In recent years, wireless technology has become common in offices, whether it’s used to provide network access to employees away from their usual workstations, or visiting from another site, or to offer Internet access to clients.
The trend has been bolstered by the growing adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and the convergence of voice, data and wireless networks. But most businesses, experts report, are still not willing to go entirely wireless.
Brian Fernandes, an internal IT and networking security practice specialist at Lighthouse Computer Services Inc., said that currently about 20 percent of the company’s customers are set up for wireless, including Lighthouse itself.
Todd Knapp, the owner of Envision Technology Advisors LLC, said he thinks “every single client” of his firm has “wireless in some form.”
“But we’re finding that very few of our clients rely on wireless as their primary means of connecting to the network,” Knapp added. “The reason is wireless has been slower than conventional connectivity methods, and it’s also less reliable because signals from other organizations around you can interfere with it. In most cases where clients have wireless, it’s for non-critical applications.”
Knapp also said wireless is more heavily used by smaller companies.
“Most wireless networks suffer from fuzzy connections and if you’ve got a data intensive program you can cause data corruption,” he said. “That is why typically larger companies aren’t using it as much.”
And both Knapp and Fernandes agreed that security issues require more care when you’re using a wireless network. “The security of the wireless within an organization presents the biggest challenge,” said Knapp.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Lighthouse, which has about 55 employees and reported about $105 million in revenue last year, from embracing the technology.
“Over the last couple of years or so, it’s grown in leaps and bounds from slow to fast access, so it’s becoming quite the rave,” Fernandes said. “We went from fully wired to wireless, and it supports both workers and our guests.”
Fernandes also said security issues can be addressed with proper care.
“A lot of companies have vendors coming in and rather than a hardwire they have a segregated wireless network,” Fernandes said. “We have a production and a guest side of the house.”
With that setup, a guest can access the Internet but not the wireless network that the company is using, which would require an encryption key.
Additionally, Knapp said, a sophisticated networking company can go even farther to ensure that the wireless network is secure.
“When you set up wireless, the most conventional way to protect it is to encrypt the data that passes across the network and to encrypt the PCs as they try to establish a connection with the wireless,” Knapp explained. “However, there are better ways to do it that include limiting the signal strength so that only the areas you want to get access are getting access. That can be done by a good consulting company that has equipment that can measure signal strength, range and propagation [how effectively the signal penetrates walls].”
But Knapp said that often the security is not as tight as it could, and should, be.
“If it’s installed correctly it’s pretty secure, but it’s not as secure as a wired network, and most of the times we find the wireless is not installed as securely as it could be,” he said.
On the speed front, Knapp said, wireless may soon equal wired networks. Up until now the standard for wireless has been 802.11g, which runs at 54 megabits per second, while normal wired networks run at 100 megabits per second.
But a new type of wireless, 802.11n, will be able to run at more than 100 megabits per second. And that, combined with the convenience of wireless, may make all the difference.
“We’re on the verge of a wireless renaissance right now,” Knapp said
