CWNP CWNA – WLAN Deployment Part 2

8. Wireless ISP: Last-Mile Data Delivery

One of the terms you might hear often from any service provider, whether it’s for your internet service provider or your wide area network, which is a private line. It’s a term called last mile. And what that is, it’s a term called by the phone company. And by the way, yes, most of our wide area networks started with phone companies or cable companies. And so from their edge of the their network, that wire to your building was called the last mile.

And that actually, if you think about it, is very expensive. I mean, what does it cost your cable provider? If you have cable internet to get into each and every one of your homes, they have to have somebody come out and connect a wire from their central office or their switch into your home. And that is expensive. I mean, of course we have to pay for it, but that’s called the last mile.

There are many internet service providers that use a series of large antennas that have ranges of 2020 5 miles to be able to provide wireless connectivity to an antenna in your home to give you that same capability. And that is very inexpensive. Either way, you have to have the right equipment. So the last mile of service, like I said, is often the most difficult and costly to run because that’s where we have to connect all of these different houses.

And that would be the same if it was in your actual enterprise at your business. So that’s where the wisps, the wireless internet service providers are trying to get a big hold of the market to give you internet services. And if you think about it, if you have the right equipment, you can roam around the city and maintain the same wireless connectivity to the internet that you’re already paying for. And that is again, much cheaper than directly cabling each of the subscribers.

9. SOHO

In the case of the sohos, what they call the small office or home office, we might use wireless networking to make it easier for somebody to connect to the office computers. I mean, if you look at a typical access point that was designed for home use, they often have wired connections for some devices that might not support wireless. They have another wired connection that goes out to the Internet. And then, of course, everybody else sitting around there can connect through the wireless radio, whether it’s other laptops, your phone, maybe even your printer. I mean, these are all getting to be very commonplace in our house.

And some of them, I think I made mention before, and some other modules could actually go through the Internet to get to your headquarters and then from your headquarters protect your traffic with all of their security as you browse the Internet. So there’s a lot of really cool things that we can do, but really what we’re looking at is that we wanted a device in a small office that can provide connectivity usually to the Internet and through the Internet, to the headquarters. And it reduces the cost because you’re paying for Internet service, you’re not paying a special service for a private line. And the people at home have the ability to get whatever work done that they need to do.

10. ROBO

The remote office. Branch office differs in that there’s probably many employees when I say many could be 3410, 50 people that are working in that office that are not at the headquarters with the thousands of other employees. So you might have branch offices, especially being like sales, and your headquarters is in Chicago, but yet you want to do sales in Seattle or San Jose or some other other city like that. And so some of these offices might have to have connectivity across a region, the entire country, or even around the world.

So we use what we think of as a distributed solution using an enterprise grade wireless lan router at each branch office. And that’s a very common choice. And it’s really I mean, compared to a home router, these might be expensive, but compared to the equipment being used at the headquarters network, they’re very cheap. And they have the ability to even use internet connectivity to get back to the corporate headquarters. So you’re not paying for any extra service. And of course, we use things like an ipsec secured vpn to be able to make sure the communications are encrypted from that robo to the headquarters.

11. Educational/Classroom Use

In the schools. For our students, wireless networking is more and more prevalent. I remember in the early 90s that some of my contract work was to install a switch and cable all of the teacher computers to the network. But they didn’t care about the students. In today’s world, at least, like where my daughter goes to school, they give them all a tablet so they can go in anywhere in the school, out to lunch, out to wherever they want to be, to a study hall. And they can connect to the network and still continue to work on their homework.

Now, unfortunately, most classrooms have these walls that are made out of cinder block because we’re trying to keep the noise from one classroom from interfering the other. And fortunately, that also means that a lot of signal strength is lost through attenuation as it’s going through those walls. So where, you know and if it wasn’t wireless, what else could you do? Try to create a wired connection in the classroom for the 25, 35 students that are in there.

That’s really not possible and very expensive. So usually the only extra expensive to school is just having extra access points for coverage because of the type of material the walls are made out of. And so, again, it’s getting very, very popular. But I’m going to say something now that you’re going to hear me say throughout the rest of this course is that the best way to design this is to precede any installation with a site survey where you can actually determine the areas of coverage and how many of those access points you need to get the best coverage.

12. Health Care

Hospitals are going more and more into the wireless paperless world, where there’s a clinic, a doctor’s office. It seems very different than a lot of businesses because actually, I should say it’s not very different, it just looks different. But they have the same type of networking needs as other companies, but with them it’s a little different because they have these things called workstations on wheels, and that means they have things like heart monitoring or computers that are on a cart. So I’m going to make some wheels. And they literally just roll it from one patient’s room to another patient’s room. It looks at what medications they need, when they’re scheduled, they input the data from the check up. It’s, like I said, very commonplace now.

13. Hotspots

Hot spots, everybody loves. Well, not everybody, but most people love to go to their local coffee shop or their fast food restaurant now. And while they’re eating or drinking their mocha, they are working on their laptops or on their tablets or on their phones. And so we’re seeing a big rise in what they call the hot spots. Now, one of the things about hot spots is they don’t put a lot of money into security. In other words, they might have an access point or two that everybody with their cup of coffee is connecting to. Yes, I’m making the coffee cup connect to the wireless. Why not? Anyway, they sit there and the hot spot people say, you know what? We’re not going to worry about security. They’re not connecting to my actual internal network. I’m just giving them Internet service so they can use it at their own risk.

But how do we legally do that? Well, often they use a special type of web page when you first open up that connection, called a captive portal. Here’s an example of one that I’ve seen at many, many hotels. And look at this. You can even choose the language you want to read this in. Some you might have to pay for the subscription. Some might just be free. It says click here. But you know what they do? They put all that legal jargon to protect themselves. Where we actually think people read the well, it’s not quite an end user license agreement, but we always expect that people are going to read that, and if they don’t, that’s fine. They’re agreeing to it, and then they get connections on the security side. Really be careful when you’re at a hot spot.

14. Fixed Mobile Convergence

So in this module, we looked at some of the deployment considerations for the community support or the commonly supported types of technologies. Wireless land applications, devices, video, voice data, those types of things. The corporate data access, the BYOD network extensions to remote areas, small office, home office, branch office bridging between buildings, having a wireless ipad that can support communications instead of having wires, mobile office networking, connecting to all of these different types of points without having to string a wire from one place to the other.

15. Module 11 Review

Another really cool technology they call fixed mobile convergence. Now, I have a problem with that name Fixed, because Fixed doesn’t sound mobile. I mean, at least to me it doesn’t. But this is what they call it, and it’s one of those other hot topics relating to wifi.

And what it basically is, is you with your tablet or your smartphone or whatever else can roam around the country. And this is true. I travel a lot so I go to hotels a lot. I’m at a hotel right now this week. And when I’m not at the hotel, my tablet or smartphone uses my cellular network, my 4g network. Who knows when five G is coming out? But anyway, using my 4g network and when I get to the hotel, then I’m using their wireless network to do all of the same work going through their access points. But it is a fixed device that is mobile. And I guess that’s what they mean by fixed mobile.

So I can literally do my work anywhere I want to be and it’s even sadder in today’s world all these airplanes that I fly in now have wifi so that I can continue to be bothered by people at work and be expected to do work while I’m going the world. But anyway, so they call them fmcs and their systems that allow you to have what looks like a single phone number that can switch between the different networks using whichever one is lower cost or maybe the other way around whichever one is the higher speed.