Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For Beautiful Network Cable Trays? 250
First time accepted submitter murpht2 writes "My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners. We're now engaged in a significant upgrade to our IT systems and we have a clash: the IT team leader wants to run network cable in trays hanging from the ceiling so all the client computers have high-speed access to the new servers; the guy in charge of the office design wants to keep things looking clean and the cable trays don't fit the bill. We're in a building made entirely of bricks and concrete, so we lack some of the between-the-wall spaces that are used in other settings. Any suggestions for beautiful cable trays or other alternatives?"
Re:use wifi (Score:5, Informative)
Wifi is.. nice, but I wouldn't use it in a full office environment for everyday access. It's a big brick room, lots of computers, lots of interference. Not only is WiFi slower, but you end up with less throughput as interference requires random packets to be retransmitted.
Beautiful to the eyes, but what about the ears? (Score:4, Informative)
"My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners."
I'm happy for you that your office is pretty. But where do you go when you need to stop "collaborating" and get some actual work done? Or when the group at the bench across from yours is "collaborating" so loudly that your group can't hear each other talk?
Open floor plans may be great for some jobs, but they are poison for work that requires concentration, especially when that work also entails remote collaboration. If you find this isn't true, I'd like to hear more -- especially about how you handle conference-call participation when there's a loud discussion nearby.
(Yeah, I know I'll take an "off-topic" hit to my karma for this. Sorry; it's a hot button at the moment.)
Re:802.11ac (Score:5, Informative)
Re:use wifi (Score:5, Informative)
The bigger problem is that having many nodes means having many collisions. The aggregate capacity of the WiFi channel goes down as the number of nodes increases. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSMA/CA [wikipedia.org]