Wireless Year in Review

Irish writes "The wireless world had some surprises last year. WLANs, with easy but unsecure bandwidth, may disrupt the adoption of regulated/limited 3G networks. DoCoMo's iMode surprised many gaining 27 million users while Europe was disappointing. This developerWorks article takes a look at the big wireless security stories of 2001 and tries to offer some predictions on the future."

Comments

Security in a wireless network

[buckrogers]

I think that the best way to use a wireless network is to merely use the WEP as a method to initially authenticate that users are allowed to connect to the wireless network.

Once people are on the wireless network, they come up against a firewall. They must use a VPN client to connect their computers to the network on the other side of the firewall. Any communications between clients also goes through the firewall.

Then and only then are you even close to safe. And some brainiac is probably already figuring out a way through both layers of encryption.

Interesting, but misleading

[SerpentMage]

I read the article and it missed several fundamental points.

1) SMS do not cost on average 30 cents USD. More like 10 cents EURO. This is by looking at the big carriers in Europe. But SMS is catching on because people thinking it is trendy and cool and IT KILLS TIME.

2) Imode is popular in Japan because of the problems with Internet in general. In Japan land lines are expensive and take a long time to get installed. Hence landline Internet access is not a viable solution. However IMode was priced right and the Japanese mentality "small is beautiful" works. Try that in Europe and North America and it will flop on its face. Europe and North America has cheap Internet and hence wants the full experience.

3) They are all missing the real reason why some wireless works and not others. It is COST and only COST. SMS is cheap in contrast to other wireless. IMode is cheap in contrast to others. WLan is cheap in contrast to 3-G or GPRS.

Hence all of the solutions have nothing to do with security, or coolness of the factors, but COST. If two wireless technologies beside each other were cheap then there is a different story to tell. But in wireless it is basically either cheap or expensive and the people go to droves to the cheap one.