standards

PB/INFO/071 (10/06) WEP, WPA or Other? The JANET Wireless Advisory Group (WAG) strongly advises the replacement of WEP techniques with WPA or WPA2/802.11i-based security, or alternatives such as encrypted VPN and self-securing protocols like SSH, as soon as possible.

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.