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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?"
Unless buildings are made of less concrete and brick. My school has a wireless network, but it's spotty due to the big maze of concrete and brick buildings. You only get a connection when the room you're in has a wireless bridge, but every room has a RJ45 port. There really is no question of signal strength when talking about wired networks.
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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.
Yeah, that moves your vulnerability away from the hobbyist tier and into the professional tier, but honestly, which one scares you more?
Guess you could always wrap your cable in tin-foil.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
The strangest was a friend who used a linksys router with the SSID "linksys" and WEP encryption, who lived next door to someone using the same SSID but no encryption. Oh yeah, the wireless network managers on various OS's had a field day with that one. Ethernet just doesn't have those problems, so it will always been needed when mobility is less important than reliability.
Palm trees and 8
Agreed. Just got a new house. CAT6/RJ45 is going into all rooms.
Not a wireless router on the grounds, and the notebooks wireless has its switch turned off.
Once it's secure, I'll use wireless.
So, I'll be using wired for the rest of my life.
The game is to incrementally push the consumer market into a series of screwed up proprietary drivers to push out open standards and ensure that only "enthusiasts" use open source.
It's possible that you're being paranoid on the drivers issue (sorry, don't mean to be insulting, but it's possible). However, I'm sure that the game is to incrementally push the consumer market to new devices. Many hardware companies do this-- they don't want to release a real solution all at once, but instead constantly release incremental improvements. The game is to get you to keep buying more hardware.
No, Ethernet isn't going anywhere, especially for "mom-and-pop" businesses. Why? If you have a small retail store with two cash registers, and your wireless connection acts up, you have -zero- income until it's fixed. That's pretty mission critical. On the other hand, if you're IBM, and some of your wireless goes flaky, IBM isn't going to shut down. A lot of people will be inconvenienced, but very few parts of a giant corporation are mission critical. If anything, I'd expect to see wireless at big businesses, where there's a ton of redundancy already (again, IBM is a prime example). Small businesses' computer systems are much more critical, so I can't imagine any successful small business using wireless anytime in the near future. I know that mine isn't!
I don't respond to AC's.
A single antenna can deal with 200+ computers.
It isn't an issue of numbers per antenna, it is view angles, polarization, signal propagation and blockages. 4 antennas per AP lets you set them at different locations (wired back to the switch) and at various inclination angles to be sure the signal covers the space you care about.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
In my apt building, someone just moved in and brought an 802.11n supported router with them. All of a sudden the 10 or so 802.11g routers in the building have all but stopped working. I used to be able to pick up my wireless connection anywhere in the building, but now I can't see it at all if I'm more than two rooms away and the connection constantly drops. I've talked to some of my neighbours and they have been having the same difficulties.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Wireless is far more secure than wired. To listen on your wired network all I have to do is get access to a cable. To listen on your WPA-secured wireless network I have to get access to a copy of your WPA key (assuming PSK for simplicity, but similar difficulties apply to the other modes).
One of those you can do from the parking lot (or with a good antenna, quite a good distance away). One you need physical access for.
Thanks, but I'll run encryption over my wires before I'll switch to trusting the same broadcast to everyone in the area.
Rofl, is network security the issue at that point? Once they're in your house they'll just jack your nifty computer, NAS, media center, etc. The security of your network doesn't matter. They can just pick up your box, take it home, and run a simple brute force cracker against it.
Now you could say that that argument doesn't apply to businesses but I'd say that the computers that were stolen from Wells Fargo a few years back would beg to differ. At the time I was a Wells Fargo client and I received a nice letter about how my personal information may be among the thousands of records on the stolen machines... I obviously left Wells Fargo. What kind of bank lets someone walk out the door with a computer!?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Not true. I could drive up in a surveillance van parked a couple doors away with extremely sensitive gear and actually tap into your electrical system and read what is going on with your system. Not to mention EM transmissions. Wired networks decrease this ability, and fiber all but eliminates it without some very sophisticated splicing tools. All in all, a wired network as far as security goes does improve it. The only way wireless will be secure if the wireless link itself is secured via encryption, and the data passed to the transmitting wireless point is already encrypted via vpn or some other link level encryption. That way even if the wireless link itself is broken, the data itself still has to be cracked. Another thing with wireless is that if someone is sniffing your traffic, you have no way to know. With cat5/6, you could if required do weekly/monthly checks on the wire to find if anything is suspicious. With fiber, you could know usually on the spot that it was spliced and someone had patched in for snooping purposes.
It looks like you need to repaint your apartment. Try this :http://www.safelivingtechnologies.ca/RF/Products_RF_Shielding_Paint_HSF54.htm Maybe if you just paint the wall that faces that neighbor, you will still get your signal down in the lobby.
We are all just people.
How do you get the WPA key from the parking lot? Please, do tell. You can become quite famous and probably make some good money if you can answer this question.
Just as soon as someone finds the answer to that, or more likely, finds a way to get around needing it (let's not insult each other and pretend it will never happen), they can have the fame, I don't want it.
I understand your point, but it doesn't change the fact that, however strong you claim cryptosystem-X, I can still assert with 100% accuracy that running it over wires instead of broadcast RF greatly improves that strength.
Security is one reason I prefer wired over wireless... and since most of my networked equipment stays put in one room, extra cables are non-issue.
The other reason is reliability: I can count on my 100BaseTX network delivering 7-9MB/s with very little chance of external influences causing my link to either slow down or die. With wireless, I am at the mercy of nearby interference sources including cordless phones, electrical appliances, various gadgets and other wireless networking equipment, any of which can cause the link to do a number of undesirable things from retraining to going down.
There are two reasons I got WiFi: 1) my previous router was dying and 2) I got a laptop. I only use WiFi with the laptop but whenever I do large transfers, I still hook it up to Ethernet since it is ~5X as fast and never goes down. 802.11g is good enough for internet access and moderate file copying with my two laptops so I most likely won't be bothering with 802.11n until my 802.11g router either dies or becomes a broadband bottleneck.
BTW, it is possible to eavesdrop on Ethernet without touching the cables by capturing EMI from the UTP cables - there was a proof of concept for this some years ago where they managed to reconstruct a B&W image from a VGA cable by placing the receiver antenna ~1m from the cable using commodity components. That's pretty far from monitoring from a van parked a few houses down the road but it certainly proves the feasibility.
I don't think you could do that with a network cable. CRT monitors emit tons of RF, at very low frequencies (which propagate much better through walls). They have practically no shielding. UTP cable behaves as a transmission line (so it doesn't radiate RF all over the place), and uses pretty small signal levels. With very good equipment and a low-EMI environment, you might be able to do it from 1 or 2 meters away, but not much farther.
Contrary to popular belief, Faraday cages do little to stop professional snoopers. Unless you put all your stuff into an RF test chamber with no openings whatsoever, the effectiveness of your shielding will be pretty low. Professional spies can probably overcome the 10-20dB attenuation that you would get, just by using better equipment.
In most cases, it is far easier to gain access by purely physical methods. They can open doors, replace or bribe security guards, install surveillance equipment, and so on. There is no real way for any given individual to prevent any of that, so the whole argument is pretty pointless.
Um, no.
Where's the "-1 Wrong" modifier?! Actually, this one is wrong for so many reasons I don't know where to start.
The simplest thing to point out if that if you use a one-time pad more than once (and you're going to send more than one packet in 10 seconds, I assure you), you lose the security properties of the one-time pad. So all your syncing (which is obviously going to be a huge pain in the butt) is wasted since you didn't get the thing that it was supposed to get you.
OTP are essentially useless in practice. 99% of practical systems that claim to use OTPs actually don't. Worse, OTPs actually *don't* provide many critically-needed security properties and they magnify some vulnerabilities. (It's easier for a MITM to flip a specific bit of a packet protected by an OTP than for a packet protected by DES.)