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.
Same here. Demonizing Wi-Fi (like some comments here) is not the answer; instead, understand its limitations and use the best tool for the job. Anything that can be wired (anything stationary basically) should be, so that you save the (limited) radio spectrum for the stuff that can't be wired such as mobile devices.
Same here. I bought 1000’ of cable, a bag of 50 RJ45 connectors and a crimper for about the same price as the 2 50’ cables I was originally looking at.
Value of the knowledge on how to make the cables and have exact lengths: priceless.
Same here, big spool of cable, crimpers and connectors.
WiFi is nice for what it's good for: mobility. Like when I want to work in the backyard for an hour because it's so nice outside, or when I need to walk around the house laptop in hand for some reason.
But any spot where I'll be online for more than like an hour a week, I install ethernet and wall jacks.
I don't disagree that some of the marketing out there is misleading and customers may get a product with a lot of line-noise, but...
> Flat cables are NOT ethernet
Is this perhaps confusing signalling with the medium?
If I take a modern home network and swap out all the cables with RJ-45 connectors for "flat" versions, and is still works and machines still talk to one another... what kind of network should we be calling that if not "Ethernet?
Does the one true Ethernet require coaxial cables and vampire-taps of the 1970s, and everything in the last few decades has been mislabeled?
If the channel is is in-spec, then the geometry doesn't matter. The 802.3 series doesn't specify the cable geometry. They do specify channel parameters like FEXT, NEXT, IL, and RL across frequency ranges of interest. Maybe the CAT specs are more into the cable construction than the performance; I haven't read any of those.
Your ethernet signal is basically an A/C pattern of square waves going down the wire.
This is the analog manifestation of your digital data and it behaves like other analog signals going through wires.
A twisted pair of wires naturally rejects outside interference better than a random arrangement.
However truly parallel wires can be almost as effective under many conditions.
An outer well-grounded shield sheath surrounding one or more sensitive conductors can provide even more isolation from nearby signals or noise.
Unintended diodes caused by corrosion, unsoldered connections, or dissimilar metals can sometimes compromise analog representations of digital signals by causing assymetry during zero-crossing events.
I have a crawlspace and a spool of Cat-6 cable, along with plenty of faceplates and a drywall saw, but I have no freaking idea how to get the cable from "in the crawlspace" to "coming out of the drywall." Any tips/links?
I ran Cat6 from my router-equipped living room into my bedroom. I'm very pleased with the results, here's what I did.
I chose a Ubiquiti "Access Point AC In-wall." It's a WiFi AP, with 4 GbE ports, and draws PoE, which means no plugs needed at the point of installation. It looks very clean, just a neat rectangular box affixed to the wall, delivering both WiFi and 4 wired jacks (one doesn't work, oh well).
Using a manual drywall saw, I cut a hole in my wall, at the point of installation but smaller than the faceplate, so it would be covered. Next I used an 18 inch spade bit to drill through the sill plate of my floor. This part was the most nerve-wracking: I couldn't see what I was doing through the drywall, and sill plates are very hard. Eventually I busted through, and left the drill bit in the hole as a marker.
I climbed down into the crawlspace and fished the Ethernet cable up through the hole, with some help from my wife. I then ran the other end to the living room, just in the crawlspace dirt (stapling it to studs was possible but didn't seem important); the other side had a pre-drilled hole for cable and I fished it up through.
I'm not especially handy but wiring my home for Ethernet was a manageable adventure, give it a try!
The owner of Cragside House in Northumberland [0] used his hunting ferrets to install under-floor cables in 1880 (or so). This was preferable to ripping up the extensive wooden floors.
Basically you drill a hole in the subfloor. Use fish tape[0] for pulling cables through holes up from the crawlspace. Cut a hole in the drywall (use a stud finder), punch down the cable and mount the faceplate.
Although more expensive, because of rooms constellation we have, I've resorted to bridge some areas by using powerline adapters and it works surprisingly well, if you are lucky and find a socket combination where devices see each other.
Why do people associate ethernet cords with old outdated technology? I have found that newer houses are much more likely to be wired up with jacks in every room, and it is trivial to plug in your laptop through a dock or a cheap adapter. Most people I work with do exactly this.
Landlines are terrible across the board though. Just find a nice headset and call it a day.
To anyone that just bought a new/newish house with only RJ-11/phone outlets installed...
Pull off the face plate and check to see what kind of wire they used. Chances are that it is cat-5/6/7/8 and you MIGHT be able to use it as an ethernet outlet if it was installed appropriately.
This was done in a former property of mine and I went through the place and replaced certain RJ-11 outlets with RJ-45 ones.
If you’re building a new house it’s close to free to run a bunch of Ethernet in the scheme of things so why not. But at some point you do draw a line. I probably wouldn’t run speaker wire everywhere these days.
And I’m always grabbing a laptop and taking it to another room; I have a separate desktop. So I prefer to keep my laptops untethered as much as possible.
Back in 99 my mom was building a new townhouse. I had them run cat-5 everywhere. I also had them run a 3" stack down the utility wall.
The builder, who had done commercial, really hated the requirement. They were supposed to let me vet the cable before closing up the walls. They closed up half of them. The effing electrician stapled through half the exposed stuff. Somehow that was acceptable with phone wire and power... that's what he tried to explain. Guy also left maybe 2" of cable in the wall boxes, he had terminated it all as phone jacks, so just cut it back. Luckily the GC asked me what the stack was for before they put it in, they almost put joints in it in the wrong spots.
We ended up getting comped for the whole install and they fired the electrician (several other fuckups). Luckily the router -> gaming pc run survived.
I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days. I'm glad I didn't have the electrician try and run fiber (that's what the stack was for).
>I'm assuming builders know what they're doing with network cable these days.
Nah. Two houses ago I couldn't figure out why my ethernet wasn't working. Turns out the builders had wired it up completely randomly, i.e. it didn't go orange-white, orange, green-white, brown... and each termination was different. I had to redo them all.
White/orange orange white/green blue white/blue green white/brown brown is the typical standard[0] used for both ends of a straight-through cable. Of course, the color order doesn't really matter as long as it is the same on both ends, or one end only swaps the 1st and 2nd wire with the 3rd and 6th respectively[1].
[0] T-568B
[1] Normally this would be the green and orange pairs, resulting in T-568A. Modern Ethernet ports are pretty much all auto-sensing and will handle being connected either straight-through or crossed-over regardless of what device is on the other end.
Until something happens near your home (big event, accident, terrorism, etc), mobile cells crap out under the strain of thousands trying to call at the same time, and you're left with no connection.
Maybe! But some folks would like some redundancy on infrastructure, particularly for emergencies. My elderly parents, for example, held on to a land line until they had both cell and fiber internet in their very-rural home. They wanted to have more than one way to reach emergency services (or me) in the event of disaster. I live in a more-urban area and am quite a lot younger, so I'm not as concerned about it.
Most consumer-internet infrastructure is built on the expectation that only a small percentage of people will actually use it at any given time. Chances are a localized emergency will be precisely the time you see the limits of this approach.
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™. 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".
I have a friend who is an experienced senior paralegal. (Experienced paralegals are sought after because the best ones often leave the job quickly to go to law school.) She started work at a new boutique law firm founded by prominent litigators. She was to head up the paralegal department within the firm. She quit days later. Key to her decision, she told me, was the fact that their IT plan apparently involved using the building WiFi instead of setting up an internal wired network. She figured that this was such a red flag regarding the firm’s administrative competency that she was going to have a rough time.
I recently worked with an architect who was incredulous when I specified structured cabling be added to the plans for the building (a 16,000 sq. ft. building housing 3 separate office suites). The architect assured me it's very uncommon today, in their firm, to see "outdated" technology like wired networking used.
Architects sometimes feel like the Mac users of the engineering world. Maybe it's not fashionable anymore to have headphone jack, but the utility of it is immeasurable and you'll really miss it when you need it.
The kind of person that considers Ethernet to be "outdated" tech also thinks that a single access point hidden somewhere in a basement is sufficient to cover the entire property, so no need to run Ethernet for PoE either.
I was too shocked to ask. Now that I think about it, though, off-brand mesh APs hanging from wall warts situated on filing cabinets, cube walls, top the the refrigerator in the break room, etc, was probably the "enterprise" strategy they had in mind.
My decade of experience with lawyers is that most of them aren't great with technology. If I had a dollar for every lawyer I knew with an AOL email address I would be writing this sat on the beach.
I've known a lot of people who were amazing at their job, but shitty at running a business. I guess I would have tried to help these lawyers and explain their wrongheaded tech decisions to see what their next move would be. That would give me a better understanding of whether they were an outfit worthy of my time.
Technology is definitely not a core competency for most lawyers. With data breaches recently hitting several prominent law firms, however, clients are increasingly scrutinizing their law firms' data security practices.
That's something she should make sure comes up in her future job interviews, especially if her firm deals in the tech industry...if I had an attorney with those sorts of concerns I'd feel pretty good about my legal council.
On a side note, I have no idea why pgp is not more common in that industry. It's completely insane. In some ways, you'd be better off sending your legal correspondence on a postcard with attorney/client priveledge disclaimer at the bottom.
> Case in point: just a few weeks ago Goldman Sachs mistakenly sent a sensitive email with account information to a random Gmail user because someone fumbled some keystrokes and sent to a “gmail.com” account instead of a “gs.com” account. The email contained such sensitive information that the only recourse Goldman had was to get a court order to require Google to retract the message. Just this month, the UK’s Information Commissioner “sounded the alarm” for lawyers in an attempt to get them to realize that unencrypted email is an unacceptable risk for privacy.
It is by far the weakest link in terms of law firm information security these days.
> I have no idea why pgp is not more common in ...
Maybe because pgp is still the same pain the butt it was back in the 90's. Nothing significant has been done to improve the user experience.
Meanwhile, roll forward to 2022 and there are now dozens of good quality secure document sharing platforms, all of which have full web, desktop and phone/tablet integration.
Having used some of those secure document sharing services, I don't feel very confident in them. They seem more like a checkbox getting ticked off for the sake of offloading some liability. pgp is a real dinosaur and a nightmare to set up, but for sharing legal docs digitally, I can't think of a better tool.
There's nothing wrong with wifi per se. It is simply another type of medium - instead of a wire, you use electromagnetic waves to transmit the signal. That's how your mobile phone works and so does your radio and TV (if you have them and don't just use Netflix - you know what I mean here).
There are long established standards such as 802.1X which involves mutual TLS encryption for wifi. This is generally called "Enterprise WPA" or something like that. This means that all wifi traffic is encrypted to what I would call: a decent standard.
I hope your friend did a proper analysis of the wifi offering and didn't simply discount it out of hand because it is wifi.
There are a lot of issues here and the wifi vs wired thing is bloody complicated but make sure you understand all of the issues before pontificating about one vs the other ... 8)
Wi-Fi is surprisingly bad. Sitting less than 10 feet from my access point (802.11ax) with a clear line of sight, my ping to Google.com varies from 7.4 ms to 88.6 ms. SSH-ed into my router, which is connected directly to Comcast fiber, it varies from 5.74 ms to 5.83 ms (less than 90 microseconds jitter).
Wi-Fi is a shared medium in a crowded and noisy spectrum environment. I can see a dozen networks from my house, and I'm in a (dense) neighborhood of single family homes--it's much worse in a high rise office building. It can have decent bandwidth (almost a gigabit when it gets going) but reliability, latency, and jitter are bad.
I am guessing this point is totally unnecessary based on how overall well-informed your comment was, but in case you weren’t aware, it is frequently helpful to run a wifi analyzer of some sort to figure out which channels are heavily utilized in your area so you can set your router to one with less interference. I used to use the Mac network utility that I think may have been deprecated, but it worked like a charm. I do this for my friends all the time and it dramatically improves their network performance in 90% of cases. The only places I found it was pointless were in the middle of nowhere and my own apartment not too far from MIT’s campus, where I assume I was surrounded by equally (probably much more) knowledgeable nerds so the neighboring networks were surprisingly evenly distributed across the available channels.
Other places where it is useless is when your neighbours move in bringing dodgy out-of-spec 5g and 2.4ghz wireless trash like baby monitors or "Security cams" that smash the entire spectrum.
I've had another neighbour buy a wireless landline from China that was because "sometimes the phone would crackle, and i hated that" meanwhile it would bring every 5ghz wifi network to its knees when she was taking a phone call.
So, there are other cases, maybe this is a bit more prevalent in countries closer to those with lax spectrum laws.
Problem with unlicensed spectrum is that it becomes tragedy of the commons. Much like SF, anyone is free to loiter and shit on the street, shoot up heroin, other kinds of degeneracy and whatnot.
The licensed frequency bands, in contrast, are congestion free and more polite let’s say. I’d be willing to pay a monthly fee for use of one of those frequency bands. But good luck getting permission from the FCC to do that.
I think the person in GP's story objected to the fact that the network connection she was told to use was not even limited internally to that law firm, but was astonishingly just whatever semi-private "building wifi" network happened to exist in the (presumably shared) building. If I were a lawyer and cared about client confidentiality, that would at least give me pause, regardless of whether the physical network was wired or wireless.
Google doesn't use shared building wifi in their corporate campuses
> For both wired and wireless access, Google uses RADIUS servers to assign devices to an appropriate network, based on 802.1x authentication. We use dynamic, rather than static, VLAN assignment. This approach means that rather than relying on the switch/port static configuration, we use the RADIUS servers to inform the switch of the appropriate VLAN assignment for the authenticated device. Managed devices provide their certificate as part of this 802.1x handshake and are assigned to the unprivileged network, while unrecognized and unmanaged devices on the corporate network are assigned to a remediation or guest network. - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Yes BeyondCorp does allow access to corporate resources outside of the intranet, but as part of a managed device + identity + network evaluation.
If stuff is being used from a stationary position it should ideally be wired. I’m sympathetic to the notion that wires look cluttered and nobody resents how thick and ungainly Ethernet cables are more than me, but defaulting to WiFi is just a waste of electricity. You get slower, higher latency internet. Especially in crowded settings where there’s a ton of congestion at those radio frequencies.
There's nothing wrong with WiFi technology. The problem is the traffic is passing over someone else's network (the shared building WiFi).
If I were a corporation looking to hire a law firm, this would be a serious down-check for them, as I don't want the details of any cases they're handling for me exposed on a shared network.
This could also be considered weak protection of client-attorney communications, and get the state Bar Association involved.
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.
Wifi 1 is only allowed for corporate issued laptops. We don't even know what the password is.
Wifi 2 for employee personal devices has the password on an internal website and it changes once a month
Wifi 3 changes passwords every 24 hours. It is only for vendors who need internet access to do a demo of their product. When we meet the vendor in a conference room we have to get the password off another web site and then they also get a wifi login screen where they have to list their company name and reason for visit etc.
If you implement client machine certs, then only corporate imaged machines can connect to 1 in the first place - wired or wireless. 2 and 3 are a bit same-y from my perspective, but the selling point might be “you get a bigger share of the office pipe than the totally open guest network, and fewer restrictions” for 2.
Wifi is always an external network segment. Maybe run different SSIDs to make the use cases clearer or do some kind of QoS; however there isn't really enough spectrum (at least pre 6e) to worry about that in most places.
May as well just use one outside the network AP for everyone, just an easy password everyone knows to prevent parking lot users.
Entry to the corporate network? That'd be the VPN (or wireguard, etc) just as if they were off site.
You are old enough (I assume) to remember really dodgy wifi but it has moved on and APs from nearly all vendors are really rather good. ISPs in the UK (I can't comment elsewhere obviously) have generally woken up to delivering really quite decent "hubs" instead of a shonky Thompson Rainbow type device. That said, even those have some mileage with a firmware change.
It's all about tools for the job. You know as well as I do what drywall/plasterboard does to wifi or what a skin of bricks does to wifi propagation, compared to generally wooden construction.
Yes, running a CATn cable will nearly always trump a wifi connection but it's fixed. I personally stick to CAT5e at home instead of 6 but I won't rule it out in future. 5e -> 1Gb/s over 100m. 6 ... which one? 6 is nominally 10Gb/s and 6A is 40 I think. 6A needs the shielding to be earthed properly.
I run most things over wifi if I can. My servers have fixed ethernet and things like my doorbell obviously get a PoE CAT5e connection. ... ... ... obviously!
"drywall/plasterboard", "skin of bricks"... I wish!
Here I am with 12" thick stone walls and wifi can barely make it from the next room.
I'm so glad the previous owner ran a little bit of ethernet cable!
Employees at Facebook and Google use Wi-Fi for their daily work. Maybe there’s a way to run an Ethernet cable to one’s desk, but e.g. my MacBook doesn’t even have an Ethernet port.
Say what you will about ad tech, I think there’s no denying these are “serious” tech companies.
When I was at Facebook, they had network to my desk, and it often worked; with 802.1x too (certs automanaged by the corporate spyware). You could get a usb nic out of a vending machine if you had a poorly specified machine that doesn't have an ethernet port. If the vending machine doesn't have a compatible nic, the helpdesk probably would (they did for me, my corporate issued macbook had usb-a and the vending machine only had usb-c nics; I had been using a personal 10/100 usb nic for some time, but needed 1G for something eventually).
Their wifi was pretty ok though. I went a month or so without noticing that my personal usb nic had stopped working after an macOS update (needless to say, I'm not a fan of macs after experience using one at that job).
Work is done at a desk with a large display (or two) and a network port. The laptops come out for meetings, not coding.
Some people prefer hiding with their laptop and coding, but I find the added latency of wifi when using remote desktops is painful. Code is _not_ allowed on the laptop's storage.
Some people who do use laptops as primary machines will have a dock to let them use the wired network and large displays.
I worked at Apple and had a 10GbE fiber optic hub underneath my desk where I was able to pull 6Gbps over the public internet.
It depends on your job function, for sure, but I had to download multiple large device images each day, and having a 10G link was pretty convenient for doing that.
I don't know anyone that isn't taking Amazon or Apple seriously now. Lots of people don't take Meta or Alphabet seriously, but still buy or click online advertisements.
Seems like your definition of "serious business" probably amounts to about 10% of the overall economy at this point? It doesn't seem very relevant or useful.
I ssh into an insane desktop machine, which has a wired connection. Effectively, this is WiFi for the shell commands, and wired for the actual heavy lifting.
> but e.g. my MacBook doesn’t even have an Ethernet port
Staircase's ramp here at home is beautiful but the metallic balusters acts as a Faraday cage. Wife's MacBook M1 doesn't have an ethernet port either but she's using a little USB-C hub providing ethernet (and connection to a proper monitor): I think these adapters cost like $25 or something (my brother had one laying around and just gave it to me).
I'm kinda with you, though I am more willing to use wifi as an alternative when wiring is impossible or impractical.
The line I use in the house is, "if it's staying in one place and can be wired, it should be." My iMac is wired, all the AppleTVs are (now) wired, Linux servers are wired, etc.
Weirdly, until the 4K launched, on the AppleTV 4's was actually faster to use wifi (they only had a 10/100 Ethernet port, but support 802.11ac.)
To be fair, Wifi has gotten a lot better than the bad ol' 802.11b and WEP days. My Unifi access points are fairly solid (even if the company behind them is acting less so recently) and I very rarely have any wifi problems that aren't specific to a device. Like printers. I constantly fight with printers falling off the wifi. But I just prefer to be wired if possible.
I was pretty surprised to learn that my 2021 OLED TV only has a 10/100 ethernet port. Apparently previous models had USB 3.0 ports so you could workaround it by adding a USB gigabit ethernet adapter but in newer models they've reverted back to USB 2.0 ports, for whatever reason.
To me "I refuse to adapt or change" is one of the most undesirable traits for an employer when some type of innovation needs to be accomplished then deployed.
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.
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.
> So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time
You aren't wrong [1], but at the same time you are missing that it is entirely possible to provision a wifi setup that can support a large number of devices in a small space. In an office setting, you should be incredulous if they don't have it right. But at home, with consumer networking gear (like the WSJ is talking about)? No way, ethernet is going to outperform it - it will be like night and day.
Thanks for clarifying the point, I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer.
WiFi devices can support many devices in small spaces, but you will have increased latency and diminishing returns on throughput for the reasons I mentioned.
I can remember when most wired consumer gear were hubs, not switches. The network would become nearly unusable when you had even a tiny LAN gaming party. Now, I'm not sure that you can even buy an ethernet hub.
And yet countless massive office buildings across NYC and every city seem to allow dozens of people to work from a conference room without issue simultaneously over the air every day... must be magic.
i'd believe the second line if the first one were true, but fact is that although your experience may be very good, people have issues with WiFi constantly -- and more importantly; a lot of people are having issues without even realizing it.
An AP that hits 40% of it's projected performance metrics isn't down, but to say it is issue-free is malarkey.
Air-congestion is very real, and it affects all of us. Average latency is more chaotic now than it ever has been -- even if the low numbers are very low.
Is WiFi effective? Absolutely. I have no illusions that an office worker filling out spread-sheets is going to be totally hindered by a bit less predictable latency numbers -- I just think that it paints an incomplete picture by not realizing that we ARE losing something for the convenience of network-over-the-air.
And just to throw an anecdote out there , i'm often one of those conference room workers in one of the massive office buildings when contracted , and with a brand new XPS I still see all the same old issues with congested WiFi nearly everywhere I go. "Convention Wifi" is such a meme that most people expect it to fail 1st or 2nd day of any specific Con. It's not all that uncommon for me to encounter corporate groups that have specific APs for video conference that aren't allowed for general-employee use; the fact that this trend sprung up in the first place presumably indicates that not everyone is getting the performance they need from the arrangement.
I worked in a purely wifi-based office of hundreds of people. Seamless roaming, speeds in hundreds of Mb/s, low ping - while everyone restored their NPM deps, Docker image layers and had video conferences all the time. Don't know what you're talking about.
IME wifi problems are purely administrator capability issue. And I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi...
While many access points will state that they support 250+ clients, what they mean is that 250+ clients can theoretically be “connected” as in pinging the base station. Actual throughput will be limited.
Having worked in high density setups I simply cannot believe your experience. Even with low power and many APs there would be too much crosstalk/overlap. It cannot be the way you claim it to be unless you were 10 people and had isolation from other APs.
They just had like 100 APs and well configured roaming. I guess they carefully managed power levels and channels of each AP.
It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors.
IME from where I live, mobile data work well even when standing in the middle of protests of 10k people (many of them live streaming on FB and Instagram, sending selfies and photos and videos...). 100k becomes a problem though.
I'd love to see this done right, The only company I've seen go close was using ubiquity hardware and they had custom engineering work done to make it work well.
I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.
> It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors.
I promise sincerely that this is the kind of naivity that I was referring to.
A single cell site has something like 36 "TRXs" (this is independent of 3/4g), but with 4G due to the fact there is better collision avoidance and a lot of work on the trailing and leading edges inferring meaning: you can have 36 calls without increased latency.
It doesn’t, but it matters when you extrapolate and generalize that Wi-Fi is more than fine for most if not all the people ( even if that wasn’t you intention )
A good RF engineer who specializes in WiFi deployment can absolutely design a solid environment. For the best deployments they're involved during the building design process to identify the general area where access points will be needed based on the expected building occupancy (and just as important, how people will be distributed in the building). Near the end of construction they'll be on-site to take reading and fine-tune the placement. After construction ends they'll often be on-site several times to take additional readings and adjust power levels (although large companies may have people who can take the readings so the engineer doesn't have to come on site to make updates).
And honestly, even most conference facilities are able to provide acceptable WiFi for attendees. --I've participated in meetings where 100 people would be in one room and we all had decent connections.
WiFi has it's problems in environments where the access point owners won't cooperate (home environments), but it's much better than it used to be.
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 :)
> Companies with a large enough IT deparment will have enterprise APs all over the office with certificate authentication.
OK but companies with a large enough IT department shall also have shitloads of employees / contractors using desktops plugged into ethernet all over the place.
Yes; you can get it right; lots of places don't, but you can.
And it's very good for people constantly shuffling between meeting rooms.
That's a real use
I crawled around my attic and basement and ran cat 6 to a few rooms. I never use it. I've been working from home for years, all on wifi. Never had an issue with it. Wires are just ugly dust collectors and things to trip over.
Because of various renovations in my house, I always had Cat 5 (and speaker wire) run when walls were open. I do used wired connections when convenient but I don’t generally see any difference.
A real enterprise WiFi rollout might provision 1 access point for 1-4 people to keep access speeds high, depending on cube or office layout. WiFi shouldn't be expected to penetrate walls well. If you take normal WiFi hardware and try to go with normal household usage patterns it doesn't work great.
I don't think my feelings about it are as extreme as yours, but I agree otherwise. Using WiFi as a primary connection is just asking for a lot of extra crap to troubleshoot for no good reason at best, and giving people unreliable and slow connections at worst.
WiFi in your business is for smart phones/tablets and guests.
Early on in my career, I made a living designing network solutions for companies. Warehouses and retail stores in particular needed large, highly available Wi-Fi networks. Some providers tried to build proprietary protocols/networks, but ultimately, they failed.
These days, I'd question working for, or doing work for a company WITHOUT Wi-Fi.
I am probably your age or older. I've interfaced with COBOL systems, for example...
I'd wager employees at the majority of tech companies today (including those at the scale of Google and Facebook) use Wi-Fi by default for all day-to-day operations. Whether they are "serious" businesses or not is for you to decide.
Like most things, it depends... and you get what you pay for. If you have an enterprise grade or "prosumer" level access point (Ubiquiti, for example), wifi is solid. If you're using a garbage router/wifi combo, like the ones provided by most ISPs, you're definitely going to have issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That may explain why some people have more trouble with wifi than others. I have a lot of wifi devices, but I also have four ubiquiti access points with good overlapping coverage. Using wifi instead of wired ethernet costs me about 1.5ms more latency.
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.
Latency highly depends on interference and attenuation. If you’re sitting right next to a 5 GHz AP that’s used exclusively by you, then your latency should be minimal. If you’re trying to connect to a router behind a couple of brick walls, or your roommate is using a leaky microwave, or you’re in a convention where everyone’s trying to connect to the same WiFi, then you’ll notice it in a video call, multiplayer shooter, slow-loading webpage, or anywhere else where double-digit-% dropped packets matter.
Latency is a few tens of ms (milliseconds) larger. It's not that much, but it matters to me.
It's like keyboards, as measured by Dan Luu [1]. I can totally feel the difference between some listed on that web.
Stacks are adding up a lot of latency, and I'm trying to remove as much as I can from my configuration.
An extreme comparison is to run Emacs in text mode with Ethernet, a good wired connection and USB Magic Keyboard vs Emacs on a heavy desktop environment, WiFi and a laggy wireless keyboard. Night and day difference. On the second one, there's a lot of lag.
Wi-Fi latency 5-10 ms typically, and highly variable. I'm on fiber, and my wi-fi doubles or triples the latency to close data centers (about 5 ms from here in Annapolis to Ashburn VA).
Start of lockdown I ordered my brother an eBay $5 7m ethernet cable so he could run it down the hall from his WiFi router to desktop pc. He is in an urban apartment block and can literally see 50+ WiFi networks.... Greatly improved things. I had thought of powerline adaptors but last time I gave him a pair to self install he said they were too slow and on visiting I found he had managed to connect them to a flat three floors down through two electricity meters? An Ethernet cable was easier for him to self install
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..
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.
POTS calls had noticably lower latency... which made conversations feel more natural.
i often wonder if the popularity of sms and texting in general was largely fueled in the early days by the horrific high latency, lossy compression that made up early tdma, cdma, pcs and gsm mobile to mobile voice channels.
latency and mobile to mobile "hd calling" have improved, but i still think landlines were more natural. multihour phone calls were comfortable... now they're exhausting.
Yeah it's still possibly the best. I did a landline-to-landline call recently for the first time in decades and I was shocked by how good it sounded. Completely got rid of the latency that leads to the feeling of interrupting/waiting to speak.
My current workplace is pretty serious about call fluidity so we all have $300 podcaster mics and open backed headphones and shit and all that was blown away by two fucking landlines a couple states apart.
In the late 1970's I attended an informational talk by an engineer in the Bell system. The speaker said: "We don't know how good the [POTS] system is, but we don't want to make it any worse."
This is what I noticed about Clubhouse that I felt went underreported -- you rarely talked over each other because latency was very low. I was under the impression this was a big part of why they dragged out the android release, it doesn't allow the same real-time audio API that iOS apparently has.
> POTS calls had noticably lower latency... which made conversations feel more natural.
I wonder if there is a market for two data-lines into a home, one that emphasizes low latency and another that emphasizes large volume. The lag in current video/audio communications is pretty bad.
yeah. i was thinking about this a bunch at the start of the pandemic. what about building a video/audio conferencing system that focused on the psychophysical aspects of calls... things like reducing latency or mixing/synchronizing multiple channels over distances.
problem is that there's a fair bit of fixed delay. a/d and d/a have fixed minimum latencies, as do codecs (although i think there's been focus and improvement there over the years), and then there is, of course, the public internet with its various hiccups that are often smoothed over with additional buffering/latency.
i do wonder how much energy has been put into reducing perceived latency and the psychophysical aspects though. (also a very interesting domain)
hard to beat the latency of a local analog signal though!
There are a number of projects aimed at delivering low-latency audio over the internet, I think some were started or used by musicians trying to be able to play together remotely
The music thing is just tracking. You record a track, then someone else downloads it and records themselves on top of that track, then someone else downloads that… repeat for a whole choir if so desired. These sessions could be separated by hours or weeks. In the studio world they often are. The innovation here was to accelerate this process and make it happen with delays of hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds, instead.
There’s no cheating the physics or the underlying network. You can’t interact with the “inner” musicians as the data only flows one way.
also, since we're going down memory lane, who remembers the album isdn by the future sound of london?
the name comes from the fact that they used hardware that was designed for musicians to jam over isdn digital calls (or more likely high latency high quality calls for audio distribution, given the state of audio codecs at the time), to produce the album across a large geographical area, if i remember right..
The key would be a circuit-switched network for real time communication. ISDN once promised low latency circuit switched video calling. Shame it never took off.
BRI was two bonded 64kbit channels. i think even with today's compression you'd be hard pressed to have a decent video call experience.
PRI was 1.5mbit, but i'm not sure you could dial out all the constituent channels. (i think it was designed to either behave like a standard leased line or as an endpoint for BRIs to dial into)
edit: looks like you can dial those out... but in practice it's either 2 channels at 128k or 6 at 384k. still not a lot of bandwidth for video (but probably great fixed latency)
fun fact: i looked at starting up an isdn based isp in the 90s. isdn calls were charged by the minute back then, which wasn't great for that purpose... but if you set up a centrex (the phone company's managed cloud pbx as a service), then you could make intercom calls for free between stations... so, the isp would have been a business with each customer site as a branch office. :)
> 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.
What? The calls where the network saves bandwidth by dropping audible frequencies from each party's voice, so everyone sounds bizarre over the telephone?
That's not the kind of thing I associate with "audio quality".
Nothing to brag about, sure, but still remarkably good in comparison with calls today. Latency aside, the quality of copper POTS was still capable of being much better than, for example, my new iPhone making cellular calls on AT&T’s network. (I prefer FaceTime Audio)
This just isn't true. Narrowband audio quality is a dumpster fire compared to calls today. Narrowband drops all frequencies outside the range 300 - 3400 Hz. Not only is the top end much, much too low to accurately represent a human voice... the bottom end is too high!
One aspect of Ethernet I do really like is that when a computer has, physically, no ability to do WiFi (as is the case on many desktop motherboards) you know through what exactly your device is connecting.
If your device has wifi capabilities, you suddenly gained wonderful features: like for example your smart TV using your neighbour's Amazon echo (or whatever the latest evil scheme is these days) to report your viewing habits to advertizers.
I've got WiFi for my "fun" computer: a Mac M1 laptop for the couch. For my serious computer (a high end Linux desktop machine with a gigantic screen) it's ethernet.
The main issue that no mainstream user knows about is bufferbloat. If you use WiFi APs and devices that support AQM and airtime fairness, you'll never know that there is a user on your wifi with low signal as they wouldn't be able to use all the airtime.
No mention of HomePlug/Powerline? Turns the power lines in your house into a wired LAN - plug one into your router and a mains wall socket and the other(s) into mains wall socket(s) in other room(s) to get you wired network connection(s) in that/those room(s). I've been happily using them for years, after struggling with WiFi in a large L-shaped loft-conversion that had a lot of lead cladding. Now everything that can be wired is wired, i.e. devices that are rarely moved, reserving WiFi for just the devices that need WiFi, i.e. devices that are often moved, e.g. mobile phones and the car outside.
The other transformative thing for me was moving to fibre to the home. The fibre to the cabinet in the area suffered massive contention issues (didn't matter who your provider was because they all used the same cabinets). In the old days when the copper cabinets reached capacity they would stop taking new subscribers, but in recent years they've just been wiring more and more people in and hoping not too many people would use it at once. Which of course they did when the working from home and home schooling started 2 years ago, leading to everyone in the area having multiple sometimes multi-hour internet outages a day, which was a complete nightmare. The recently-installed fibre to the home removes the contention issues, so when combined with the HomePlug/Powerline wired connections where-ever possible, everything has been rock solid. Only mentioning the fibre to the home as an example of where new technology does actually make things significantly better rather than worse.
YMMV - I've never had any luck with Ethernet-over-power boxes, but it's very dependent on the quality and topology of house wiring.
Fibre to the home, on the other hand ... super amazing. Rock solid 1Gb full duplex (and for busy torrents I actually hit 120Mb/s!) ... but it's all about the latency: I have (according to mtr) <85ms with StdDev<1 from home in .NL to OVH in .QC.CA.
I bought a set of powerline network adapters once, from a reputable manufacturer. While they work flawlessly, they have an extremely annoying side effect that made me pop them out an hour after I first installed them. I ran an ethernet cable instead (now I'm using them again in a different place). They turn the powerlines into radio antennae and all my semi-professional studio headphones tend to pick that signal up as really distracting digital clicking and humming noise.
The newer G.hn powerline stuff is pretty great. I initially tried to run an ethernet cable from an AP in my second-floor office to the router in the basement, but it had to go through what used to be an exterior wall so it ended up being impossible (without making big holes which I wasn't willing to do). I tried Ethernet over coax but never got that to work either. Then I got a pair of G.hn adapters and they've fit the bill perfectly. Absolutely rock solid (literally had more issues with the fiber to the house), good speeds, etc. Anybody scared off by older powerline standards/implementations should give the newer ones a try.
I like the powerline plugs as well. I've been using them for years now, upgrading as speeds improved.
I also installed a mesh wifi network, but installed one that would do the backhaul to the router over ethernet (and powerline) rather than via an extra wifi channel.
Wired Ethernet is not only more stable, it is so stable that it's way down on your list of things to debug, so when you have any kind of network issue, you don't have to start with checking whether the WiFi is connected.
For context, some parts of Lexington are pretty dense. I don't know if anywhere there as dense as the part of Jamaica Plain that I used to live in, but I had to pull CAT-6 because from my desk I could see a dozen and a half Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi was hopeless as a result.
I've lived in Lexington for 22 years (two houses) and practically nowhere in it is dense by any reasonable standard. Other than a mere handful of apartment developments it's practically all single-family zoned, with larger lot-size requirements than many other towns nearby. I just don't know how that can seem dense to someone who used to live in JP.
What is true is that the 2.4GHz band can get a bit crowded, because every one of those standalone houses has multiple overpowered APs, plus other devices using (or interfering with) that band. On 5GHz, with more channels and less range, it's not so bad. With modern gear that can do MIMO and automatically select the least crowded channel, plus a wired backhaul between router/APs, those issues disappear entirely. It has been months since I or any other member of my family has noticed any issues at all with our wifi network, never any related to neighbors' activity, and we're in a completely typical part of town. You just have to use something other than the POS that Verizon/Comcast provides.
(In case anyone's wondering: Netgear Orbi, one for every ~1000sf, all connections via Ethernet except for one that's G.hn powerline. Before that I had Synology MR2200s on a wireless backhaul, very occasional bad moments, and then one fried itself.)
I’m so tired of trying to convince friends to get a mesh Wi-Fi network. Guys, it’s 2022: get a Wi-Fi device per room (or one per two rooms) and be happy with your gigabit bulletproof Wi-Fi network.
It’s expensive? Yeah. No pain no gain.
Why? 2,4Ghz networks are from an era where Wi-Fi networks were rare and thus you had no interference.
Today, you are surrounded by (literally) hundreds of networks and your tiny packages need to fight for airtime on those 11 channels.
The only viable solution is 5Ghz Wi-Fi (not to be confounded with 5G mobile network). It comes with much more channels and it doesn’t traverse walls so well (it’s a good thing, because your neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal won’t interfere in yours). So you need at most a wall between you device and the wifi router.
So, nowadays the solution is: several routers on the house, interconnected via a wireless link (not regular Wi-Fi) in a mesh network.
You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.
Mesh WiFi is digital cancer. It is the ultimate in selfish asshole technology. Let me explain. Elsewhere in the thread others have touched on WiFi channels being a shared medium so I'll skip over that.
My neighbor has mesh WiFi. Correction - my neighbor THREE HOUSES OVER has mesh WiFi. How do I know this? Because his multiple access points show up in a scan with ridiculous output power, at nearly the same power as the AP in my own house. WiFi packet captures show these things are enormously chatty, constantly occupying the channels with management traffic to perform their mesh thing.
You want to live out in the country with no one around you for half a mile? Have at it. You live in a dense neighborhood with many APs where channel selection is limited? Fuck anyone and everyone that uses mesh WiFi in this situation. Literally everyone around you suffers so you can have your "very very low latency and super reliability". It's like lighting up a cigar in a crowded train car with no regard for anyone around you.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. If your neighbour's ap appears at your house, at 5Ghz, means that either you are very close or his house if basically transparent to 5Ghz (lots of windows maybe?).
There is no such limited channel selection in 5Ghz. In 2.4 sure, but 5ghz surely not, with over a hundred channels and poor material penetration.
Meshed 5Ghz is neighbour friendly, not the other way around. Is a saner way of doing wireless network in crowded environments.
Some equipaments even use proprietary protocols and licensed radiobands for the trunk traffic, thus alleviating even more the 5Ghz range.
> but 5ghz surely not, with over a hundred channels
On which planet do you reside in which this is remotely true?
Many devices (clients and APs alike) do not properly implement DFS. Which leaves the number of usable channels around a dozen or so. And that's in 20 MHz mode. In his quest for more speed, my neighbor runs his network in 40 MHz or 80 MHz mode (can't remember which) which cuts the amount of usable channels in half / quarters. So the rest of the neighborhood deals with interference while he binges 4K Netflix with his Y-fronts around his ankles on the toilet.
I really hope this is sarcasm. Are you really suggesting an AP in every room? An AP and a router are not the same thing, and neither will give you a very very low latency 1.5 GB wireless connection in my experience.
What's wrong with one AP per room? That's exactly how it should be and indeed gives you bulletproof performance & reliability. Wi-Fi should be your home's "last mile" and everything before that should be wired.
The over-gigabit speeds are hyperbole, but in my case I'm regularly seeing ~500Mbps both ways and very consistent latency with no sudden spikes.
Most wireless problems are due to there being a single AP that's barely within reach causing tons of retransmissions which makes any real-time application (such as calls) unusable. It doesn't help that Wi-Fi signal strength meters are completely useless (maybe they should measure actual packet loss instead of RSSI which is only part of the picture) so end-users are unable to tell what's actually going on.
Having APs always within line of sight of the client device solves all these problems.
Hmm, I’m seeing 500Mbps with my mesh network straight through 2 floors and a bunch of walls (everything is connected through cable to the meshed routers).
Speed is not the only factor. In fact, most people thought their Wi-Fi was fine because for non-real-time usages, TCP will conceal occasional dropouts. Your in-browser test might be showing 500Mbps while what's really happening is +500Mbps in between bursts of nothing. Applications such as iperf3 would be able to tell you more (as they can report in much quicker intervals, allowing you to see spikes that would be averaged out) but a quick test is to just ping your gateway and move around in any area you will potentially use your device (even your orientation matters; if your body is blocking the line of the signal it could have a disastrous effect on an already-weak connection) and see if you notice any spikes. If not: congrats, if yes: you have shit Wi-Fi that TCP has been successfully concealing but the illusion will break down when you use a real-time application where retransmissions can't work (because they would be too late).
Ah, the good part is probably that the connected machines are not going to move very much, nor is the AP (e.g. the connections between the AP and machines are all cables). I simply don’t have a cable pulled from the top floor (where my fiber enters the house) to the bottom floor where my office is.
I’ve played realtime games over it, and haven’t had too much issues, so I guess it’s working well enough for my use case.
It’s possible the actual speed is higher though, and the occasional bursts of nothing are still there (the link to my home is 2Gbit).
They certainly aren't, but most routers can run in AP mode and cost way less than a dedicated AP. One AP per room is pretty overkill, if you do that, you definitely want to turn the transmit power down to help clients roam.
> You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.
Would you mind sharing what equipment you use?
While I now have wired connectivity to my access points, I have friends who don't have that option and would greatly benefit from better wifi. I would love to help them.
I doubt there is any router on the market today that operates on 2.4 Ghz by default. Some don't even have it as an option. So everyone with a Wi-Fi network in their house is already using the 5 Ghz band. And while range is a problem (in a lot of cases it isn't, considering modern city apartments are tiny and walls are made of cardboard), having multiple access points doesn't really fix it unless you have them scattered literally every few meters in your house. Heck I'm pretty sure I won't get a 1.5 Gbit/sec connection even if I put my router on the same table as my laptop.
I have an AP in pretty much every room on 5 GHz with low transmit power. I like it a lot - good speeds, not a lot of interference from the other APs, and clients mostly roam nicely as only the nearest AP is strong enough.
There's routers on the market today that are 2.4ghz only. I've got quite a number of them. They are cheap and since we've got few neighbors, 2.4 is pretty much wide open.
Yeah no. I have WiFi in my home in a grudging concession to others in the family. I hate all wireless tech. It's flakey and annoying. I've never had a wireless keyboard, mouse, or headphones that were reliable either. If they weren't dropping the connection, the battery was dying.
If cords are for old people, then I'm old. Everything in my house that has an ethernet jack on it is wired. I have two switches for everything and I live alone.
I want a way to plug my old landline phone to my PC, but basically every solution I’ve found does away with the bell because it’s hard to get them to ring.
> Landlines and Ethernet Cords [...] early 2000s technology
2000s? You'd expect better fact checking from the WSJ. I take it the author is young enough for all of this stuff to just blend into an amorphous chunk of history corresponding vaguely to "what my parents mean when they speak of the olden days".
I mean...yes, from 2000 to 20005 (the "early 2000s") I indeed had a landline and ethernet cords. Just because a technology preceded the time the author mentioned doesn't mean it didn't also exist in that time.
But then the choice of early 2000s as a reference is just arbitrary. I mean: I have both ethernet and landline now, having never discontinued my use of them and not intending to do so in the foreseeable future. (The landline is VoIP-through-DSL, but I have a hardware VoIP phone connected to the DSL router, and the DSL itself runs on the infrastructure that was originally put into the ground and the house for use with landline phones, so in that sense both the infrastructure and the end user device could still be referred to as "landline").
The timeframe where Ethernet ascended to displace other modes of networking was mostly the 90s, though its history dates back to much earlier time periods.
The only thing that's peculiar about the early 00s is that this marks the time period when PCs had already squarely displaced mainframes in business contexts and also found their way into private homes and WiFi hadn't yet broken into the mass market. (Wikipedia tells me the WiFi alliance was founded in late 1997, but I don't personally remember anyone using it until the early 00s).
So, maybe in an "oral history" sense a reference to the early 00s seems justifiable as that may be what one's personal associations are. But, then again, that's the exact thing I'm poking fun at when I say "amorphous chunk of history" corresponding to the "olden days".
Dr. Ozimek knew, in his heart, that no one he wanted to talk to was ringing. And yet.
“That’s how we were raised. You run to answer the phone,” he says. “It’s like if someone walks up to you and says hello and you were to just stare them in the face and not respond.”
After a few months of nonstop ringing, he gave up and unplugged it.
Dr. Ozimek has evidently completely forgotten the other part of a wired telephone: the answering machine. It's like voice mail except it's in a little box next to your phone that plays the message as it's being recorded, and automatically stops if you pick up the phone.
Which did lead to messages like "Hello? Hello, Peggy? I know you're there. Pick up the phone. Pick up pick up pick up... Okay, I guess you're out. Um, I got your thing, call me when you get back and we'll talk about pickup times. Monday and Thursday evening next week are probably good for me."
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.