Wireless Homes - Ready for the Big Time?
By Ben Berkowitz
Tuesday January 29
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - They go by many foreboding names that only an engineer could love or understand -- 802.11, Wi-Fi, WLANs -- suggesting headaches and misery for nontechnical users.
Yet wireless home networks, which allow computers to access the Internet, untethered, from as far as 300 feet away from a landline Internet connection, are growing in popularity as the technology becomes easier to install and prices drop.
The pace of adoption could pick up still more, too, as technology leaders, such as Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), push forward with plans for home networks products aimed at mainstream users, not just early adopters. Sales of wireless home networks are expected to surge almost five-fold over the next four years.
Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) used his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show during the first week in January to unveil ``Mira,'' a hardware and software platform for computing on televisions and portable tablet-like devices throughout the home.
AT&T Broadband, the nation's largest cable company, also said this month it would work with network hardware maker Linksys to provide, for a nominal fee, wireless networking hardware and services to its high-speed cable modem customers.
Another sign of the technology's growing popularity -- of the tens of thousands of electronics products sold by online retailer Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN - news), the No. 4 and No. 5 best-selling products, respectively, are a wireless network access point and an antenna for laptops.
A basic network kit, with a base station (called a wireless access point), plus an antenna for a desktop PC and an antenna for a laptop, can now be had for $299, considered something of a ``golden'' price point for consumer electronics.
2002 THE YEAR?
So is this the year that wireless home networks move from the high-tech fringe to the vast middle ground of everyday users? The answer is that it's getting close, but may not be quite there yet.
``When the industry started out, everybody really felt if you could get to less than $100 per node ... you'd really get into mass-market residential users,'' said Navin Sabharwal, director of residential and networking technologies at research firm Allied Business Intelligence.
``Those cards are going toward $50 to $60 in the next 12 months,'' he said.
But while the cost is becoming less prohibitive, there is still the problem of simple confusion -- wireless networks look hard to set up, even if they generally are not, and the standards can be confusing.
The most commonly used standard wireless home network, technically known as IEEE 802.11b but more commonly known as Wi-Fi, has a theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 11 megabits per second.
Wi-Fi networks are adequate for most regular Internet surfing uses, though not fast enough to handle streams of high-quality movies or other videos. Still, it's fast enough to let users easily transport large amounts of data from one PC to another PC or portable device.
But just as people have started to grow comfortable with the idea of Wi-Fi, it's about to get ugly all over again, as two incompatible technologies vie for consumers' attention, something that always seems to happen in consumer electronics.
Later this year, 802.11b will be joined by 802.11g, which operates at the same frequency but can push data at rates almost five times faster; and 802.11a, which runs at the same speed but on a different frequency, making the two incompatible.
``I can't imagine this being good from a consumer perspective,'' Sabharwal said.
He also cautioned about limits on the distance the wireless signals can travel inside single-family homes, something most people don't necessarily expect when setting up home networks.
``Walls and insulation are the two biggest killers of range,'' he said. He believes it will be at least a year-and-a-half to two years before home wireless networks reach level of technical sophistication to allow homes to be totally wireless.
Besides walls, another common feature of the single-family home is the cordless phone, and all the newer, high-end models operate at the same frequency as Wi-Fi networks. The interference between the two renders both the phone and the network unusable at the same time.
SECURITY AND COMPATIBILITY
Another issue that has slowed Wi-Fi, albeit to a greater extent in businesses than in homes, is problems with holes in its security standard, called WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy).
Throughout 2001, various security experts identified gaping holes in WEP that allowed even the most minimally industrious of hackers to sit back and watch the traffic traveling over Wi-Fi networks, leaving potentially embarrassing or damaging personal data open to the world.
But experts suggest that the problem is not with WEP. ''Focusing a lot of energy at securing the wireless link is misguided,'' said Avi Rubin, a principal researcher at AT&T Labs and author of the recent book ``White-Hat Security Arsenal,'' which addresses issues of hacking and data security.
``Wireless just makes it a little easier (for an unauthorized user) to tap in,'' said Rubin. But an even bigger issue than security, on a practical basis, is hardware compatibility. Any device certified as 802.11b compliant should work with any other certified device.
In practice, though, while Microsoft's new Windows XP (news - web sites) operating system supports 802.11b right out of the box, reports of problems have surfaced with hardware that does not work with XP because their internal software is incompatible.
Sabharwal cautioned that some Wi-Fi hardware that says it works with Windows XP only did so because of a security hole in XP Microsoft has since patched, meaning the hardware will no longer work properly.
Which still leaves the question: Is 2002 really the year that wireless home networks take off?
``802.11 is definitely the way of the future -- it's not the way of the present,'' Rubin said. |
