Wireless 101

Summary: Learn the basics and some safety tips about wireless Wi-Fi. Dave Hodgdon and Josh Richard from Portsmouth Computer Group discuss what to watch out for and the benefits of various Wi-Fi systems. Listen or read more to earn a degree in ‘Wireless 101.’

Mike:  It is Tech Tuesday with our friends from PCG, the Portsmouth Computer Group. Our good friend, Dave Hodgdon, is with us. Hey Dave, good morning to you. Welcome.

Dave Hodgdon: Good morning, Mike. Always a pleasure.

Mike:  Always a pleasure. I hope you had a good last weekend, fourth of July weekend, it was great.

Dave: Great week, great week on the lake.

Mike:  Wasn’t the weather wonderful.

Dave: Wonderful, went to the Red Sox last night. Spectacular. Good stuff.

Mike:  Oh, you did go to the Red Sox last night, huh?

Dave: Good stuff, brought my son.

Mike:  He saw a good game.

Dave: Saw a great game.

Mike:  Seven in a row for the Red Sox.

Dave: Another home run for Martinez, we like it.

Mike:  Yeah, that’s good for ratings here on WTSN as well.

Dave: You like that, right?

Mike:  Dave, of course, president and strategic technology advisor, Josh Richard, one of the PCG’s wireless experts. Josh, good to see you. Welcome to the broadcast.

Josh Richard: Fine, thanks. Good morning.

Mike:  Good to have you with us. Today, on Tech Tuesday, all brought to by Portsmouth Computer Group, they’ve got offices in Portsmouth and Dover, you can call them up in Portsmouth at 603-431-4121 or in Dover at 603-750-0101, easy numbers to remember. We’re going to talk about wireless 101. What does this encompass, Dave? Wireless 101.

Wireless 101: What You Need to Know

Dave: We know wireless in today’s world. We as users expect to always be on, whether it’s in your car, it’s at your home, it’s at the office, you’re at the beach, you’re on the hotel, so wireless is a very strategic part of IT and businesses just need to be on. And we’re going to give you some tips on wireless today.

Mike:  It’s almost like a cashless society. We’re in a wireless world, right?

Dave: When you can’t get on, people are frustrated. You watch your kids, I can’t get online, I can’t get online.

Mike:  That’s the other thing. You know, I’ve noticed the instantaneous gratification that we need to have right away. You know, God forbid, Josh, God forbid, we can’t get online.

Josh: Seriously. Seriously.

Mike:  I mean it’s unbelievable. We didn’t really care about this 20 years ago.

Josh: No. This is the new thing. People get very frustrated by this, especially when their kids are yelling at them, my Wi-Fi doesn’t work, I can’t get on my games.

Mike: Remember the dial-up sound?

Josh: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I came right up with AOL, so I’m very familiar with all of that.

Mike: Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable. Let’s talk about business versus consumer wireless. Is there a difference, seriously?

Josh: Yeah. So, there’s a couple of different points to make here as far as business versus personal. The devices, specifically there’s definitely going to be business-grade versus consumer-grade. And your business-grade are always going to provide you better equipment, more longevity, the overall signal’s going to be better. But one of the real important things has to do with when you have a Wi-Fi access point in your business, separating the wireless signals, and what networks they connect to. So, whether it’s connecting to your personal network, or whether it’s connecting to a public network. In other words, what I mean by that is, you have your computers, your server, your database are all on your network. When you connect your Wi-Fi up, you’re connecting that to that same network as well. And that can open up some vulnerabilities for you in your information and your employees, by allowing public to access that.

So what you want to do is, you want to have a separate access point, or a separate Wi-Fi signal that goes to a protected section of the network where it can’t reach all of those devices. And that keeps people from, that gives you the ability to allow your customers to have Wi-Fi access when they’re on your property or in your business, but still protect your assets, protect your information from people that are tampering, or stumbling across stuff, malicious intent, whatever have you. People can sit out in the parking lot in the middle of the night, pull up their laptop, and plug right into your Wi-Fi, especially if it’s public and you’ve made it notified, you’ve put it up on your wall, this is my Wi-Fi, and this is my password. You want to make sure that that connects to something that doesn’t have access to your actual private information.

Secured vs. Unsecured Wi-Fi Networks

Mike: So that’s why there’s a lot of sites that you’ll see as you roam around and you drive around and you see your phone pick up these wireless networks, you’ll see some are non-secure, some are secure. Some are password-oriented, some are not password-oriented.

Josh: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: All looking private, right?

Josh: Yeah. And that’s another piece of it too. So, a lot of times you’re going to see some of these access points are unsecured or secured, and that just means that they’re using or not using encryption for that wireless connection. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that connection is secure even if it is password protected. You can have a password protected network, and still connect to something that is able to access your company’s personal information. That just means that that data stream, that wireless data stream, that actual traffic is not encrypted, or it is encrypted. And that’s that big difference right there.

A lot of times, you’ll see Xfinity hot spots popping up everywhere. Comcast is just trying to flood everything with their Xfinity hot spots. And those are seen as unsecure to your device, but you have to go through what they call a captive portal, so when you pull up your website, instead of going to, like you type in Google dot com, but all of a sudden you’ve got Xfinity’s webpage, and you’re like, I didn’t go to that. But you have to put in your user name and password, that’s your authentication into the system. So that’s one of their ways of restricting and limiting traffic, but so many people are on Comcast these days that that could be pretty much anybody.

And, that still doesn’t mean that your data stream is encrypted, so if you’re banking, or if you’re doing any kind of passing of personal information, credit card information, and it’s not on an encrypted network, that means that data that’s going back and forth over the air, can be actively captured. Somebody can, I can be sitting there with my laptop and a special device, and I could sniff that information right out of the air, and I can record it all, and then go back later on and decode it, and look right at it. Versus encryption, where if you have it all encrypted, they’re going to have a much harder time trying to understand what that data was.  And all in all, it’s just better off to stay away from the unsecured or the non-password protected networks. Because you’re putting yourself at risk too. So, when you’re using Wi-Fi at public places, coffee shops, McDonald’s, whatever have you, those are really sketchy places to use your Wi-Fi, unless you’re just accessing an application, you’re using your Snapchat or you’re using your Instagram or something like that.

Not doing banking or things like that. You’re not exchanging types of data that are going to be usable to somebody that could capture it.

Mike:  No, that’s a really good point. Dave, I always talk about that. That’s kind of like the downside of technology. We love the wireless stuff, but now that we have this wireless and all this fast technology, we’ve got to be even more careful, more on-guard, more defensive about protecting our assets and our information, right?

Dave: That’s a good point, Mike. We talked about some of our early sessions about security and passwords, so you the user just need to be ‘thinkful’, be thoughtful of what you’re doing, what you’re trying to accomplish. And just before you’re hitting click on a public on a private, just make sure it’s what you should be doing, and then once you’re on it, make sure you’re hitting your secure network with your password to get into it.

Mike:  So, what you’re saying Josh, is really you should not be at a Starbucks coffee shop and using their wireless network and doing your banking and stuff.

Josh: Absolutely not. No, you don’t want to do that.

Common Issues with Wireless Wi-Fi

Mike:  So, let’s talk about some of the wireless issues. What are some of the common issues users will have as far as using wireless?

Josh: So, the number one issue that we’re really running into these days with the advent of the technology becoming so cheap and easy to get your hands on, these access points, being able to put up your own Wi-Fi hot spot wherever you want in your house, at your place of business, pretty much wherever you want. Even turning your phone into a mobile hot spot-

Mike:  Yeah, the phones now come with mobile hot spot.

Josh: So, all of this is creating a lot of congestion on the airwaves. And what is happening is people are basically stepping on each other’s toes with their Wi-Fi signals.

Mike:  So, a lot of interference.

Josh: Lots and lots of interference. The traditional 2.4 gigahertz network is so saturated. You just can’t get away from having interference from either somebody else’s hot spot next door to you, or in an apartment next to you. Even the house across the street can be interfering with your signal. But not just that. Microwaves. Cordless telephones if you still have them in your house, a lot of people are now . . . cellphones. But still, all run on the same technology and it’s just cluttering up the airwaves so badly. When it originally came out, it wasn’t such a big deal, because it was few and far between. But now everybody’s got them, and it’s just covering everything. So, they’ve come out with a new standard, the five gigahertz technology, and that’s helping alleviate some of that band, some of that frequency range, from interference. So, you move to this other frequency range, and you’ve got a lot less interference, but there’s pitfalls to each one. So, we can get into that, but Dave wants to say something.

Dave: Yeah, a couple more things we find in various buildings, Mike, is the building, a brick wall, a stone old fireplace in there. Wallpaper, a lot of copper in the wall. So, every building is so unique, and it’s very important to do the wireless assessment to determine where those access points go, because you might run it out in your front patio, or in your conference room, but there could just be this huge wall that’s going to be a problem. You got to put the access point inside there to get the coverage you want.

Mike:  Oh yeah, it’s almost like radio signals, you know. I mean it all depends, you know. Like FM signals are line of sight, so FM signals, you want to be on the highest point available, so you don’t run into concrete buildings or metal buildings or metal towers or mountains or things like that, right? That’s what it is. So how do you determine what type of wireless system to install when you’re talking about wireless assessments? What is the process?

Dave: Well I think the most important part in this, and one of the things Josh does is, you’ve got to do a full wireless assessment. You’re going to go to the building, the business that we’re trying to assess, we want to ask the person, where do you want your coverage. Conference room, open area, it’s a manufacturing, or it’s a doctor’s office, they want the exam rooms, you need to go around with your notebook, we have the various testing tools, and find out where they want the coverage. And then pretty much come up with a plan of where the access points need to go, because you pretty much want to always have it be on. Whether it’s in the kitchen, it’s in a particular closet where supplies, because more and more people are using tablets, phones, to get their inventory. They want to be online.

Control-Based vs. Single Wireless Access Point

Mike:  Yeah, all the time. We’re speaking to Dave Hodgdon and Josh Richard from Portsmouth Computer Group. You can check out their website, PCGIT dot com as well. It’s Tech Tuesday here on WTSM. We’re talking about wireless 101. It’s 7:51. We have a couple more minutes with the guys here. So, managing wireless, what’s the difference between a control-based and a single wireless access point. That’s seems confusing to me, but what’s the difference here, when we’re talking to someone —

Josh: So, the differences can get pretty technical, but to start right off, cost. Cost is always going to be the biggest separator between the two. There are some new advents of technology that are bringing that cost down, but basically, your standard access point, when you go to Best Buy or something and you pick up an access point, you’re going to have just a single access point. And you can buy multiple access points, but they all are stand-alone access points. They don’t communicate with each other. They might be aware of each other’s signals, but they don’t actually talk to each other in a common language to say hey, I’ve got a better signal over here, send your traffic to me instead.

That’s what a controller-based system does. It allows you to essentially tether all of your access points to one central hub that sees each device as a single device and says okay, what are you getting for a signal, what are you getting for a signal? And then gives your device the access it needs to the best wireless access point. And as you would traverse like a large building, if you have a large corporation you have multiple access points, that controller will actually manage the hand-off of your device from one access point to the other as the signal decreases off of one and gets better on the other. That controller will actually force your device to the other one. Without the controller, your device is making that decision all by itself. And usually these devices don’t do a good job of that. And they’ll hang onto that access point even though there’s like no coverage at all, and you constantly run into this.

I run into this all the time when I’m in people’s houses, where they’ll be, I’ve got great access out here, I’ve got no access out front, even though I have a controller, not a controller but an access point right there in the front of the house. And I can actually go into the system and I can see that their device is actually still connected to the other one in the back of the house, because it disconnected. And sometimes that requires just the user to take the phone in and out of airplane mode, so that it disconnects from the other one, and reconnects to the new one, but that requires intervention with the user. Some people just don’t want to be hassled by like, oh I’ve got to push more buttons, or I’ve got to mess around with my settings or whatever. They just want it to work.

So, controller-based can help you with that, but at the cost of just the amount of money you’re going to spend on that. And like I said, there is some new technology out there where that cost is coming down, they’re pretty new out there, ASIS has got a great new controller system out there. But that’s up to you-

Mike:  Final word, Dave? Final word?

Dave: Yeah, I just feel that that controller-base is where businesses need to go. Mike, it’s —

Mike:  Absolutely.

Dave: — Because you’ve got your application, you’re in your medical office, and you’re going from room to room. You don’t want to lose the signal. You’re alive on that application. So as businesses move forward, wireless is everywhere, so you’ve got to be online.

Mike:  So that will keep a steady signal, that controller base?

Dave: You can keep a steady signal, keep it on your secure network, and it’s the route to go.

Mike:  All right. Best way to get in touch with you folks?

Dave: Give us a ring at 431-4121, that’s 431-4121, or visit us at PCGIT dot com.

Mike:  All right, Dave and Josh from Portsmouth Computer Group. PCGIT dot com. Tech Tuesday. Thank you, guys.

Josh: Thanks for having us.

Dave: See you.