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?"

Comments

Re:Um, no.

[Tiger4]

I agree that wired LAN is more secure than WiFi. But can't you do some pretty scary signal reconstruction by reading electromagnetic noise coming off your network cable? It's my understanding that this can be done from X yards away, through walls, whatever.
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.

Re:Um, no.

[swillden]

Now, I don't see much reason to string ethernet through people's homes, at least not most of the time.

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.

Re:Um, no.

[The -e**(i*pi)]

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.

Re:Um, no.

[cayenne8]

"If they really want in, they're going to get in. Most people's houses are going to be pretty easily accessible compared to trying to crack WPA wireless encryption."

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.

:-)

Re:No

[AK Marc]

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.