Imagine sitting in the garden and accessing your main computer 10 or 20 times faster than you can with broadband. Add an Internet connection, and you will be able to send e-mails and surf the Net. You can use the technology to chat to your robot dog, and soon you will even be able to monitor your fridge — from the coffee shop next door. By the end of next year, according to analysts at IDC, 1.2 million European homes will have this miracle: a broadband wireless computing network.
I wanted my home to be among the first. Not only did I envision making high-speed wireless connections from everywhere in my apartment, I also hoped to be able to file my TIME copy from Caffè Nero just around the corner. After all, the main technology behind this revolution, called Wi-Fi or 802.11b, claims a 100-m range, well within the distance to a tasty café latte prepared by the delightful Cinzia.
For most people setting up a home wireless network is a doddle. All the pundits say so. Some even claim that getting rid of your cabled connection to the Internet altogether is a simple thing. But for some of us it isn't.
I won't bore you with the gruesome details. Suffice it to say that after three days of nonstop nightmare I was saved by Mike Cook, product marketing manager and technical wizard from Zoom-Hayes, the modem and wireless-gateway manufacturer. After only about four hours he managed to get my various pieces of kit — Icon ADSL modem, Zoom wireless gateway, Toshiba laptop and Sony Aibo dog — talking to each other.
JUSTIN LEIGHTON/NETWORK for TIME
TESTING TIMES: Our intrepid reporter gets connected on the roof of his South London apartment
As for Caffè Nero — I had explained my remote access plan to several experts, and they agreed that getting a signal there was unlikely. But Cook had brought a directional antenna — surely that would work. One look out my bedroom window across the rooftops that intervened between my computer and the café, however, and he sucked air through his teeth and said: "No chance." You see, Wi-Fi does not like going through walls. Even going from the sitting room to the bedroom in my small flat proved a challenge. The bathroom proved a wall too far.
Still we persevered, and after another hour or two got the directional antenna running. At Caffè Nero, not a sniff of a signal. Yet wireless public access points are being rolled out at coffee shops all over Europe, so I may still be able to file a story and drink a latte at the same time. Probably not soon, though.
If you can't sit in your favorite coffee shop and surf wirelessly, what can you do? Well in my case I can relax on the roof in the sunshine and check the Net, file my copy and connect my laptop back to my office PC. I can, of course, also do this in my sitting room and bedroom. So far, so boring.
Things improved dramatically during my second night of wireless living. I like to listen to BBC Radio Four before I go to sleep, though sometimes it is as entertaining as old toast. But with a broadband wireless connection and a laptop, a couple of clicks on the bbc website brought me the wonderful Dead Ringers comedy program three days after it was broadcast.
I had only two other things to try: updating my Palm PDA using a slip-on connector from Xircom, which did not seem a great leap forward, and spending time with my new best friend, Aibo. Whoever thought of sticking a wireless networking card into the backside of a robotic dog deserves a medal. Useful? No. Practical? No. Wonderfully stupid? Certainly.
The downside: Wi-Fi can be a security disaster. The most important thing to remember when you install Wi-Fi is to switch on the encryption system called WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) that comes — turned off — with nearly all Wi-Fi kits.
You can control your dog from any computer on the network. You can make it walk anywhere, and you see what it sees through the camera in its nose. You can make it sit, dance, speak and listen. This may not be the world's most sensible use of Wi-Fi, but it does show why wireless networking looks
set to be a home technology revolution.
Over the next five years anything and everything could use wireless networking. Before the end of this year, expect to see reasonably cheap add-ons for your stereo system to allow it to play music downloaded to your PC. Also coming soon: Microsoft will introduce a technology called Mira that will enable you to sit in the living room with an LCD screen on your lap that could potentialy, through its access to your PC, control all your consumer electronics, from washing machine to TV. Samsung is already testing air conditioners, washing machines and microwaves — connected by Wi-Fi to a controller running Windows CE built into the fridge — in a hundred homes in Korea. Most other household appliance manufacturers are trying similar tricks.
Why? you might ask. Because linking home appliances to a computer system can pick up and report machine faults automatically.
HOW
TO DO IT
• If you are new to computers, wait until
Christmas for more consumer-friendly wireless
products to arrive.
• If you are an experienced amateur running
Windows XP and have an ethernet connector
on the back of your computer (it looks like
a big U.S. phone socket), then buy a wireless
gateway for your PC and use Windows’
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) to access
the Web on notebooks.
• For your notebook all you need is a
Wi-Fi card. Even old laptops running Windows
95 can be used to access the network. New
notebooks, with wireless access built-in,
are coming onto the market.
WHAT WILL IT COST?
For a simple Wi-Fi gateway expect to pay around
€1250 to €1350; the Wi-Fi
card for your notebook will cost about €1120
to €1175. If you need to install
an ethernet card in your PC, it will cost
around €175.
SECURING YOUR SYSTEM
• Change the default settings and password
on your wireless-access box.
• Enable WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy);
change passwords often.
• Install a personal firewall such as
Zone Alarm (it's free).
• Switch off your wireless access when
you're not using it.
• Don't keep details of credit cards,
expiry dates or passwords in normal files.
• If you are planning to access work
systems from home, talk things through with
your company's IT people.
If WEP is enabled, determined hackers can still crack it, but only if they capture lots of data. If wep is not turned on, a hacker can be into your system in under a minute. In fact, if you stand outside a home with a wireless laptop running Windows XP, you will be able to use its connection to surf the Net and often even read the contents of its hard drive.
The security company Orthus recently did a drive-by survey in 10 European cities. It found that of 1,689 networks, only 30% had enabled wep; perhaps more interestingly, almost 60% had left their networks on manufacturers' default settings — systems passwords, etc. — unchanged. Orthus founder Richard Hollis, who worked for 20 years in security for U.S. government agencies, is so concerned that he removed his company's Wi-Fi system altogether. "Even set up properly," he says, "there are too many possibilities for weaknesses to develop in a wireless network." To prove the point we took a stroll around my neighborhood. Within half an hour we had discovered, by walking around with a Wi-Fi laptop, three wireless business networks and one residential one. None had WEP turned on, and all could easily have been hacked.
While you may not have state secrets on your home computer, you should remember that Wi-Fi makes breaking and entering simple. That means a hacker can intercept e-mail, steal credit-card details or learn enough about you to open up credit-card and other accounts in your name and then make off with the proceeds — so-called identity theft. Most alarmingly, a wireless network can allow access to an employee's home computer and from there burrow right into the information heart of an
otherwise well-protected company.
So should you install a wireless network? Yes. If you add it to an existing computer or network using Internet Connection Sharing, it is pretty straightforward. Wireless networking at home is cheap and fun, so long as you get a €2,000 Aibo dog and remember to switch on the WEP security sytem.
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