Future of Wi-Fi

An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek looks at the The high hurdles facing Wi-Fi. Sure it's got promise but if overcrowded spectrum isn't destined to crimp its growth, it'll need better technology and regulatory help from the FCC."

Comments

The FCC is going to screw us

[krog]

The writeup is right; the FCC will need to give Wi-Fi a chance before it catches on. And the FCC won't, because the money-rich and power-hungry wireless companies and other broadcasting firms always manage to win somehow. If the FCC were interested in crawling out from beneath the desk of Big Business, then Wi-Fi would already be in motion.

Yeah.....the FCC, they'll show us the way!!!

[billmaly]

Oh yes please...get the Feds involved...everything they deal with turns golden, and smells nice too!!! Maybe RIAA has a few points to add to the mix as well. Stir in a Congressional sub committee or two, mention that pr0n will fill the airwaves, and you gotch yoself a recipe for a WINNING standard.

Reading too much in to Wi-Fi.

[laserjet]

I think this article reads too much into current Wi-Fi. All these people say that this and this needs to be done for Wi-Fi for it to grow, but it is growing at a furious pace already.

I think they overestimate what the current Wi-Fi is for. It is so limited, than market demand will certainly open up new avenues for wireless networking. This is how the tech industry is. Don't expect to be buying the same ol' 802.11b technology that you use today in three years - it won't happen. We always have new stuff.

That's what I hate about articles like this - they always state all the things wrong with a technology that we already know about, and they forget that when the demand rises for high-scalability and secure networks, then something will come to the rescue. If we can't get more bandwidth from the FCC, then they will have to figure out someway to get more out of the bandwidth.

I use Wi-Fi for what it is made for TODAY: medium to small networks where security is not paramount and mobility is.

And I, for one, will watch the great economy work and create new solutions as people are willing and needing to buy them.

why are we securing it this way?

[Raleel]

I will probably get beaten down for this, but it seems to me that integrating encryption directly into the media is probably not the right approach for this. There _are_ systems that do work rather well. Let's take, for instance, a system like they have in hotels, where you have to log into a web page before you are even routed. Combine this with the simple rule of "never put your wireless net behind your main firewall" and you can sleep a little better at night.

Design a system that has protections beyond something built into the media. The medias function is _not_ to provide security, but rather to communicate.

Re:why are we securing it this way?

[Bodhammer]

There are a couple of reasons why security at the media layer is being looked at for 802.11, specifically 802.11i (Task Group I) is specifying use of encryption such as AES at the physical layer. A main driver is that low powered devices like phones, PDAs, etc. do not have the computing power to do this in software and do robust encryption at high data rates. Adding security at the chip level will help to keep power (cpu and battery) requirements down. To respond to your point about firewalls, that is hard to do and still provide public access hotspots. You are right that protecting things at a high level is a good thing (tm) but you still need protection of the link itself.

WiFi

[Jacer]

I recently drove to ohio from the minneapolis, long drive, with me and several of my friends, well, I brought my laptop and a fairly decent sized antena (omni 8) when we got near a city, it'd connect and i'd check my email every few hours, and have maybe 10-20 minutes of uninterupped internet access. from the hotel, i could use an access point either in the hotel, or from the business acrossed the street (the business had a bigger pipe) and the same scenario on the way home... This is a step closer to uninteruppted access, however the spectrum is fairly clogged, and you get a lot of interference, and many people like me who want free net access. After these bugs are worked out, the only thing we have to worry about is me watching divx while driving... "Oh I love this par...*screech ka-boom*"

Re:mmm....wireless

[clnelson]

Hmm. I'm reading that same article. Also over your Wi-Fi connection. Thanks. It IS pretty cool.

Re:Security?

[Lumpy]

setting up any of that is easy, the only thing that is more secure is the login type of system.

mac filtering is easy to circumvent. I demonstrated that last month to our security chief who was bragging about our corperate deployment of WiFi gear being "un-crackable" (at least he used the right term!) I was in the network within 30 minuts. Spoofing HIS MAC address and logging in with a Manager's login that I sniffed after cracking the WEP encryption... (Why they chose to use 64bit I have no idea)

granted, I sniffed it long enough to already have the WEP key and the manager's login password 3 days before at the end of a week long sniffing session. but I wanted the impact of having the login display that I was coming from HIS laptop.

it isn't protected you MUST treat 802.11 access like dial-up or internet login. dont trust it in any way shape or form.. consider everything that is on the wireless side to be highly hostile.

We now use HTTPS for the login screen and added many more features similar to that we use for internet side logins to the network. (SSH tunneling required on all)

WiFi cannot be Consumer-secure... same as if a consumer plop'ed a server on the internet... It'll be hacked and rooted in time without difficulty. nothing will ever change that short of adding transmitter fingerprint recognition or a rolling WEP code. every packet uses a different Key from a pool of 90 bajillion keys... but what happens when the key pools get out of sync?