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On The State of Wireless
There's a short piece on Mindjack about the state of wireless. Actually, the piece is a minireview of a piece that Nicholas Carroll produced at Hastings Research. Yes, it's a PDF, and yes, it costs money. Having read through it, it's also totally worth it, especially if you are an organization that does basically anything with wireless.
One of the major reasons networks like Sprint, AT&T and MCI can't bring programs like ION(rest in piece, you were a great idea, and deserved better. My friends who have the service will fight tooth and nail to keep it even though Sprint is canceling it) to residential businesses is because the "Baby Bells" own the local loops. I know that both Sprint and AT&T are watching wireless very closely. Both have been burned trying first generation fixed wireless and have had to stop offering the service because 1G wireless is just to unreliable. I'm not sure about MCI, but I would be suprised if they're not on top of it as well.
With the next generation of wireless, we just may see some viable offerings from these companies for broadband. If, and this is a big if, it can be done before the Bells roll out DSL on a wide scale. The race is on, and the last mile is at stake.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Having said that. Not all is lost. As mentioned before on /., WiFi seems to be going places and nicely filling the gap between a low-bandwidth voice and short message service and wireless broadband.
On encryption however the comment is way off the mark. The between choice encryption or not does not equate wether or not there is legal intercept! The authorities need a place to get the bytes that you communicate. That place does not need to be the air-interface, in fact it is better to pick it off a router in the service provider's network. You and your wireless provider can agree on an encryption scheme that will keep your bits from being snooped by anyone with an antenna and too much spare time. (OK, well not your and your SP per-se but first the parties in the standards fora agree and that will enable a contract on privacy between you and your SP.) In fact as customers get more tech-savvy they will demand that the contract with their service provider will make statements about privacy of their data. It is then up to the service provider to keep their data safe (except from cops with warrants) even from their own employees.
Before this post gets downgraded to -infinity, think for 2 seconds (or 2 minutes if you are just waking up). This is not a technical problem, good security technology is readily available. It is a legal and commercial problem!
Some problems can not be solved just by looking at the technology, if you look at the legal and commercial framework in which services are deployed you find that you can solve some issues there as well.
How difficult would it be to convince a court that you were damaged because your service provider did not safeguard your data and somebody used it against you to harm you financially or your standing in the community...
OK, on the first case the service provider with try and claim that the technology is not available to secure this. BS On the second they will claim that the government has ordered them to leave this non-secure. Hmm, in some countries they have a point. The governments around the world are feeling the pressure from citizens organisations demanding more privacy.
So the government will listen if one can demonstrate that they can get what they want (legal intercept) and the citizens can also get what they want (privacy).
think about it.