“Googlers assigned to the building are making do with Ethernet cables, using phones as hotspots, or working outside, where the Wi-Fi is stronger.”
How the fuck is a person that writes articles for a living not aware of the phrase “making due”? What goes through their mind when they write out “making do”? How the fuck does that make any sense to them?
I hate to be that guy, but come on. It’s literally your job.
Was the dew you made of the mountainous variety? Did you have to make do with what you had in order to make due on your rental payment? Am I doing this right?
Yeah looks like I may be wrong about “make do” being incorrect. Didn’t know the spelling was changed in the 40s. I’ve always seen it written as “due”. Seems like an odd word to use though. Wouldn’t due make more sense? Like you’re able to meet the dues that are required?
You think that's bad, you should take a gander at the official news sources in Jacksonville Florida. I don't know if they're still this bad, but as I recall they have not one, but at least two big news publications, both produce articles that look like they were written by grade schoolers. Anything that wasn't copy/pasted from the AP seems to be written hastily by somebody who dropped out before understanding English. I'm sure many other cities have the same issue. The one is called news five or Jax 5 news, and the other is first coast news. They'll hire anybody to write apparently.
One anonymous employee told Reuters, “You’d think the world’s leading Internet company would have worked this out.”
You don’t think that’s exactly why they constructed that building the way they did? WiFi is much less secure than a wired connection. It makes much more sense to me that they knew it would make WiFi not work as well to get more employees to used wired connections for security reasons.
Funny how there’s a lot of wired vs wireless hate in the comments, can’t really pin down the reason. Generational?
Wired will always be more stable and faster, whereas wireless is more ubiquitous. If you work at a fixed position, prefer wired. If wired is unavailable, well, you’ll have to make do with wireless. USB-C dongles and docking stations are a thing, so the laptop doesn’t have it argument doesn’t hold.
Wired is not always faster. I have a WiFi 6 router at home that (only) has gigabit ports, and wireless speeds are often faster than wired. WiFi 6 is quite common in consumer electronics, but 2.5gbit is not.
Then that’s the fault of the device design, or using incorrect cables, and not of the communication standard. Using cheap CAT 5 cables that max out at 100Mbit instead of good quality 6a cables is going to mess up speeds too.
WiFi 6 offers ~9Gbps under ideal conditions, and that deteriorates with all the usual reasons for WiFi, and wired is 10 Gbps for whatever distance. The standard says wired is faster. Your particular device failing to meet those speeds doesn’t represent the communication methods.
So you agree that wired is not always faster… It depends on the hardware you’re using. And most consumer grade hardware you can buy today has faster wireless speeds than wired.
Wireless is only faster if wired is using outdated or underdeveloped gear. If a box has faster wireless than wired connection, then it was clearly designed to cater to wireless. GbE can hit up to 100gb.
This is correct. As the article says employees are using their phones as hotspots so it’s not as if it’s a Faraday cage. Their IT guy should do a Wi-Fi site survey and install a few AC Pros.
So, I haven’t worked in IT in a couple decades, but back in the late '90s/ early '00s, all the conference tables at the companies I worked for, had Ethernet ports built into the table towards the center, and a switch mounted under the table so that everyone could just plug in. Did they stop making those tables once WiFi became ubiquitous?
Yes, they stopped. The ports were never sufficient, people always wanted to move the table around, and the cables and connectors in the table were always breaking.
Besides, there are always people far from the table.
It’s true, they used to be more available and then they stopped making those tables for those reasons (and they were more expensive).
Yes, in a conference room setting with more than 3 people it’s better to have wifi, no disagreement there. In google’s case here it sounds like they’d bring a mobile hotspot in so everyone could see the documents together, which is not ideal but would work.
Still, they’d have ethernet for the video sharing so they could just put a router in each conference room (a huge pain to admin, but - it’s google) and everyone gets wifi in the conference room and no one is very slightly inconvenienced.
I can tell that you’re being sarcastic. But if I’m playing ranked match on my phone, it’s always with an Ethernet dongle. Way more reliable and definitely lower latency.
It’s absolutely making do. Having to plug an Ethernet cable in every time you take your laptop to someone else’s office, break room or conference room simply doesn’t work. Offices aren’t designed for it.
My last job was with a Fortune 100 technical company in a sales position. No one used a docking station and no one bothered with an Ethernet cable. Neither did any of the customers we dealt with. People with desktop computers were wired up but most everyone else used wifi all the time.
Not my last job with a Fortune 100 company. Nearly all of us used wifi all the time. Our engineering and software development groups did use desktop computers with Gig E though.
Sorry to hear your company doesn’t care about productivity.
My company produces networking equipment and actually knows how to implement reliable wireless and wired networks. If your company’s wifi network is unstable perhaps hiring a competent network design and implementation company would have been more cost effective than throwing more equipment at the problem.
Lordy, I ain’t never heard about one of them before. You’re a genius!
Now look around your office and see how many people are using them. There’s not a single person in my sales office, whether sales or engineering that bothers with a dongle because we actually have a well designed, fast wifi network. It’s called “reliability” and you and your company should look that up.
From the responses here it sounds like many companies need to do the same.
What if I want to move my laptop around the office, say for example to make a presentation, or work in a different area? If I’m just working on some documents online, I don’t need a fast connection, just 30-50Mbit is plenty enough for pretty much everything, including video calls etc
And what you’re telling me you never use a mobile at work? You still need a signal to make/receive regular phone calls
That’s true, which is why the article mentions one of the things googlers are doing is using their phone as a hotspot.
Y’see the phone gets it’s internet from the cell tower. It then passes the internet to the laptop via a local (i.e. 2 feet) wifi or bluetooth connection.
That’s an entirely different thing than enterprise-wide wifi. And if the building was blocking cell phone signals - well, first of all I’d be impressed, and secondly they would tear it down.
Don’t most of (maybe all) dell and lenovo laptops come with ethernet ports by default ?
And nowadays, with thunderbolt docking stations, you have more or less every connection available anyway.
If ethernet is not an option, you’re just wasting time. Ethernet-to-USB dongles are cheap and plentiful.
It’s crazy that people with no experience with it have no idea why anyone would want to fuss with a direct wired connection when it’s objectively faster and more stable in every metric possible.
Assumptions, assumptions… My company is a communications company and actually produces networking equipment. Almost no one uses Ethernet because we have the knowledge and experience to implement reliable wifi. Perhaps your company should hire us since they’ve done such a bad job with their own implementation.
Conference rooms, yes. Break rokms, yes. Offices? No. Use a docking station? Are you working solely from your laptop screen or do you dock and use monitors mouse and keyboard? Generally, there’s ethernet attached, too.
Conference rooms should have ethernet connected to the USB-C dongle that’s attached to the TV and the Jabra or whatever alternative you use.
Wouldn’t want to take my laptop to the break room, I go there to take a break from work, not continue it in a different setting.
I’ll agree on going to someone else’s office, or using your laptop in a meeting where someone else is connected up, but that’s where Wi-Fi works as the back-up.
Lol! One Ethernet cable in a conference room? What if someone else is using it? Next you’ll proudly state that you carry an Ethernet switch everywhere you go. But, you be you.
Why do all thing need to look like these soulless glass metal and concrete blobs. Like bruh, why not build something cool lime a Roman Temple, European Castle, Viking Longhouse, Ancient Chinese Pagoda …
Those would be far more expensive to produce, needing specific skilled craftsmen. Not that glass production is easy, but compared to hand-carved wood and stone the labor hours alone is a staggering difference.
Epic (software company) has a really cool campus near Madison, WI where all of the buildings are different styles of architecture. One of them is a giant dairy barn.
I’m pretty sure the problem is the shape and reflections. This type of design creates echoes from many directions which makes it harder to pick up the signal at a distance
That was my interest in the story. Technology is so ingrained in our lives. It’s weird more furniture doesn’t have power chargers and other cords better designed into them. It’s weird our houses and electrical codes haven’t caught up.
But this is just a huge step back. Unless I’m unaware of lots of other new and old buildings with similar issues.
No, please do not start adding electrical components to furniture en mass.
If you do, I give it 1, maybe 2 generations, until furniture is partially subsidized by tech companies and it becomes niche to NOT have a “smart couch”.
Funny you mention the smart couch because that’s the type of furniture that seems to come with USB charging stations a lot nowadays. But I hope most smart home devices remain a niche for a while. The open source and crafting community around them is pretty amazing and I’d hate to see it getting literally sideshelved for smart home prefabs.
In my country, from what I observed, not many study tables and work tables with power outlets. 1 may say, “Add usb-c sockets too.” But the future is hard to predict. Will there be usb-d? Will 150-watt charging be the norm for phones? The safe thing to do is just outlets. Power bricks for phones are cheap anyway.
Agreed. My work desk is barely four years old, and already its integrated USB-A ports and Qi 1 charger are outdated and basically useless to me. I’d prefer not having them. The power outlet is still fine though.
The ideal way to handle this would be to add an EM absorbing material to the ceilings. The reflections off the ceilings are causing self-interference, and because it’s curved and complex, standard noise correction doesn’t work.
To support MU-MIMO / beamforming (multipath signals for multiple devices) they could also just add more flat surfaces inside the ceilings to make radio reflections/echoes less complex so that the signal processing doesn’t get overwhelmed when the source is some distance away.
Plain absorbing material removes interference but doesn’t let you use MIMO tech as effectively, because the newer higher end routers can use those reflections to boost the signal
It’s a Google office building, they definitely considered Wi-Fi before building it but they made a mistake. Compared to that building in England that turned into a glass death ray I think this was a less obvious mistake.
Oh they for sure fucked up, I just mean that it was likely a mistake as opposed to them not caring. Pretty crazy for a huge corporation to overlook it though.
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