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When your teleworkers need a home network, be wary of cost and security.
The results of last month's meeting weren't good:Your teleworkers wanted multiple network jacks for their families' computers.Your IS staff specified Category 5 for everything. But hardwiring your teleworkers' homes would have broken your budget.
So you thought 802.11b wireless might be a good solution. At 11M bit/sec, 802.11b's 2.4-GHz spread spectrum approach offers reasonable throughput, and its Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) seems to satisfy the security requirements. But after your trial rollout, your teleworkers were grumbling about speed - about six times slower than Cat 5 for LAN through-- put - and your IS staff was grumbling about WEP's security
The boss wants details, but every Internet resource you find is heavily biased. Some tout WEP as the security solution it was designed to be, and others, such as Berkeley in a recent report, claim the design has "significant security flaws.'
This story compares the strengths and weakness of 802.11b wireless and Cat 5 by looking at two teleworkers.
John is a family man with a wife and three children. He has a company-provided workstation and asymmetric DSL (ADSL) connection. His wife and son have their own computers and want to access the Internet over the ADSL connection.As a video-effects guru,...