Yeah, high density APs that can handle a lot of clients exist, in theory…but in practice you can’t expect many devices to be simultaneously in-use. Having this many clients per square foot? SNR for those phones must be terrible. Amazing it works.
Don’t know why you’re getting down voted. It is indeed impressive that all those WiFi radios are working that close together. There’s another wall of phones behind it, double! Probably more in the room too.
There’s gotta be 100 phones on that first wall alone, plus double it, so 200. More in the room? Other rooms? Hundreds of phones, all screaming out WiFi, trying to connect.
From a networking perspective, impressive indeed. Those phones must hate life.
Edit: heck I bet most consumer grade routers DHCP servers would choke after the first 255 clients (probably much sooner) just from having to change subnets.
I’m not a networkologist though so IDK for sure
The phones are all wired, so I could imagine they receive LAN via USB-C. That would make the whole setup not that difficult.
On the other side, these phones don’t need to be all active at the same time. I could imagine that they just switch on the Wifi while interacting with one of the phones.
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that.
Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true. Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?
As for turning WiFi on and off, that could work too, didn’t think of that.
But I feel like maybe not? Surely the apps would complain or get suspicious of only connecting to make a quick comment and then disconnecting again, every single time. Or maybe not.
I just imagine companies trying to fight this somehow, and that would be a suspicious fingerprint.
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true. Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?
You don’t actually need to adapt out of it. There are Ethernet-over-USB switches that output to USB directly. So all you need are USB cables, and you need them anyway to provide power. So all you are doing (compared to just power over USB) is to use an Ethernet-over-USB switch instead of an USB PSU.
The one they advertise on that website has 24 USB outputs, but I’m sure you can find bigger ones. And from them you only need a single patch cable to the next proper switch.
There’s about 100 phones on the panel and another 100 on the other side, so that would be maybe 8 or 9 of these switches, all wired together into a 10 port switch and that one then is fed by a single input line.
The upside for a setup like this is that the bandwidth requirements per device are minuscule. It’s a lot of devices, but they aren’t doing anything for most of the time. That’s quite the opposite of what we usually plan for when designing a regular network where if we have hundreds of devices we expect them to actually do something as well.
The product you linked is for USB devices to be able I be used over a network. One common use-case is getting hardware license tokens (on a USB dongle) accessible to a virtual machine…especially when that VM can move dynamically between hosting servers for load-balancing or fail-over.
The closest I’ve seen is a cart intended for tablets or Chromebooks that gives 60W PD + Ethernet over one USB-C port. So something similar exists. I think with this though, you had to bring your own Ethernet switch.
I would love to see something like that, but with active cooling and 180-240W PD. And probably dual L6-30s, if not more, to power the damn thing.
But even if you can’t find an off-the-shelf solution for this, it’s trivial to DIY one. One USB controller can feed 127 devices maximum. You’ll obviously need powered USB hubs for that, but that’s not an issue. This works because when you enable USB tethering, the phone can be in USB device mode while getting IP over USB. The main issue here is the routes, but if you use an app that creates a local VPN on the phone to capture the traffic you can then tunnel that traffic through the tethering connection, using it in the reverse direction. Now you only need a PC with many USB controllers (easily done using PCI-E extension cards) and you are done.
Setup is a little complicated, but you only need to configure it once and then copy it over to all the phones.
I would love to see something like that, but with active cooling and 180-240W PD. And probably dual L6-30s, if not more, to power the damn thing.
I haven’t seen any devices so far that can deliver high wattage on multiple ports at the same time, so I think the PD is probably the bigger limit.
Especially considering the price of the phones they are running. Even if they are trashed second-hand ones they will be much more expensive than the adapters.
Edit: heck I bet most consumer grade routers DHCP servers would choke after the first 255 clients (probably much sooner) just from having to change subnets. I’m not a networkologist though so IDK for sure
As somewhat of a networkologist I can say that most home routers use the 192.168.something.x IP range. With a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, this means that you could put 253 devices on the network (2 of the IPs aren’t usable for devices). After that, you would have to change your subnet mask to something larger, which is easily doable in router config. However, a home router likely wouldn’t work well with even just 100 devices connected. WiFi is also half duplex, meaning it can only send or receive, but not both at the same time. This would make the speed unbearably slow. You would really need multiple access points to have this many devices.
My previous router (ASUS) crapped out at about 30 clients on 2.4GHz. New one (TP-Link Archer) is doing fine with somewhere between 30 and 40 depending on whether some clients connect to 2.4/5/6GHz, and about 50 clients total once I count wired and docker containers.
From a networking perspective I’m impressed.
Yeah, high density APs that can handle a lot of clients exist, in theory…but in practice you can’t expect many devices to be simultaneously in-use. Having this many clients per square foot? SNR for those phones must be terrible. Amazing it works.
Don’t know why you’re getting down voted. It is indeed impressive that all those WiFi radios are working that close together. There’s another wall of phones behind it, double! Probably more in the room too.
There’s gotta be 100 phones on that first wall alone, plus double it, so 200. More in the room? Other rooms? Hundreds of phones, all screaming out WiFi, trying to connect.
From a networking perspective, impressive indeed. Those phones must hate life.
Edit: heck I bet most consumer grade routers DHCP servers would choke after the first 255 clients (probably much sooner) just from having to change subnets. I’m not a networkologist though so IDK for sure
The phones are all wired, so I could imagine they receive LAN via USB-C. That would make the whole setup not that difficult.
On the other side, these phones don’t need to be all active at the same time. I could imagine that they just switch on the Wifi while interacting with one of the phones.
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true. Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?
As for turning WiFi on and off, that could work too, didn’t think of that. But I feel like maybe not? Surely the apps would complain or get suspicious of only connecting to make a quick comment and then disconnecting again, every single time. Or maybe not.
I just imagine companies trying to fight this somehow, and that would be a suspicious fingerprint.
You don’t actually need to adapt out of it. There are Ethernet-over-USB switches that output to USB directly. So all you need are USB cables, and you need them anyway to provide power. So all you are doing (compared to just power over USB) is to use an Ethernet-over-USB switch instead of an USB PSU.
Here’s the first one I found on google: https://www.digi.com/products/networking/infrastructure-management/usb-connectivity/usb-over-ip/anywhereusb
The one they advertise on that website has 24 USB outputs, but I’m sure you can find bigger ones. And from them you only need a single patch cable to the next proper switch.
There’s about 100 phones on the panel and another 100 on the other side, so that would be maybe 8 or 9 of these switches, all wired together into a 10 port switch and that one then is fed by a single input line.
The upside for a setup like this is that the bandwidth requirements per device are minuscule. It’s a lot of devices, but they aren’t doing anything for most of the time. That’s quite the opposite of what we usually plan for when designing a regular network where if we have hundreds of devices we expect them to actually do something as well.
This is USB over IP, not IP over USB.
The product you linked is for USB devices to be able I be used over a network. One common use-case is getting hardware license tokens (on a USB dongle) accessible to a virtual machine…especially when that VM can move dynamically between hosting servers for load-balancing or fail-over.
The closest I’ve seen is a cart intended for tablets or Chromebooks that gives 60W PD + Ethernet over one USB-C port. So something similar exists. I think with this though, you had to bring your own Ethernet switch.
I would love to see something like that, but with active cooling and 180-240W PD. And probably dual L6-30s, if not more, to power the damn thing.
Then take this one: https://m.made-in-china.com/product/USB-to-Ethernet-8-Ports-Switch-2079770325.html
But even if you can’t find an off-the-shelf solution for this, it’s trivial to DIY one. One USB controller can feed 127 devices maximum. You’ll obviously need powered USB hubs for that, but that’s not an issue. This works because when you enable USB tethering, the phone can be in USB device mode while getting IP over USB. The main issue here is the routes, but if you use an app that creates a local VPN on the phone to capture the traffic you can then tunnel that traffic through the tethering connection, using it in the reverse direction. Now you only need a PC with many USB controllers (easily done using PCI-E extension cards) and you are done.
Setup is a little complicated, but you only need to configure it once and then copy it over to all the phones.
I haven’t seen any devices so far that can deliver high wattage on multiple ports at the same time, so I think the PD is probably the bigger limit.
Wow that’s crazy!
for usb-c? $10 each, nonbulk, on aliexpress is what I see, a worthwhile investment for a farm like this
Especially considering the price of the phones they are running. Even if they are trashed second-hand ones they will be much more expensive than the adapters.
I can pretty confidently say that usn-c wasn’t used in this photo - posts from around 10 years ago indicate that these are iPhone 5c’s.
Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Ethernet over USB works irrespective of the shape of the plug.
As somewhat of a networkologist I can say that most home routers use the 192.168.something.x IP range. With a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, this means that you could put 253 devices on the network (2 of the IPs aren’t usable for devices). After that, you would have to change your subnet mask to something larger, which is easily doable in router config. However, a home router likely wouldn’t work well with even just 100 devices connected. WiFi is also half duplex, meaning it can only send or receive, but not both at the same time. This would make the speed unbearably slow. You would really need multiple access points to have this many devices.
Don’t all phones do IPv6 nowadays?
My previous router (ASUS) crapped out at about 30 clients on 2.4GHz. New one (TP-Link Archer) is doing fine with somewhere between 30 and 40 depending on whether some clients connect to 2.4/5/6GHz, and about 50 clients total once I count wired and docker containers.