, you don’t want to plug it in every time.
Also phones and tablets are a thing.
Why didn't they send an email to their facilities? How are we supposed to care?
At launch, Google's VP of Real Estate & Workplace Services, David Radcliffe, said the site "marks the first time we developed one of our own major campuses, and the process gave us the chance to rethink the very idea of an office." The result is a wild tent-like structure with a striking roofline made up of swooping square sections.
In other words, they erected themselves a circus tent. Ironic.
Hilarious in a way...
Of course Google would have problems with the very foundation of a technology needed for business when choosing to design the building themselves.
Like, they couldn't consult with a professional.
Seems very... on brand for Google now.
I kept reading it as Daniel Radcliffe and I was like why the HECK is he working there?
This doesn’t sound like a serious problem for a company like Google. They can afford to solve it by brute force — just put a Wi-Fi hotspot in every single room.
Which is also what you want really, if you have everything on WiFi. High density setups with really small cells so you can reuse channels. A building with high signal attenuation helps with that.
Having said that I'd never want to work for a company like Google.
PS:
Bad radio propagation means Googlers are making do with Ethernet cables, phone hotspots.
"Making do with Ethernet cables"? For me that's still the most reliable and secure way of doing networking on computers. You're at a desk, why not have a cable there. For mobile devices, sure. At my work every docking station has a cabled connection luckily.
But if they spend millions on WiFi hotspots then how they can pay the dividends to the shareholders? If you listen to them the company is barely profitable and more cuts are needed
That would be problematic on many levels.
This is a very common approach, as a meshnet, of course.
Not really. Radios can be tuned if you're talking about interference.
why is that?
Radio interference and roaming are the primary concerns. There's only so many channels that Wi-Fi can run on, and they will clash if there's too many APs near the same band. You also have to ensure that each device is configured to disconnect from a weak signal and connect to a stronger one when moving from room to room, which realistically doesn't work flawlessly. You want to instead have a few powerful access points in each wing or whatever needs dictate.
You can reduce transmit power and enable meshing and roaming in conjunction.
I'm not even sure that would be a bad solution for us. Can something like a Raspberry Pi work as a hotspot?
I wonder what exactly it is that's messing with the signal.
Any computer with a network port and a wifi adapter can be turned into a wifi access point.
But there are cheaper and better alternatives than a raspberry pi
That's probably true. Any examples off the top of your head? (I obviously haven't had to deal with this recently)
For mass distribution of wifi APs? Some SDN solution would have a higher upfront cost but a lower running cost. Im sure all the big providers have their own system, consumer ones include ubiquiti and omada.
Cheaper than that would be mikrotik. Not really deployable at the scale of 1000s that would be required to fit every room with a wifi AP, but CAPsMAN can scale to hundreds, so still has centralised management to reduce running costs.
If it has to be cheaper still, then any cheapo SBC with wifi. While raspberry pis might fit the bill, they would be too overpowered with too many unused features to really squeeze the cost effectiveness.
Hey, its google. They could probably fork an AP into one of their home automation thingies.
Then probably a whole stack of ansible scripts to try and manage 1000s of deployed linux installs
Okay, so I wasn't quite as far off as I thought, then. Thanks.
My house was built in 1967. It's a solid house. The walls are plaster and they have chicken wire in them. WiFi is a nightmare. I ended up running a few hard lines and using a mesh system.
Same here, but the house is a few decades younger, has brick walls and thick reinforced concrete floors. Early WiFi was rough, let me tell ya. At one point, I improvised a directional WiFi antenna out of Styrofoam and precisely cut wires, which actually worked. I tried three generations of DLAN after that, all of which were horribly unreliable and had nowhere near the advertised performance. I'm now moderately happy with a meshnet, which is so reliable that I forgot how to log into it to configure it.
All this tells me is that ancient Chinese evil spirits were made of wifi.
I would think the metal parts of roof might be reflecting signals all around the building, which would cause interference between devices. (there is a limited number of WiFi channels), it might work better with a plastic roof, or one with RF absorbers.
Is this going to be the first building on KilledByGoogle.com?
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