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Chicomm Blog

Wireless Broadband: As Safe as Wired?

Posted by Jill McNamara on Wednesday, August 10, 2011

You’ve probably been hearing a good deal, lately, about a networking technology called wireless broadband. It’s a way of using high-speed radio links to provide robust Internet-like voice and data services - so-called IP-based networking, that is - within a city or metro area.

wireless broadband Wireless broadband has many advantages over the technology it typically replaces, a long-existing wire-based scheme known as the T1 line. The latter is typically provided by the local telephone company.  One of the most appealing advantages - especially for fire, safety, law-enforcement, and other public agencies - is that when set up properly, wireless broadband can move data much faster than a typical T1 line: Some wireless links move 300 megabits of data per second, vs. the T1’s limit of a mere 1.5 megabits per second.

   But how safe is wireless broadband? Is it more vulnerable than wired networks to outages caused by natural disasters? Is it less resistant to unauthorized users, aka hackers? Is this technology too shaky, too unreliable for use by agencies concerned with public safety?

   In a word, no, there’s nothing unsafe about wireless broadband networks, just as long as they are designed and deployed properly by professional technicians. In fact, with the right design and engineering, wireless networks can provide almost any level of resilience and datawireless-broadband-resized-600.gif protection as might be required. That’s why the technology is catching on with organizations ranging from banks to manufacturers to the military.

   Wireless broadband networks are inherently more reliable than the phone company’s T1 lines. When the latter are run underground, as they often are, they may easily suffer from storm flooding, but not wireless gear out in the open. And wireless antennas can be attached to building rooftops or to special steel towers that are much stronger than typical telephone poles and thus much more resistant to the force of even hurricane winds.

   And for extra reliability, wireless broadband networks can be organized in a so-called mesh topology, which means that every node or point in the network is connected at least to two others, if not more. This use of multiple links, overseen by computer “intelligence” that’s distributed throughout the network - as opposed to being situated in a single, central location, which would be a point of vulnerability - provides tremendous redundancy. If one link goes down, for whatever reason, at least one other link is in place, ready instantly to take over and keep vital traffic flowing. 

   Hackers? Sure, wireless signals move through the open air, but because they’re encrypted, they’re essentially impermeable to even the most determined eavesdroppers. Many wireless encryption products use a scheme called Advanced Encryption Standard, which employs a 128-bit key to encode every piece of information that’s sent over the wireless link. Only specialized gear at each end of the link can “open” the encoded information for reading. According to one wireless manufacturer, cracking such an AES key would take many billions, if not trillions, of years - more, anyway, than most hackers or even the most hardened criminals have to spare.

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