On 2007-01-05 08:45:06 +0000, "TheScullster" said:

Hi all

Just a general enquiry really.
Noticed on posts for data/sky/tv cabling that people were still
advocating installation of network and phone cabling.
This is obviously at odds to the current hype wireless
networking/broadband etc.
I have already installed cat 5 and phone lines to most rooms, but am
beginning to think that technology has overtaken this.

Apart from the security issues with wireless broadband, can anyone
support the case for putting in a wired home network and phone system?

TIA

Phil

I think that the short answer to this one is yes.

Just to put a perspective on this, I've worked in the networking industry
with various technologies for over 25 years - right back to when ethernet
involved a thick yellow co-ax cable that you had to drill and tap into in order
to make connections. The slightly later 10base2 (thin coax) ethernet
that was popular
for a while was the first that was perhaps realistic to install for a
small workgroup
or home network. That worked OK but tended to suffer from reliability
problems
because of the large number of connectors physically involved.

Undoubtedly CAT5 technology made the big difference to the practicality
of quite a lot of
network installation, and the components and cable have become extremely cheap.

WiFi has obviously made a huge contribution as well in terms of convenience and
for a lot of applications gives good results.

In enterprise (large company) environments, I typically see relatively
limited deployments
(depends on the business and sector) and a lot of trouble taken over
design and security,
to make sure that coverage is right but that the overall security of
the company network
is not compromised by the wireless network. Usually this is
accomplished by using higher
end access point devices - e.g. Cisco which have a variety of security
mechanisms built in
and there is effort made to fix bugs in the firmware that risk
compromising the performance
and security; and to have additional mechanisms like firewalls and
secured VPNs to
further raise the security barrier.

Smaller businesses and home users tend to buy the cheaper,
off-the-shelf wireless products
that you will probably have seen on the shelves of PC World and on the
web. Manufacturers
include the usual suspects such as Linksys, D-Link, Netgear,
Belkin,..... and so on.

These are supposed to work with minimal set-up and to an extent be an
out of the box product.
To a first degree, that is true. People with little technical skill
can get them working by following
a quick install guide. Where a physical card has to be installed in
a PC or equivalent, there are
the usual possible issues with drivers, interrupt conflicts and all
the rest of it which can cause
problems and sometimes be difficult to address. This has been made
easier by devices
such as notebooks, printers and PDAs having WiFi built in.

Having said that, most people seem to be quite clueless about
installation and security and there
are several issues there. Security has been publicised a lot and the
reasonably sensible are
able to do a reasonable first level job by using WPA security. It has
its shortcomings, but generally
all that is required for a home network is to enter a text password on
each device - a lot easier
and somewhat more secure than the earlier WEP mechanism which was not
that secure and
which often required users to enter passwords in hexadecimal on some
devices and text on another.

A surprisingly large number of people still don't bother. Recently,
I made a train trip of about
an hour from Waterloo, going through the suburbs of inner and outer
London and beyond. I was
using my Mac for some other work, but turned on a utility called
iStumbler. This activates the WiFi
interface and scans listening for access points. It displays a list
of what it finds with SSIDs (name
of the wireless LAN), plus channels, security status and type and
signal strengths. It doesn't attempt
to join the network, but will identify and log the presence of an
access point based on a couple of samples.
So even with the train moving along it was able to detect over a
hundred wireless LANs installed
within a couple of hundred metres or less of the railway line - this
was a mix of domestic and office
networks. Of this lot, only around a half had WPA or WEP turned on.

So it's like a burglar alarm. It won't protect against the determined
attacker (if he believes the prize
is worth it) but will make most try the next house. Most people if
asked, wouldn't be keen on their neighbours
sniffing into their financial information or getting free ride on
their internet connection.

The next point is about installation and channel selection. The
radio band used (around 2.4GHz) is
an unlicensed one in most countries. It is the place where a lot of
devices can potentially be run
including microwave ovens, video senders and other devices. These may
not generally be a
specific problem, but if you are in a location where you have a lot of
neighbours with wireless LANs within
range, there can be various problems with some equipment. One example
is if access devices close
by are running on the same or nearby channels (there are 13 in the UK,
although some equipment supports
only 11 because that is the limit in some countries). Radio
interference can certainly affect reliability
and performance of the connection; so if you are going to use WiFi it
makes good sense to do a survey
around your house and property to see what is close by. This can be
done with free software like NetStumbler
to a reasonable degree. It's best to avoid channels used by
neighbouring WLANs and indeed adjacent
ones. Of course a lot of people are unaware of this and don't change
the defaults, so if a bunch of neighbours
talk to one another and go out and buy the same vendor's product, they
will probably all be on
the same channel unless someone changes theirs. Ideally, it's an
idea to choose a channel that is two
or three away from others, especially if the signal is strong from a
neighbouring access point.
Even so, location of access point(s) in the house is quite important to
get good coverage.

Going on from this are the issues of speed and reliability. The
newer technologies of 802,11g (Wireless G) and various ones leading to
802,11n (Wireless -N, pre-N and others) promise higher speeds than the
original nominal 11Mbit technology. However, the raw, marketed rates
of 11, 54 and 108Mbits are not really achieved reliably
in typical installatations. There are various reasons for this.
Firstly, the wireless and various IP protocols used by the equipment
and applications reduce the real rate of data transfer quite
substantially - can be as little as 10% of the published speed that is
actually achieved. Secondly there is the interference and wireless
coverage issue. Thirdly, there is the behaviour of other devices of
yours joining the WLAN. All can have an impact.

Another factor is the quality and reliability of the firmware in the
wireless components. The lower end manufacturers do not invest a lot
in this, and for most products you will see 2-3 firmware updates during
a product's lifetime on sale. After that, there are generally no bug
fixes even if there are product problems.
Bad things certainly do happen. I have seen wireless access points
and routers that regularly run into trouble
and need to be rebooted every few days or even sooner. Generally
this is due to bugs in the firmware.

Of course, if you are using a Microsoft "operating system" you will
rebooting the PC anyway quite frequently.

Again if a determined hacker figures out the device (some manufacturers
have their name as the default SSID, others even the model), then they
may be able to launch a security or denial of service attack. This is
probably not that common in a residential setting, but if you are
concerned about these things there is certainly
a risk factor. Some wireless products turn out to be lemons.
Therefore it is unwise to buy the latest and greatest,
and much more sensible to wait for at least one firmware update and to
read user reviews.

In terms of speed, if the only application is internet access and
especially email and web access, then WiFi can be a good solution.
In most cases, the available WiFi speed will exceed that of the ISP
connection.

If you are concerned about wanting to do device to device communication
in your house, then I think you need to look more carefully. Speed
and connection reliability are still at a point where, for some
applications in some environments, the results are inferior to what can
be achieved with wired networking.
If you want to transfer large amounts of data where starting from the
beginning because the connection dropped
out is unacceptable, then you may want to check that carefully for
example. Some applications such as certain
types of media streaming sometimes do not work well on wireless connections.

So.... for my usage, I use both wired and wireless networks. There
is no doubt that the portability of WiFi is useful and convenient for
some devices and applications. However, for many usage cases, that
can be achieved by having a good distribution of wired outlets. For
example, if I want to use a notebook in any room of the house, I can
plug it into an outlet with a relatively short cable. I don't really
want to do that in the garden and not at all with a PDA. I've taken
quite a bit of trouble to secure the wireless LAN (all of the measures
mentioned above used by enterprises, and some more) and have used good
quality equipment with proper support of firmware.

Nonetheless, I do have applications that are sensitive to connection
dropouts and have to do file transfers of tens of gigabytes. I don't
use the WLAN for those.

My usage cases and the trouble I have gone to to secure and install the
WLAN correctly are probably not needed by a lot of people, but again
you can recognise the application areas where there may be issues.
The technology is certainly useful, but I wouldn't use it as the only
form of networking in the house.