Wireless working
- Article 35 of 77
- Information Age, April 2002
Networking without cables – particularly outside of the office – seems an attractive proposition. But is the technology ready for corporate adoption?
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Office politics
Inside the office, Wi-Fi is now the dominant standard for wireless networking. Similar to Ethernet, it operates at approximately 11 megabits per second (Mbps). Vendors such as Dell offer combined GPRS modem/Wi-Fi networking cards to make the switch between systems almost seamless; when the mobile officer worker enters the wireless network's range, the computer's operating system detects the presence of the faster network and automatically logs on to it.
But few companies have started implementing Wi-Fi yet – and many of those decisions have been dictated by an organisations' physical environment. “Many of the implementations we have seen have been for small workgroups who faced real environmental issues that inhibited a wired approach, such as large retail or logistics premises, and other buildings where traditional cabling is not always possible,” says McGibbon of Scalable Networks.
“So far, wireless implementations are quite experimental,” Gemmell agrees. “Wireless is seen in a few areas, mainly: schools, hospitals and retail outlets.” One of the key barriers is security, she says: IT managers are worried about what data will travel across a wireless LAN, which they consider to be inherently insecure.
Wi-Fi supports Wireless Equivalency Protocol (WEP), which can encrypt traffic with a 128-bit key, but this has been shown to be relatively easy to break. An updated version of WEP is currently being devised. In the meantime, says Gemmell, Virtual Private Networks are favoured by security-conscious companies to prevent corporate data from being eavesdropping by hackers. She is confident, though, that the security flaws in WEP will be fixed.
While Wi-Fi is sufficiently mature that different vendors' products are able to use it to interact, Consult Hyperion's Clark says that incompatibility problems do arise. “One particular problem in our office is that interference between lower-powered Bluetooth devices and higher-powered 802.11 devices significantly reduces the range and speed of Bluetooth connections.” So while a PDA might try to print to a nearby Bluetooth-enabled printer, it might find it has a better chance by joining the corporate Wi-Fi network. Either way, Bluetooth's use in anything other than personal peripherals looks unlikely to take off in a corporate setting.
For most CIOs, Gemmell believes, the benefits of wireless are in the lack of cabling, rather than flexibility of access. “In London and in metropolitan areas, we're seeing a lot more interest, particularly in companies that rent office space,” she claims. Free of cables to manage and floor ports to provision and monitor, companies can cut costs and offset the far higher costs of wireless networking hardware (while an Ethernet card may cost only £10, a wireless networking PC card costs at least £70).
“Bluetooth prices have stayed stubbornly high,” Clark complains. “Adding a Bluetooth sleeve to a Palm costs about $200 and to a mobile phone costs the same again: $400 to replace the infrared link between my Palm and my phone. Assuming realistic pricing, a Bluetooth earpiece and microphone for hands-free operation of my phone, and a Bluetooth card for my Palm would be natural purchases – once I was sure that no-one could listen in to my phone conversations from the next office or read my appointments calendar on the train.”
For most companies, the argument for wireless networking is unconvincing. Costs are too high, speed is too low, security is too patchy, the technology lacks maturity and there are very few areas other than cabling where the benefits of wireless technologies exceed wired capabilities. Until the industry is able to show that wireless networks can be trusted and perform as well as their wired counterparts, the vast majority of organisations are unlikely to entrust their data to them.
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