WLAN Equipment Considerations

Wi-Fi equipment vendors are governed by several factors that dictate
how the products we buy evolve with respect to our growing list of
mobile applications. In order more fully to understand how these considerations apply, it is important to look at the factors pertinent for the
equipment we purchase, such as:

Security—In equipment development, security lacks both design and
configuration. Wireless equipment vendors are working feverishly to
design super levels of authentication and encryption schemes into
wireless devices. The idea is to incorporate more secure methods for
data transfers through the wireless equivalent privacy (WEP) encryption
standard. Although WEP is easily defeated by any hacker with
enough determination, using it (even with all its problems) is the
least you can do to prevent hacker attacks. A newer generation (WEP
2) promises to incorporate more secure functionality, but the likelihood
of its really being a hacker obstacle is low, since it is based on an
easily defeated encryption mode. You will find most wireless equipment
vendors support WEP, but the real truth is that you need to
employ additional layers of protection, at a minimum, to safeguard
your WLAN. One possible way to protect yourself is to incorporate
IPsec virtual private network (VPN) functionality into your WLAN to
achieve more powerful encryption, authentication, and key-management
technologies. However, with each added level of security, you
will degrade your overall performance unless you upgrade to a faster
incarnation, such as from 802.11b to 802.11a.


Cost—Deploying wireless networks is far more cost effective than
laying wired LANs into new areas of your corporate facilities. Not
only can you move freely throughout large areas of your production
facilities, but you eliminate the cost of expanding your wireless infrastructure
as your company grows. Wireless 802.11b devices are so
comparable in price that it doesn’t cost you significantly more to use a
WLAN as opposed to a wired LAN. When you factor in the cost of
installing and deploying a wired LAN against little or no cost of
installing a WLAN, the wireless network ends up costing you less.

Network management—So that you can manage your wireless network
more efficiently, many wireless equipment vendors provide you
with the ability to monitor and control the functionality of your wireless
networking equipment remotely through easy Web-based interfaces.
Using these settings, you have all the necessary inputs to
ensure that you maintain proper network operation; however very
few vendors of wireless LANs support advanced settings that allow
you independent control of all the most important elements of your
WLAN. Ultimately, your WLAN should support simple network management
protocol (SNMP) so that you can manage TCP/IP internet work connections. SNMP is an effective tool that can be used to
remotely monitor and control a wireless interface card’s settings for
both routing and radio frequency tables. SNMP remote links can be
disabled and reset from the management console, and you can use
this same functionality to monitor the performance statistics of all
aspects of your WLAN.


Speed—WLANs have broken through several speed barriers so that
they can now compete sufficiently with wired Ethernetworks. The
advantage that 802.11b users have is that they can upgrade to
802.11a, and in most cases the two types of equipment are compatible
with one another. You can increase the wireless backbone speed
of your WLAN, while ensuring compatibility with those users who
still have integrated 802.11b network cards. Speeds from 11 Mbps
using 802.11b are increasing to 54 Mbps using 802.11a. As this
technology grows with the next generation of wireless equipment,
these speeds will increase even more. As more and more multimedia-
rich applications require more extensive bandwidth, increases
in speed will be a logical step forward, while vendors maintain backward
compatibility.


Interoperability—One of the greatest advantages that 802.11 wireless
networks have achieved is that, unlike previous generations of
WLANs, there is a level of interoperability and compatibility between
different vendors. If users wish to integrate 802.11b into a mobile
device, it is still possible to have it work with the WLAN of their company
or their homes even if the two points of the wireless transmission
were created by different vendors. This level of compatibility has
opened up an entirely new horizon that permits Wi-Fi users to roam
across an entire wireless network without worrying about whether
their equipment will function in different vendor environments.