Wi-Fi as easy as cell phones

Date: 2011-03-24 19:51:00

This article from CNet by Lance Whitney covers an announcement made by the Wi-Fi Alliance on 3/22/2011. Wi-Fi Alliance to ease access to Wi-Fi hot spots. This announcement may some day make many of our lives much more pleasant and enjoyable.

Public hotspots are usually the most insecure way to connect to the internet. For the security-aware, they add a level of stress to our travels that isn't necessary. (See Using Hotspots away from home. Luckily, the people who first engineered cell phones had enough hindsight to include ways to make it easy to connect to cell phone towers and make / receive calls. When you connect to a public hotspot using a wireless card in your device, you have to think quite a bit about it. Is it a real hotspot or a scammer trying to trick you? Is it encrypted or not? Is there a stronger access point just as close? How much traffic is running on it now, perhaps a different one would be better?

When a cell phone moves with you, it is looking at the available towers and asking a few of these same questions. Fortunately, we are not bothered by all this. We just innocently use our phone or device trusting that the infrastructure it uses is reliable, safe, and secure.

Wouldn't that same naivety be nice with hot-spots? We are reading between the lines a bit here, but that seems to be the goal of the Wi-Fi Alliance. To make connecting to public or private hotspots as easy as it is using a cell phone. A second goal is to enable public hotspots to be used to offload non-voice traffic from cellular network towers to public hotspots during congestion. Building in controls to enable this in Wi-Fi equipment will enable seamlessly moving from cell tower to hotspot and back again.

Unfortunately, we may have to wait a long time before this is widely available. After all, 2006 is when WPA/2 began showing up in Wi-Fi certified equipment, and we're just starting to see a switch to that in private networks today.

We're reading between the lines a bit here, but that seems to be the goal of the Wi-Fi Alliance. To make connecting to public or private hotspots as easy as it is using a cell phone. A second goal is to enable public hotspots to be used to safely swich from cellular network towers to public hotspots during congestion. Building in controls to enable this in WiFi equipment will enable seamlessly moving from cell tower to hotspot.

Updates

Wi-Fi operators promise globo roaming standard, An alliance of alliances - By Bill Ray - 2011-06-23

Category: WiFi

Subcategory: Hot-Spots