Hints and Tips - Wifi can be a false economy
But Wifi is so quick and easy!
Yes, and if your only utilisation will be surfing the web and reading emails, as is often the case for those making important financial decisions, the conclusion is a no-brainer: it is much quicker to set up a few access points and put wifi cards in PCs than to pay someone to pull cables everywhere.
If, however, your users will be performing data entry into a networked database or routinely transferring large amounts of data to or from other devices on the local network then think again. A wifi connection is not guaranteed and no wifi user has exclusive use of the shared bandwidth of the wifi signal.
Managed Gigabit switches are now affordable by even the smallest enterprises and the difference between having a Gigabit per second connection to the network and sharing a 50 or 100 Megabit per second connection with everybody else is considerable.
(If the only resource ever being accessed is the link to the internet then the benefit of Gigabit ethernet diminishes somewhat as the internet connection would normally present the same bottleneck whether the user is connected by ethernet or wifi.)
Electrical Noise or a sudden rush of network traffic could break any individual Wifi connection for a moment and cause unpredictable results on a database application. Pulling a cable from the network switch to the desk and using a wired network makes these problems disappear immediately.
I have had first hand experience of this with a database application provided by a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and indeed one of the first things their technical support group said was "Make sure your network connection is rock solid and THEN call us". I hasten to add that I started working with this customer AFTER the choice of using wifi everywhere had been made and implemented.
As an aside - this issue is not limited to Wifi connections. Back in the corporate world I once noticed that the link across the MPLS cloud to our Paris office went down for a few seconds on the same day of the week and at the same time of day - give or take 30 minutes. Each time the sales administrators in the Paris office were thrown out of the (very well known, high end) corporate ERP system - hosted in a data center in California - and lost their unsaved work but they had not yet spotted the pattern. For several weeks while the issue - which could have been caused by any of the several Network suppliers contributing to or linking to the MPLS cloud - was being resolved I had to call the Paris office when the next outage was due, to remind them to finish their current data entry, log out and do something else until the outage had been and gone.
