Check out the Reuters article they are referencing, titled: “Google’s newest office has AI designers toiling in a Wi-Fi desert”. Now that’s cynical, and mean.
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.
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.
At launch, Google’s VP of Real Estate & Workplace Services, David Radcliffe, said the site “marks the first time we developed one of our own major campuses, and the process gave us the chance to rethink the very idea of an office.” The result is a wild tent-like structure with a striking roofline made up of swooping square sections.
In other words, they erected themselves a circus tent. Ironic.
This doesn’t sound like a serious problem for a company like Google. They can afford to solve it by brute force — just put a Wi-Fi hotspot in every single room.
But if they spend millions on WiFi hotspots then how they can pay the dividends to the shareholders? If you listen to them the company is barely profitable and more cuts are needed
Radio interference and roaming are the primary concerns. There’s only so many channels that Wi-Fi can run on, and they will clash if there’s too many APs near the same band. You also have to ensure that each device is configured to disconnect from a weak signal and connect to a stronger one when moving from room to room, which realistically doesn’t work flawlessly. You want to instead have a few powerful access points in each wing or whatever needs dictate.
My house was built in 1967. It’s a solid house. The walls are plaster and they have chicken wire in them. WiFi is a nightmare. I ended up running a few hard lines and using a mesh system.
Same here, but the house is a few decades younger, has brick walls and thick reinforced concrete floors. Early WiFi was rough, let me tell ya. At one point, I improvised a directional WiFi antenna out of Styrofoam and precisely cut wires, which actually worked. I tried three generations of DLAN after that, all of which were horribly unreliable and had nowhere near the advertised performance. I’m now moderately happy with a meshnet, which is so reliable that I forgot how to log into it to configure it.
Any computer with a network port and a wifi adapter can be turned into a wifi access point.
But there are cheaper and better alternatives than a raspberry pi
For mass distribution of wifi APs? Some SDN solution would have a higher upfront cost but a lower running cost. Im sure all the big providers have their own system, consumer ones include ubiquiti and omada.
Cheaper than that would be mikrotik. Not really deployable at the scale of 1000s that would be required to fit every room with a wifi AP, but CAPsMAN can scale to hundreds, so still has centralised management to reduce running costs.
If it has to be cheaper still, then any cheapo SBC with wifi. While raspberry pis might fit the bill, they would be too overpowered with too many unused features to really squeeze the cost effectiveness.
Hey, its google. They could probably fork an AP into one of their home automation thingies. Then probably a whole stack of ansible scripts to try and manage 1000s of deployed linux installs
Which is also what you want really, if you have everything on WiFi. High density setups with really small cells so you can reuse channels. A building with high signal attenuation helps with that.
Having said that I’d never want to work for a company like Google.
PS:
Bad radio propagation means Googlers are making do with Ethernet cables, phone hotspots.
“Making do with Ethernet cables”? For me that’s still the most reliable and secure way of doing networking on computers. You’re at a desk, why not have a cable there. For mobile devices, sure. At my work every docking station has a cabled connection luckily.
I would think the metal parts of roof might be reflecting signals all around the building, which would cause interference between devices. (there is a limited number of WiFi channels), it might work better with a plastic roof, or one with RF absorbers.
Also, hundreds of mobile hotspots will impact the performance of all nearby wireless networks.
I wonder if Google actually has WiFi engineers. It’s not something you need to set up everyday. Still they have the money to hire a company that specialises in WiFi.
I don’t think the roof would be good at reflecting signals back at the device, it scatters them all throughout the building, rasing the noise floor. In a way, phone hotspots can cause less interference then a proper access point because they use a lower transmit power, and allow the other devices to reduce power.
I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.
Well, straight metal surfaces are a whole different story from concave metal surfaces.
The former causes interference in a line in one specific direction, with roughly the width and height of said metal surface.
Concave metal surfaces on the other hand, can easily blast a whole room, depending on how concave they are.
And I’m a bit out of my water here, but I believe, modern WiFi does try to
direct its EM-waves towards the recipient, rather than send in all directions.
adjust the strength of its signal, so that it reaches the specific recipient and not that much more beyond that.
resolve multipath issues, so where a recipient can be reached in two or more ways, e.g. directly and through a reflecting metal surface. It can attempt to do so with 1) and 2).
But yeah, ultimately this can’t be an exact science. Recipients move around. Interferences move around. You still need additional EM-waves to advertise yourself as WiFi to disconnected devices. A reflecting interference may be situated behind a recipient, where you do need to send signals to.
And of course, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition Google’s house of mirrors, where any misdirected EM-wave will interfere with everything else in the room. That just ramps up any imperfections in WiFi by a lot…
This design looks like you could get more than one roof segment involved, too, especially if there’s a lot of traffic. I didn’t know that they actually manage spacial relationships like that, but I guess it makes sense. I suppose that’s why the extra antennas on some models.
In theory, a radio reflection off something non-flat can be a treated a bit like an extra point source. My curved tea kettle won’t mess with wi-fi, because a reflection off it just looks like a straight but lossy path that’s the sum of the distances involved. If something’s a wavelength across weirder things can happen, of course, but wi-fi is in relatively short bands for the most part, and there’s more than one so it can just switch if it’s in a dead spot. A wi-fi signal will also be modulated pretty fast, though, so now you have to think in frequency space as well, I’m not sure how that works.
Google’s hipster building is on a scale that’s very different from a kettle, but at least as complex geometrically, so maybe that’s where the gap in access point design lies. They expect small distortions and big perfect reflections.
To put it more descriptively, when you do industrial scale WiFi, you’re supposed to design out the network during the blueprint stage, then go through with a signal analyzer to map out the radio properties when it’s time to install the telecom
You can put an access point in every room or every 30 feet, and tune them to work seamlessly without interference. You can do the same with cell signals too. They even make cables that are also the antenna - they’re cut with gaps in the shielding, so you can get perfect coverage inside an iron maze if you wanted to
It’s all just a matter of cost… It’s not cheap, but a few million dollars is just a line item at that scale
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