Why Your Company Needs a Professional Wireless Network
By Mike Ellsworth, Head Guy, The WiMAX Guys

Now you may think from the title of this article that I’m going to write about all the business benefits of wireless networking, but I’m not.

The benefits of wireless networking are getting to be pretty obvious: easy employee moves, adds, and changes; reduced costs for extending network access into conference rooms and lobbies; and support for wireless handhelds for mobile workers and even in warehouses and on shop floors. If you’ve read any business-oriented press recently, you’ve been exposed to many of the reasons why you should consider wireless networking. If you want to better understand the benefits, just pick up Business Week or Forbes or pretty much any business magazine and read up.

What I am going to talk about is the need for businesses to take wireless networking seriously enough to not just slap a few consumer-grade Linksys access points up in the ceiling and call it a day.

Sure, the consumer stuff is cheap at Best Buy, CompUSA and pretty much anywhere electronics are sold. And it’s very tempting for not only business owners, but also employees to plunk down a couple hundred dollars and go unwired. But it’s also very dangerous, security-wise, and not very smart, network management-wise.

There are three main reasons why commercial gear (and professional installation by experts) is what your company needs: security, manageability, and reliability.

First, let’s take a look at security. Wireless networks are inherently much more of a security risk than the wired networks in your workplace. That’s because miscreants don’t have to have physical access to your premises to hack in; they can do it from the parking lot. And that’s just what happened at Best Buy a year-and-a-half ago. The retailer was using wireless cash registers and, despite the advice of their internal security staff, they weren’t using the security that is built in to every wireless – AKA Wi-Fi – network. Luckily, the guy in the parking lot was a “white hat hacker” and not a bad guy, but the company was still embarrassed.

Turns out, however, that even the built-in security, known as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) can be easily broken, or cracked, by anybody who has downloaded one of several software packages such as Airsnort or Kismet. And this is one of the key reasons why your company can’t trust its wireless network to consumer gear. While some of the consumer products are starting to support emerging security standards like Wireless Protected Access (WPA) and 802.1X, commercial gear typically offers several other security methods such as Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) and Virtual LANs (VLANs) as well as better encryption routines that scramble the data going over the air.

Another aspect of security involves what are known as rogue Access Points (APs). If you have an organization of any size, I can pretty much guarantee you have, or have had, unauthorized (rogue) wireless APs deployed without your knowledge. With the consumer gear so cheap, many employees don’t wait for the networking folks to get around to providing wireless. They just go out and buy an Access Point themselves and hide it in their cubes or in the ceiling. They can then use their laptops in the coffee area or the conference room and no one is the wiser.

The rogue AP problem is significant across businesses of all sizes. Since the rogue AP installers rarely bother with turning on the security, your network is suddenly extended into the air, and possibly well outside the boundaries of your building or even your campus. This sort of thing understandably drives network administrators nuts, and so some commercial wireless gear comes with facilities to help detect rogue APs, and even deactivate them.

As you can see, the security problems of consumer gear are large enough by themselves to make prudent businesses choose commercial gear. But there’s also the problem of manageability, the ability to administer the wireless network as an extension of your wired network.

Wired networks have matured to the point where it is possible for a single network administrator sitting at a console in your data center to see what is going on and remotely fix problems across the building or across the country without ever leaving his or her seat. That’s because various management standards have evolved that enable remote network management.

Consumer gear generally doesn’t have the same kinds of remote management capabilities. If your business has a few APs in a single location, this may not be a big deal. But if your company has several locations and dozens of APs, manageability is a real requirement.

Let’s just take a look at a single example. Let’s say one of your wireless APs has frozen up and needs to be powered off and on to reset it. Let’s further say that this AP is located in a ceiling somewhere in the northwest corner of your building, but you’re not sure exactly where, because you’ve experimented with various locations to try to provide better coverage. You’re not going to want to go get a step ladder and disrupt employees while you drag it around looking for the AP. You’re also not going to want to have to go back and cycle the power on the AP again when the first attempt doesn’t work.

With commercial gear, the network administrator has many more options. He or she can try to reset the AP remotely and, if that fails and the AP is running on Power over Ethernet (PoE), the admin can even turn off the power to the device remotely. Some commercial gear even allows the admin to determine a schedule during which the AP will be turned on or off – say on at 8 am and off at 10 pm – enhancing the security of the network.

Finally, commercial gear is built to be much more reliable. The consumer gear vendors often accept 5 or 10 percent failure rates as the cost of doing business. This may be fine when all that is at stake is your ability to do your email from your living room, but when your employees are doing real work on wireless networks, you want rock solid gear.

Security, manageability, and reliability: These are the reasons why The WiMAX Guys don’t use Linksys, or D-Link, or Netgear for business installations and instead rely on commercial gear. It costs more to do it that way, and it costs more for professional installation services, but you save in the long run.

So if you’ve got a home office or a single AP at your workplace, you can take a chance on the cheap stuff. But if you’re serious about wireless networking, leave it to the pros.

The WiMAX Guys is led by Head Guy Mike Ellsworth, an Information Technology veteran who has pushed the technology envelope time and again. Ellsworth is an experienced leader and entrepreneur whose goal is to make technology easier to use by normal people. Often heard to frustratedly utter the phrase, "I hate computers!" the Head Guy's mission is to take care of the details of installing secure, manageable, reliable wireless networks in your home or business.  Contact Mike at HeadGuy@TheWiMAXGuys.com, by phone at 952-400-0185, or visit the web site at http://www.thewimaxguys.com/.