Wi-Fi Networking News reports on a review by PC World that contains some performance numbers from the Belkin Pre-N wireless solution (the one with the Airgo Networks chipset in it). While PC World and Wi-Fi Networking News seem to be impressed by the 40 Mbps actual throughput from the Belkin solution (router + cardbus card), I was disappointed.

I have seen similar performance numbers with Atheros’ Super AG (some even better), so I was expecting to see much better (around 80 Mbps say) from the MIMO solution. If they are to reach the 100 Mbps actual throughput that is the goal for 802,11n, then I’d say they have a bit more work to do. Both Atheros and Broadcom have range extending technology too (Atheros has XR, and just recently Broadcom added BroadRange).

It would have been more interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of all four proprietary speed enhancing technologies: Connexant’s Nitro, Atheros’ SuperAG, Broadcom’s Afterburner (a.k.a. Linksys SpeedBooster) and the Belkin Pre-N. I think that since Pre-N is so far ahead of the actual 802.11n standard that for the moment it really has to be seen as another proprietary solution. There will probably be elements of all of these speed & range enhancing techniques in the final standard.

Also interesting would be a comparison of the range extenders (Atheros’ XR, Broadcom’s BroadRange and Belkin’s Pre-N) to see how they really stack up in the same environment using the same test.

Had a chance to play with Epson’s new EMP-835 wireless projector a week or so back. This is being sold in the US as the Powerlite 835p. At first glance it seems rather large, but that soon becomes inconsequential when you discover just what this thing can do…

At power up it proceeded to beam a series of vertical lines onto the wall, and then auto-focus. Next up a checker-board effect appeared and it adjusted its keystone setting as well. Then it presented the EasyMP setup. Not so easy for us at first since it was in Japanese (the model we were using was brought over from Japan), but once we had it switched to English it was all much clearer.

In addition to its auto-focus and auto-keystone, it has a feature called ‘wall shot’ that will attempt to compensate for off-white walls as well. Oh, and a neat preview mode where you get a freeze-frame of what is currently on every one of its inputs. From there you can select one to view live. What are these inputs? Three video sources of different types (composite, S-Video and VGA), and perhaps the best feature: wireless input from a computer running their EasyMP NS Connection software.

Biggest surprise of all was that this wireless software supported my PowerBook and displayed the wide screen format perfectly. If the projector is part of your corporate network, and it supports both WPA and Cisco’s CCX (LEAP) security modes as well as the older WEP mode, then it will be automatically discovered. If it is running in ad-hoc mode (which allows anybody to walk up and connect), then on the PowerBook at least I had to join the projector’s ad-hoc network in the normal way before the tool would see the projector. Once connected it worked perfectly, and in theory I can connect to more than one projector too (if I had them).

This has made it onto my shopping list in place of a large screen TV. Not only can I use it for high quality movie and TV viewing, but I can wirelessly connect my laptop to it for some living room surfing in style. Now I just need the house to put it in 🙂

Wi-Fi Networking News has a posting about more cities promising free Wi-Fi for everybody. Included in the list this time is San Francisco where the mayor, Gavin Newsom stated: “We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service.”

Other cities are looking into this too. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the reaction of commercial hot-spot operators like T-Mobile and SBC’s FreedomLink. Then there are the security issues asssociate with having open and anonymous access to the internet from anywhere in the city. Will these wireless cities simply become havens for the spammers?

Six Steps You Can Take to Secure Your Wireless Network at The WiFi Weblog lists the steps that TechRepublic recommend for securing your wireless network. Some I agree with, some are very dated even for home use, and some are just plain wrong, especially for corporate use (even in small businesses). So, here’s my corrected six steps:

1. Antenna placement is of little use against a determined hacker who will simply employ a high-gain directional antenna. Short of turning your apartment/house/office into a faraday cage, this will be of limited benefit.
2. They suggest using WEP. I’d suggest using WPA. For home users, WPA-PSK (or WPA-Personal) is a great choice. In a corporate setting, I would suggest using full WPA (or WPA-Enterprise) with a RADIUS server backend, to restrict access to the network based on either username/password or a certificate installed on each user’s system. Most wireless access points support WPA now, as do most client cards. There are supplicant’s built into Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.3, and a free supplicant with support for several wireless cards is available for Linux.
3. Change the SSID. Definitely. Don’t worry about hiding it though – that is not much of an impediment to a determined hacker.
4. I would not recommend disabling DHCP. Again, if your hacker has defeated all the other security measures, it takes but a second to sniff a packet from the network and get an idea of the IP addresses being used. Disabling DHCP just makes your life harder!
5. Disabling, or securing, SNMP is probably a good idea if your wireless access point(s) or other network infrastructure devices support it. I would be more concerned about UPnP though since it has the potential to allow a compromised laptop to punch holes in the firewall at your internet gateway. Corporate networks will probably want to leave SNMP enabled so that they have remote management of their network.
6. Use access lists (MAC address filtering) in a home network, but in a corporate setting this is just a headache to manage (keeping the list up to date on all wireless access points will quickly drive a network administrator insane). Stick with WPA for corporate use to limit network access to authorised users.

In addition, WPA2 is on the way. As soon as your access point(s) and clients all support it, then switch to further improve the security of your network. You can phase this in as most APs offer an option to support legacy WPA clients at the same time as WPA2 ones.

Finally, don’t be fooled by proprietary solutions like Cisco’s LEAP though – WPA is a better choice than LEAP and will be more widely supported. Indeed, Cisco’s CCX certification programme even requires WPA certification.

An article on an Arizona news site suggests that drive-by hackers are worrying residents in an upscale area of Scottsdale. The article is nothing more than FUD, or at least it should be.

If these users are really worried about these war-drivers accessing their networks then they should enable the highest level of security supported by their wireless devices.

For most people today that will be WPA (though even static WEP is better than nothing at all – and only a really determined war-driver will waste the time trying to crack the encryption on an unknown person’s network). Very soon people will be able to enable WPA2, with very secure AES encryption.

As for credit card numbers, nobody should be posting these online unless the site they are sending them to is already encrypting the link. In which case it does not matter whether the wireless network is encrypted or not – the SSL tunnel between the browser and the remote web site will protect the card details.

Windoze users are probably much more at risk of being attacked through the numerous flaws that it contains than they are from a drive-by “hacker” using their unprotected wireless network.

I first saw a wireless TV panel a few years ago when my former employer had one that was shown on its trade show booths (they had provided the OS for the product). That was a first generation Sony Air Board, and they were available only in Japan, and had a user interface that was entirely Japanese.

Sony now has a newer version of that product, the Air Board LF-X1.

According to Akibalive, this panel uses a proprietary extension to Wi-Fi to boost performance, although they also quote a maximum of 15Mbps, which would be slow even for regular 802.11a or 802.11g connections (my SMC 802.11g access point will do over 20Mbps, and I have seen 802.11g systems go as high as 29Mbps in TCP throughput tests).

TechTV is showing a splash proof equivalent from Casio, the Xfer. They comment on the problems of range (basically, get too far from the thing’s base station and the video becomes choppy). The same was apparent on the Sony device I played with, and probably won’t be something that will get much better with current generation 802.11 technologies – at 60 feet 802.11 will still have a connection, but not at the full data rate. As an example, I am averaging 24Mbps to my PowerBook through an access point I am testing today when in the same room; walking to the other side of my 1 bedroom apartment though, the data rate was slashed in half, and also suffered from occasional dips below 10Mbps. If the video stream was expecting to use more than 12Mbps, that will translate to dropped frames.