In his keynote earlier in the day, Phil Meeks, COO and EVP of the Time Warner Cable’s business unit, suggested that small cell deployments could start in late 2014.
via Small Cells: The Battle for the Lamp Post | Light Reading.
802.11ac defines the 5GHz band.
Adding to the challenge, “We expect these people to be carrying and using multiple wireless devices,” says Frohwerk. “In Vancouver, we only had to provision one device per user. This means that we really have to have the capability to support up to 120,000 users on the Sochi Wi-Fi network, without issues or interruptions.”
via Avaya builds massive Wi-Fi net for 2014 Winter Olympics – Network World.
It’s interesting that they have to provision devices to users. Is this done manually? Here’s more….
In Sochi, Avaya’s Wi-Fi network will be split into five virtual SSID-based networks. There will be one network for the athletes, two for media (one free, one paid), one for Olympics staff, and one for dignitaries.
Each group will have its own access password, and extra layers of password protection will be added where needed. The Wi-Fi traffic will be distributed using about 2,000 802.11n access points across the Olympics Game sites; including inside the stands for the first time.
Each SSID will need its own range of frequencies so having 5 seems like it would present problems trying to figure out where to place access points so their radio transmissions don’t step on each other. Also there doesn’t seem to be any provisions made for their customers, the people paying to attend these events.
The goal is to put physical shops on a similar playing field as e-commerce stores, which already have a wealth of data about customer buying habits. According to the website, Swarm treats smartphones like “offline cookies,” so stores can personalize the experience for new and repeat shoppers. Swarm does this through its cloud-based platform that integrates into a store’s public Wi-Fi network.
My best guess is that what they did was to impersonate the EP-EXT wifi network and steal our credentials from the login page (https://wifiauth.europarl.europa.eu/, now no longer available, see screenshot below for what it more-or-less used to look like). In this scenario, after I automatically connect to the rogue WiFi (because my phone recognizes the SSID), it presents me with the familiar login page, but this time it’s not HTTPS but plain HTTP. So, no warning about a self-signed certificate is presented to the user.
After I type in my credentials, the rogue WiFi is turned off for a minute or more, so my phone re-connects to the real EP-EXT network and I am asked for my credentials again. I would probably think that I mistyped the password or something and not think twice about it. After a minute the rogue WiFi goes back online, waiting for the next victim.
via epfsug – Re: Ang.: [EPFSUG] 14 MEPs emails intercepted by a hacker thanks to Microsoft flaws – arc.
This is classic MITM where a user inadvertently accepts a different certificate than provided from the mail server which allows the man in the middle access to the encrypted stream. Always be on the lookout for those pop up notifications. An attacker can’t get to an encrypted stream without your permission — even on an unsecured open wifi.
From: Temporary Switch-off of the EP Public WI-FI Network. EP Private Wi-Fi Network Still Available.
The Parliament has been subject for a man-in-the-middle attack, where a hacker has captured the communication between private smartphones and the public Wi-Fi of the Parliament (EP-EXT Network).
The consequence is that some individual mail-boxes have been compromised. All concerned users have already been contacted and asked to change their password.
As a precaution, the Parliament has therefore decided to switch-off the public Wi-Fi network until further notice, and we invite you to contact the ITEC Service Desk in order to install an EP software certificate on all the devices that you use to access the EP IT systems (email, etc..).
Ironically, WDS (when compatible) is generally considered the superior solution. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, it’s just a cleaner, more efficient solution, with fewer idiosyncrasies than universal bridging. But what always kills WDS is the incompatibilities.
via WDS vs Repeater – Wireless Network – Wireless Networking.
I found this paper very useful.
ABSTRACT
Wireless sensor networks promise fine-grain monitoring in a wide variety of environments. Many of these environments (e.g., indoor environments or habitats) can be harsh for wireless communication. From a networking perspective, the most basic aspect of wireless communication is the packet delivery performance: the spatio-temporal characteristics of packet loss, and its environmental dependence.
These factors will deeply impact the performance of data acquisition from these networks.
In this paper, we report on a systematic medium-scale (up to sixty nodes) measurement of packet delivery in three different environments: an indoor office building, a habitat with moderate foliage, and an open parking lot. Our findings have interesting implications for the design and evaluation of routing and medium-access protocols for sensor networks.
via Understanding Packet Delivery Performance In Dense Wireless Sensor Networks
The user’s guide for one of Aruba’s recent software products states: “The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and associated devices.” That software includes “a location engine that calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds by default… The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each MAC address.”
For now, Seattle’s mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area. But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have “citywide deployment” of the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “real-time situational awareness.”
This is why you should always have wifi disabled, in “airplane mode,” turned off when not in use. Only turn on wifi for your device manually when you need to use a network. Doing this also extends battery life because running the radio interface uses a lot of juice. This network they built in Seattle would have great public benefit if it were open for all to use and there’s few engineering reasons why it can’t be. Since emergencies are rare may as well utilize it and then kick people off indiscriminately when the network truly is needed. I suspect however it’s not open for use by the rabble. Another blurb from the article:
It’s reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff’s Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.
Fusion centers, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security as “focal points” for the “receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing” of surveillance information.
At least if they’re going to spy provide some value to the spied upon “user.”
Patch antennas focus the radio beam within a specific area. (A couple of vendors, Ruckus Wireless and Xirrus, have developed their own built-in “smart” antennas that adjust and focus Wi-Fi signals on clients.) Depending on the beamwidth, the effect can be that of a floodlight or a spotlight, says Jeff Lime, Ventev’s vice president. Ventev’s newest TerraWave High-Density products focus the radio beam within narrower ranges than some competing products, and offer higher gain (in effect putting more oomph into the signal to drive it further), he says.
via High-gain patch antennas boost Wi-Fi capacity for Georgia Tech – Network World.
At Georgia Tech, each antenna focused the Wi-Fi signal from a specific overhead access point to cover a section of seats below it. Fewer users associate with each access point. The result is a kind of virtuous circle. “It gives more capacity per user, so more bandwidth, so a better user experience,” says Lime.
CeroWrt is a project built on the OpenWrt firmware to resolve the endemic problems of bufferbloat in home networking today, and to push forward the state of the art of edge networks and routers. Projects include proper IPv6 support, tighter integration with DNSSEC, and most importantly, reducing bufferbloat in both the wired and wireless components of the stack.
via Cerowrt – Overview – Bufferbloat.
From their wiki page on buffer bloat:
Bufferbloat is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is “Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes.”
The bad news is that bufferbloat is everywhere, in more devices and programs than you can shake a stick at. The good news is, bufferbloat is relatively easy to fix. The even better news is that fixing it may solve a lot of the service problems now addressed by bandwidth caps and metering, making the Internet faster and less expensive for both consumers and providers.
Wi-Fi client devices can seek a wireless network to connect to through active or passive scanning for ‘beacons’ broadcast by access points. Smartphones typically use active scanning, which means they switch on their wireless radio for a brief period to send a probe request and receive information about networks within range. The operating systems of wireless devices can include a preferred network list (PNL), which incorporates some of the SSIDs of Wi-Fi networks the device has previously successfully connected to, and some devices will include this information in their probe requests.