Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”
Bad radio propagation means Googlers are making do with Ethernet cables, phone hotspots.
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Why the hell is a professional tech business not relying almost-exclusively in ethernet, anyway?
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.
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.
