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Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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The moral is – Wi-fi intensity study should be part of modern architecture.
I'm all for 👍 architecture. Just consider Wi-fi before building it.
For this structure, I wonder if the best solution is – Just add more mesh points. Not elegant but what if there's no better way?
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 My work desk is barely four years old, and already its integrated USB-A ports and Qi 1 charger are outdated and basically useless to me.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.
Your batteries last longer with trickle charging. If you're at the desk most of the day, USB-A and Qi 1 is perfect, and should be adequate for another 5-10.
Neither of my last two phones came with a USB-A cable, nor did my wireless mouse or keyboard. The flush Qi 1 charger doesn’t even work because my camera bump is too big. Also, from what I’ve heard Qi 2 should produce far less heat while charging, which makes Qi 1 worse for battery life.
Sure, I could “make it work”, but I’d be happier with two electrical outlets or even nothing than the basically useless wireless charger and ports I have now.
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
https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/articles/massive-mimo-and-beamforming-the-signal-processing-behind-the-5g-buzzwords.html
I thought of interference too. If the Wi-fi was bouncing all over, there may be many areas with destructive interference – weak or no Wi-fi.
I fucking love 👍🏻 architecture, gotta be one of my favorite genders
The two genders: engineers and architects
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.
Obviously they didn't do a Wi-fi intensity study.
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.
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