WLANs

Sneak peek of book 'Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless LANs'

Cisco Subnet — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:54:57 -0400

This week's sneak peek of a Cisco Press book is a chapter from Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless LANs, by David Castaneda, Oisin Mac Alasdair, and Christopher Vinckier.

Here's the blurb from Cisco Press:

The Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless LANs helps you make the right decisions by explaining the business value and cost of investing in a WLAN—from security and architecture to deployment and application. Using a lifecycle perspective, this guide covers the value proposition, cost justification, and alignment of security, design, and operational components within the business.

Go to free chapter: Chapter 7: Security and Wireless LANs.

Go here for a comprehensive library of free chapters from new and classic Cisco Press books.

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Go to Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.

Power Testing - Again, and More

Craig Mathias — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:29:27 -0400

You know how sometimes you start down a particular path and things just get more interesting as you go? And you wind up spending a lot more time than you thought you would, as the problem gets deeper and more complex? And you look up, after a few weeks, and wonder where all the time went?

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Is there an 802.11n wireless LAN in your future?

John Cox — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:44:07 -0400

Looks like there's an 802.11n wireless LAN is in your company's future. Or is there? We asked 372 IT professionals about their plans for 802.11n and the answers were all over the map.

802.11n is currently a draft IEEE standard but it's being implemented by nearly all WLAN vendors and products are certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The standard is expected to be ratified in early 2009.

So what are YOUR plans for 802.11n...and why?

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Virtual Wireless LANs - A Really Good Solution

Craig Mathias — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:12:35 -0400

My friend and colleague Keith Shaw [http://www.networkworld.com/Home/kshaw.html] forwarded to me a note with the following question from a NWW reader (slightly edited here):

"I need to set up five different wireless networks in one building. Three need to be to be separate (three offices that can't connect to each other; traffic must be encrypted), one that is open to public and one that is a backside router (open router). How would I go about doing this?"

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Site Surveys and VoFi

Craig Mathias — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:02:35 -0500

I think everyone knows by now that I am not a big fan of site surveys for wireless LANs - in fact, I think they are almost always a bad idea, exchanging cheap hardware for expensive labor of doubtful value. Sure, in pathological buildings, a cursory site survey might be useful. And I like doing RF sweeps (with a spectrum analyzer) if interference is suspected. But in the vast majority of open-office installations, site surveys are a waste of time and especially money. One can always compensate for errors in coverage or capacity by simply adding a few more APs - indeed, one should always count on needing to do this whether a site survey is performed or not, because site surveys only take coverage, and not capacity, into account.

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Does Anyone Really Care About Benchmarks?

Craig Mathias — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:03:53 -0500

I spend a lot of time testing and benchmarking wireless LANs, in both individual and comparative exercises. I have always assumed that some form of testing and evaluation is a prerequisite for any major network-equipment purchase, and an enterprise-class, mission-critical WLAN certainly qualifies as major. As I've mentioned before, the fundamental costs and challenges inherent in large-scale WLAN testing provide significant motivation to find an alternative to this activity. But these also raise another question - looking ahead, will benchmarking itself remain important?

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Six Big Wireless Arguments

Craig Mathias — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:59:09 -0500

Jeff Caruso, who is the Site Editor for Network World and who mysteriously allows me to post stuff here without his seeing it first, asked me to take a look at a recent article from NWW on the 50 greatest arguments in networking. Six of these pertain to mobile and wireless, and here are a few thoughts for your consideration:

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WLANs for SME: Bandspeed's Back

Craig Mathias — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:17:05 -0500

That's a little misleading, perhaps, since Bandspeed never went away. But this is a company that has changed direction significantly and may now in fact be on a very profitable course indeed.

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