Wired v Wireless

Hi there,

I work for a small charity in an office of 10 people. Currently, we have a
wired network using Cat 5 cable and are using Windows Small Business Server
2000.

We intend to move offices soon, but rather than get the new office wired up
with network points straight away (though we'll be doing it for at least the
phone system anyway), we thought we'd consider moving to wireless
instead.

I've put down below some pros and cons from internet research, but I'd
appreciate it if people with experience of both solutions could give me
their comments and recommendations for our particular case:

For wireless:
-------------
No wires!
Save on installation costs of cat 5 points
Can access network or internet anywhere in office, and not restricted by
network point and cat 5 cable
New standards of wireless are quite fast and secure (?)

Against wireless:
----------------
Would have to buy a wireless router
Would have to buy wireless network cards for each PC
Not as fast as wired networks
Not as secure as wired networks (?)


Thanks for any advice,

Stephen

On 2004-12-03 04:39:40 -0500, "ste�"
<(E-Mail Removed)> said:

> For wireless:
> -------------
> No wires!
> Save on installation costs of cat 5 points
> Can access network or internet anywhere in office, and not restricted by
> network point and cat 5 cable
> New standards of wireless are quite fast and secure (?)
>
> Against wireless:
> ----------------
> Would have to buy a wireless router
> Would have to buy wireless network cards for each PC
> Not as fast as wired networks
> Not as secure as wired networks (?)

If you are running structured wiring (Cat5) for voice, you might as
well run for data as well. The incremental cost of running the data
cabling is, AFAIK, rather minimal. Wired or wireless, you'll need to
buy a networking device--an Ethernet switch for wired networks vs. a
wireless access point/router for a wireless network. The two options
are reasonably comparable in that regard.

As for speed, wired networks are GOING to be faster, no doubt about it.
Even 802.11g, which runs at 54Mbps (or 108Mbps in non-standard,
non-interoperable configurations) is still slower than Fast Ethernet,
which runs at 100Mbps. Raw Mbps aside, the switched nature of a wired
Fast Ethernet network compared to the shared nature of an 802.11g
wireless network means wired networks will have better throughput.

Security on a wireless network is getting better, but only if you run
WPA with 802.1x authentication; this provides dynamic per-session
encryption keys and advanced AES encryption. Otherwise, running WEP
with static keys or WPA with static passphrases are not as secure as a
wired network. True security geeks would insist on 802.1x
authentication even for wired networks, as this would guarantee that
nobody gets on your network without being authenticated first (DHCP
won't even give them an IP address lease).

It's very likely that you'll get as many different opinions here as
there are people responding to your post. This is just my humble
opinion.

HTH.

--
Scott Lowe