If you work for a large corporation the chances are that you've seen people sat around with laptops kitted out with walkie-talkie style aerials allowing connections to the business's LAN (Local Area Network).
Today networks like those based on the 802.11b standard, also called wireless LANs and Wi-Fi Networks, are becoming more and more common in the modern workplace. In the US and Europe wireless LANs have become a must have for many companies but some have rushed in and created networks without thought and this has allowed people to break into them due to the WLAN signal not being encoded sufficiently.
The next big development in wireless LANs is the adoption of VoWLAN (voice over wireless LAN) – the implementation of a system similar to VoIP (voice over IP, which allows voice traffic on a normal LAN). In the past it has been difficult to achieve this due to QoS (Quality of Service) problems but now these have been overcome and the emergence of handsets which can be used with a WLAN are a reality.
For companies this could mean that there will no longer be a need for physical connections in the future as the phones and network could be broadcast, saving money and resources in maintenance of the physical network. The security of WLANs has already been established as very good if companies take sufficient measures. The WLAN story so far has shown people can set up networks carelessly and this has lost data and risked security already, now if the same were to be done for VoWLAN they could risk having people making unlimited free calls by tapping in to badly configured systems.
News source: Silicon.com
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