That would be problematic on many levels.
Comment on Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”
kinttach@lemm.ee 7 months ago
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.
Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
cooljacob204@kbin.social 7 months ago
Not really. Radios can be tuned if you're talking about interference.
Helix@feddit.de 7 months ago
why is that?
Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
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.
Helix@feddit.de 7 months ago
You can reduce transmit power and enable meshing and roaming in conjunction.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 7 months ago
This is a very common approach, as a meshnet, of course.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 7 months ago
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
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
I’m not even sure that would be a bad solution for us. Can something like a Raspberry Pi work as a hotspot?
I wonder what exactly it is that’s messing with the signal.
watson387@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
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.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 7 months ago
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.
towerful@programming.dev 7 months ago
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 piCanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
[deleted]towerful@programming.dev 7 months ago
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
Zworf@beehaw.org 7 months ago
Which is also what you want really, if you have everything on WiFi. High density setups with really small cells.