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 clients 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 radios/access points to have this many devices.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.
hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true.
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.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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: www.digi.com/products/networking/…/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.
hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Wow that’s crazy!
optissima@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
for usb-c? $10 each, nonbulk, on aliexpress is what I see, a worthwhile investment for a farm like this