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Honeyball: insane use of wireless can only end in tears

Can I put in a quick plea for sane use of wireless technology? By that, I mean that I'm already starting to see companies who think that wireless is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and in their enthusiastic ignorance, have decided that everything should be wireless.

Can I put in a quick plea for sane use of wireless technology? By that, I mean that I'm already starting to see companies who think that wireless is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and in their enthusiastic ignorance, have decided that everything should be wireless.

Let me give you an example. Last week I was in the offices of a new client and I noticed that everyone was carrying around shiny new Dell laptops. Each was sporting an 802.11b wireless card, and the LEDs were winking away in an excited fashion. Their previous IT expert, who had made rather a hash of the servers, had decided that wireless was the way to go for all the client desktop machines, and these ought to be laptops. After all, laptops could be carried home, stolen, left on a tube, or be lost in any number of other frightfully helpful ways.

Nevertheless, it is hard to argue when you can get a scorchingly fast Pentium processor, loads of ram and a 1600x1200 pixel display on a laptop. Well, yes you can argue quite easily - the processor is scorchingly fast and scorchingly hot too. The display, at 1600x1200 pixels on a display only 15" across diagonally is at least 5" smaller than an equivalent desktop screen of the same resolution. It might be sharp, but boy the words are small.

As you can imagine, the complaints had already started. I wont mention the howls of anguish from the typists who thought that a laptop keyboard was a pitiful excuse for Gods Own IBM AT Keyboard. At least they had been given USB mice to use instead of the touchpads.

No, the real howls were aimed at the network speed. Apparantly it wasn't very fast, and users were noticing.

Well, it wasn't surprising. There is only so much a couple of 802.11b base stations can manage to do, and high speed Ethernet delivery for nearly 20 users isn't on that list. These users had stuck doggedly to the notion that Wireless Was Good because Wireless Was New, in the face of clear evidence that something was wrong. Naturally, it had to be A Fault, and thus I was called in.

When I dared to mention that hanging that number of users off a couple of 802.11b bases was probably a deeply bad idea, I got a hard stare. When I suggested that there was nothing wrong with the existing 100Mb Ethernet wired ports at each of their desks, I was met with a tirade of "but Wireless is the way to go ... "

In desperation I went to half a dozen of these poor strangulated laptops, plugged in their Ethernet cables which were conveniently lying at the back of the desktops, reconfigured their network connectivity, and stood back triumphant as full speed returned to the network.

How had this come about? Dare I mention how someone had "explained" to them that 11Mb 802.11b was "obviously" faster than 10Mb Ethernet? Isn't the logic of someone who is Loud Confident And Wrong a sight to behold?