On Christmas Day 2000, I had to tear myself away from family festivities to
get back to Foster City, Calif.,
the then-home of both eWEEK Labs and PC Magazine Labs (I worked for PCMag at
the time). I needed to untangle—in time for publication—the mysteries that kept
popping up during my first 802.11b wireless LAN
interoperability test. I had found that post-certification firmware upgrades to
some of the products under test were breaking out-of-the-box interoperability,
one of the core elements that would help drive the future success and growth of
the wireless technology.
Soon after 802.11b products appeared in the marketplace in 1999, the WiFi
Alliance, which was known as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance at
the time, started certifying products for interoperability. Most of the
products I was testing—which consisted solely of access points and laptop PC
Cards—had already garnered certification, but after-the-fact enforcement was a
little lax, and a couple of vendors were quietly breaking interoperability via
upgrades after getting the seal of approval.
The potential for Wi-Fi was already undeniable at that point in time: The
use of open spectrum for connectivity and falling silicon prices provided a low
barrier of entry for hardware makers and software developers bringing with them
new ideas on how untethered connectivity could be consumed. Already,
expensive first-generation products aimed at a corporate audience were being
met in the market with a new wave of less-expensive equipment geared toward
consumers and home users, bringing with them the promise that a Wi-Fi client
provided at work could also work at home with little fuss.
Without a reasonable guarantee of interoperability, however, that potential
would have gone out the window, which is one of the reasons why the WiFi
Alliance was so instrumental to the early maturation of the
technology. And, over time, that organization has also proven important
for its willingness to draw lines in the sand delineating the growth spurts Wi-Fi
would undergo.
Before the article I referenced earlier hit the newsstands, word surfaced
that a group of researchers at the University
of California had poked holes in
Wi-Fi’s WEP encryption, quickly changing the focus on Wi-Fi from
interoperability to security. The WEP vulnerabilities had been known among
IEEE 802.11 members for several months, and planning was already under way to
remedy the flaws—even though a majority of Wi-Fi customers weren’t using WEP at
all.
But customers—particularly business customers—needed solutions fast to
secure existing networks or to be able to continue in-progress deployments.
The interim fix, TKIP, which was designed to work on existing hardware, held
up as an effective solution for an astounding six years until Martin Beck and
Erik Tews announced a successful attack against it in 2008. The respite left
plenty of time for the full, AES-based
security solution (802.11i) to be developed. And the WiFi Alliance added both
TKIP (WPA) and AES (WPA2) to their
interoperability testing program before the solutions were finalized,
effectively putting an end to late-stage development squabbles and quickening
the release of the technologies into the marketplace.
eWEEK invited me to join the Labs team in the wake of the initial WEP findings,
first as a contributor and then as an analyst, to follow and document the early
growing pains of the technology and those who deployed it. And in the
intervening years, I’ve borne witness to the explosion in popularity of the
technology, watching it grow from extravagance for laptop users into a
mission-critical enabler for data, voice and video to a vast array of endpoints
and devices. The technology even serves to cover up the inadequacies of
other, more expensive and proprietary wireless technologies (I’m looking at
you, AT&T).
I’d call that a gargantuan success story. Now, if you will excuse me,
I’m going to use Wi-Fi to watch an NBA game on my iPhone.
Senior Analyst Andrew Garcia can be reached at agarcia@eweek.com.
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