Solutions for Industrial Computing

1 .Most consumers of wireless at home are clueless. To begin with they are broadcasting all over the neighbourhood and anyone passing by can piggyback on their network and eat up their bandwidth, not to mention hitching a free internet connection and doing some real damage ,If the novice has NOT configured security measures to prevent a mess. All systems I've seen to date come unbundled and security is wide open . Most home users don't know any better and are wide open to hackers.

2. Another problem with wireless is bandwidth. If you have a 100 Megabit wired network with Gigabit backbone and you decide to go to a wireless network , you better brace yourself for a big dissappointment. The highest bandwidth I've seen on the market so far is 50 Megabits, If configured properly to guard against security breaches and piggybacking then you're left with about 23 Megabits/sec. If you are in a typical office then your wireless access point will likely be shared with say 10 users and maybe a printer. You might also be using VOIP on the same network which means that everytime some uses their phone the bandwidth available shrinks. Under worse case conditions with all 10 users on the phone and logged into the network + print jobs going you will have less than 1 Megabit/sec bandwidth. Compared to a wired environment at 100 Megabits/sec (only have small overhead so you have about 99 MBPS) wireless is a snail for those people who can't wait another nanosecond.

3. Wireless has 3 enemies which can cause you grief.

Absorption of the signal can severely limit the distance over which you can communicate. the further away you are from the wireless access point the weaker your signal and your bandwidth is reduced. Closest analogy is when you used dialup over a modem. If you had a good physical connection and were located close to your local Central Phone Office (where your local line is physically connected) you got top speed. If you live out in the country and have poor connectivity and a long distance to your CO then your modem cannot negotiate a nice high speed connection so you might be stuck with 19.2 KPBS instead of 54 KBPS. A metal cart passing by or a metal wall or even a group of people passing by can absorb/attenuate signals. I have witnessed this in person.

Reflection is the next enemy of wireless technology. Namely, the signal can bounce off certain types of materials like metals in walls, floors, etc... so you have to be real carefull where you install your wireless acces point. Wireless access points should overlap to ensure connectivity but signals can still be reflected, absorbed and Interfered with so you might momentarily lose PC connection, lose VOIP connection or have clipping on VOIP (Important messages left are incomplete because of clipping/ dropout of voice signal at a critical point in the message). I have experienced this as well.

Interference is the biggest enemy of wireless. When we were performing preliminary tests of a proposed wireless network by Nortel we had dropped connections due to people using microwave ovens and wireless headsets. If you have an Industrial environment or laboratory then it's very likely that your equipment is generating noise than can affect the quality or connectivity of your wireless network.

The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Center in Ottawa, Ontario , Canada made the biggest mistake in their history by going wireless with VOIP. It has been almost a year and they continue to be plagued with all the above problems I mentioned.

In my opinion wireless technology suffers from too many drawbacks and isn't mature enough technology to use in a business environment let alone a hospital where dropped voice calls, clipping of VOIP connections, loss of network connections happen on a regular basis. The hospital has metal screens embedded in most of the walls to prevent mental health patients from breaking out. Basically the entire campus building is a shielded building ( a Faraday cage ) which has proven to be a hostile environment to a wireless network operation.

We had more down time in the first week of operation than in over 10 years of the wired network in our old building. Nortel sold out their wireless division to Alcatel shortly before the shit hit the fan and employees reported all the problems with the new hospital to the media ( CBC news, A channel, CTV ).

The CFO left recently and the CEO's contract is not being renewed and an Interim CEO & CFO are starting soon.

If you want wireless at home fine but configure security to lockout promiscuous roaming users. If you want wireless for business, forget about it.

The Institute of Mental Health occupies the upper half of tower at the new ROMHC and have been looking for quotations to go back to a reliable WIRED network. Is that enough to convince anyone not to go wireless (a living nightmare).

Recent changes at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Center located at 1145 Carling Ave., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada since the change of CEO and CFO.

They have been forced to revert to hard wired connections in critical locations like Nursing and Ward stations + Admin of course.

For the amount it's going to cost them to do a partial hard wire ( $150 Thousand ) they could easilly have wired the entire building during the original construction process. Now they have to further disrupt operations and add extra cost that ultimately comes from our taxes. Talk about learning the hard way.

Management were clueless about wireless and allowed themselves to believe the claims of Nortel salesmen and Consultants (who had their own agenda ) rather than their own existing IT staff and now everyone has to pay for their stupidity.

Don't go wireless, learn from other's mistakes...