corporate network: wireless vs wired

Our office is getting a serious make over and we are looking into updating our network infrastructure. My idea was to just update our current cat5e cables to cat6 but my boss (not an IT guy) doesn't want to use cables anymore, he wants to go fully wireless.

My first concern was of course the speed, we have an art department who needs to transfer large graphic files from and to the server.

My boss main reason to go wireless is because he is afraid in couple of years a new cable standard is coming out and he has to redo all the wires.

So now I'm looking for arguments to convince him to still go for wires. Speed, security, continuity, ... The top reason for him would of course be the cost.

Any advice?

It's a network for about 25 people.

Solution 1:

Your boss is, imho, barking mad. For a start you still need to wire the building to provide a backbone for the wireless access points to connect to, and secondly wired connections are both more reliable and much faster than wireless.

As Julien suggests, these days you should probably look to do both anyway, and as xciter says, if you install modern cabling standards then these should have plenty of life in them - and more to the point, if your bosses theories about wired standards going out of date are true, then how does he propose to connect the wireless access points to the backbone if the standards change? And what happens when wireless standards go "out of date".

Solution 2:

I think we have the same boss, mine does this all the time when we setup regional offices :)

There are a couple good answers so far, 10GB is one, doing both wireless and wired is another. I'll throw in cost of getting wireless bridges for devices that aren't wireless like Voice over IP phones, Printer and Copier machines, etc. Another point is that you need a wire to do Power over Ethernet (POE), something that most VOIP implementations use.

What always ends up winning the argument in my case is the cost if he is wrong. If you're re-doing the entire office space, putting in Cat 6 now is going to be much less expensive compared to installing Cat 6 after the office space is already done. An electrician can usually wire up an office of 25 people in a day or two when everything is exposed. Compare that to the cost to come back later and retrofit network cables and it is going to cost a way more.

Solution 3:

Wireless declines in performance severely as a function of the number of clients connected. Also, you get 10-30x the speed over wire to begin with.

Solution 4:

Do both ? Wireless is nice when you want to take your computers into meetings. Gigabits wires transfers at 50MB/s, while wireless will never go faster than 50Mb/s...

I found it totally impossible to have a file server serving large photos (3MB avg.) over the wireless. Bring an access point, make a demo and that should convince your boss.

Solution 5:

I'm just repeating what other people have said, but point out to your boss that there have been more changes in wireless Ethernet standards (802.11 a -> b -> g -> n http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Protocols ) in recent years than there have in wired Ethernet 100Mb/s -> 1Gb/s (10Gb/s coming to the desktop in the future), and that the wiring you install now will support the coming future wired standard.

Perhaps your boss is speaking only from experience of a home wireless connection with 2 or 3 clients. You need to make him understand that setting up a reliable, performant, 'enterprise class' WLAN require much more work than simply bunging in a few access points.