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Does 802.11n Spell the 'End of Ethernet'?
alphadogg writes "Is the advent of the 802.11n wireless standard the 'end of Ethernet'... at least in terms of client access to the LAN? That's the provocative title, and thesis, of a new report in which the author began looking into the question when he heard a growing number of clients asking whether it was time to discontinue wired LAN deployments for connecting clients. Would 11n, the next generation high-throughput Wi-Fi, make the RJ45 connector in the office wall as obsolete as gaslights?"
I once got a call from a client who said her WiFi wasn't working in her study. When I got their I found she was using a bluetooth mouse, 2.4GHz cordless phone, Wireless video extension (also 2.4GHz), and cooking diner in her microwave (big 2.4GHz transmitter). This piece of spectrum will only take so much. She asked if changing to a 5.8GHz phone would help. I said probably not as most transmit from the base to the phone on 5.8Ghz and the phone transmits 2.4GHz back. (900MHz would be better). As we use more and more 2.4GHz wireless stuff the performance of WiFi will drop.
A 100MBPS wired network with a switch will outperform any wireless network for the foreseeable future.
its just what it sounds like.
a gas powered light.
before we had electricity alot of cities were piped with gas lines all over hell to run lighting. from the street pole lights to your home lights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_lighting
Theres still plenty of active gas lights around the world too. They don't burn out. (but might burn your house down) And they look kinda cool.
captcha - seared lol
Where X is 1 - 3 meters. If you are running a Must Be Secure network in a single cubicle of a hostile cubicle farm, or up against the wall of an apartment, you might have trouble. The vast majority of people are inherently secure, at least against this particular threat.
Guess you could always wrap your cable in tin-foil.
Shielded Twisted Pair will deal with this for you. It has been on the market for the past 2 or 3 decades. Maybe more.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I do. Media servers. Although the theoretical data rate of 802.11n is high enough for several HD video streams, in practice you only get a third of the theoretical data rate reliably, making it barely adequate for 1-2 streams. Start actually moving those files around to store, say, on a laptop drive for watching later, and you'll really find wireless inadequate.
You'll be fine, and 802.11n is probably way faster than any internet connection you might have.There are places in the world where that is not true today, where 100Mbps Internet connections are common. I expect we'll see that even in the US, as fiber-to-the-home initiatives are rolled out. There's one in my neck of the woods, called UTOPIA. Right now they're only providing 10Mbps (symmetric), but the plan is to ramp that up to 100Mbps in the future.
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The Gaslight was a technology used prior to the introduction of the electric light. The technology was used for street lighting as well as indoor lighting. Today the technology is still used in some historic areas as the old gas lights are still operational and the aesthetic is desired. There are still sources available for new gaslights and parts for old ones.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_lighting for a good writeup on the technology and photos of gaslight installations.
WPA/WPA2 is vulnerable to offline dictionary attacks. If the person setting up the access point was a gibbering idiot and didn't use strong passwords, it can be brute-forced. As far as I know, that's its only weakness.
Actually, twisted pair does a pretty good job of shielding itself. It's far easier to detect and reconstruct the video output to a computer monitor (CRT) and can be done from quite a distance (tens of metres). We did this in school once as a demonstration, using perhaps $50 of components from a supplier, $50 of common household items from Walmart and an old B&W television that was in scavanged from a storage locker. We made a simple directional antenna using a steel collander and were able to read a message displayed on the instructor's monitor: "This wouldn't work on an LCD screen"
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
ever hear of managed switches
they not only can require registration before turning on a port, but allow only one specific mac per port and either notify you, record all the data, and or shut off any port that is doing anything funy with mac addresses.
they also have a VLAN capacility that makes virtual switches connecting any ports in your whole building so noone but those on those specific ports can listen in.
and hacking a CISCO switch is no easy task.
Maybe if by WPA you really mean WPA2. WPA is not much more secure than WEP :)
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I dunno about that....at least in the Southeastern part of the US. Once you get past the locked doors, you run the risk of dogs and the inhabitants with their guns drawn and ready to fire.
Somehow I think sitting out in a car a distance away trying to hack the wireless is a little safer. It does and the very least, make the 'head shot' a little harder.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The wireless solution is. Physical access is typically very easy to obtain. Much easier than cracking AES or finding a way to get a copy of the WPA PSK or an account in the EAP server.
Physical access is useless in a properly configured wired network. Have you ever heard of 802.1x? It's still considered a part of the best that wireless has to offer for security. Do you know what 802.1x was created for? Wired networks. If you properly configure 802.1x on a wired network, you not only need physical access, but you need to authenticate to be able to reach anything except the authentication server. You will get no broadcasts forwarded to your port for sniffing. You will not be able to send anything out of the network. You don't need encryption if you don't forward a single packet to that port other than the deny messages from the authentication server. Of course, you can encrypt over ethernet as well, but it isn't necessary with a properly configured network, even without physical security to the ports.
Wireless took Ethernet's leftovers and did the best they could, and it is still less than Ethernet. Equally secure networks *always* leave the wired network more secure. Anyone that thinks otherwise doesn't know how to configure a wired network.
Learn to love Alaska
It's not just about ease of access, it's also about detection. It's very easy to break a window to get into a building, but it is also very easy to detect that type on intrusion. It may be more difficult to crack a WiFi connection, but it also not as obvious when someone is sniffing your packets.
And in any case any security comes down to the weakest link. If that link is physical access, when it comes to the point that I'm in your house standing in front of your computer, how is your security aided by using 802.11n over ethernet? (Other than one less wire for me to unplig before taking your system?)
It seems to me, wireless networking has all the security issues of ethernet and then some.
Only if you use an STP compatible switch (rare) otherwise you have just created a giant aerial. That was just one of the things I routinely found when I was a consultant, people figured the cables were more expensive and said shielded so they MUST be better.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Now wait a minute. I can sit along the street and with some antennas, you wouldn't even be able to see me from your building. In that case wired is safer. When you look at all the pros and cons verses security, and weed out what would effect both types of network, Wired beats wireless hands down.
Saying that someone could break in and steal the computers doesn't mean throwing any other thought of securing the network away. It could mean that you might be hacked by someone who would never break into anything or steal a physical object. I mean why even lock the house if they could break in anyways?
Your neighbor might never think of breaking into your house and stealing something from you. But he might not think twice about hacking into a wireless network that he can pick up from the safety of his own home. A lot of times, to the criminal, it is how likely they would get caught and how easy it would be to get away with it. How likely is it that you or I would be caught in the privacy of our own home with a wireless signal? How hard would it be compared to breaking into a house and stealing the computers?
From the Wi-Fi Alliance's Draft 2.0 FAQ (PDF file):
- I heard 802.11n can cause interference problems with other Wi-Fi networks. Is this true?
Specifically, Draft 2.0 access points are supposed to switch from 40 MHz to 20 MHz when it detects an 802.11b/g neighbor. However, according to a SmallNetBuilder blog entry, some early Draft 2.0 certified gear don't implement this protocol correctly.In some configurations, 802.11n products can interfere with other Wi-Fi networks when they are trying to achieve the best performance. However, all products that are Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 802.11n draft 2.0 are required to implement a good neighbor protocol that helps ensure that interference is not a problem. Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 802.11n draft 2.0 products will operate in a manner designed to cause the least interference.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...