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Universities or colleges consisting of multiple campuses, each with a LAN, traditionally connect geographically diverse ‘islands’ by means of private leased lines. If the connected site is small and consumes little bandwidth, the costs of such WAN links do not necessarily represent value for money. Many organisations also wish to offer their staff the facility to connect to their central network remotely, either from their houses or when travelling on business.

Secure Virtual Private Networks - Dr John Graham's guide has now been updated in collaboration with Matthew Cook and is recommended as essential reading for anyone contemplating setting up VPN inter-site or remote access systems.

IEEE 802.11b is one of the oldest WiFi standards still in use and is beginning to show its age. IEEE 802.11b products first started to appear in 1999. Now, more than a decade since its first appearance, the time is approaching for IEEE 801.11b to be turned off, for the reasons detailed below. As this may not be immediately possible for some sites, possible transition and migration strategies are also described below.

The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN working group has 250 supporting companies, 650 active members and a predilection for incomprehensible acronyms. These are the ones you need to know about: 802.11 The original 1997 2.4GHz wireless Ethernet standard, running at 1 or 2Mbit/s. As with modems, newer standards can fall back to this standard under difficult conditions or if in contact with an older interface. There were two variants, frequency hopping and direct sequence, but these were for political rather than technical reasons.