Wireless Internet Service

As someone who works on the go, I find wireless Internet service to be a necessity. Wireless Internet for laptops allows me to go to my favorite coffee shop, meet with clients, and be able to access web-based reports and charts anytime I need to. This is no small convenience considering how wired our company is right now.

I live in Portland Oregon, which is a pretty wired town. There are wireless Internet services in many of the major cafés, and most of the downtown is within easy reach of a node. This is a great luxury, but it isn't common to all of my clients. No matter how popular wireless Internet service becomes, it still has failed to provide free access for everyone. Many nodes are password protected, and many areas of the city fall outside of free wireless networks.

Interestingly enough, the business I work in has to pay for its own wireless Internet service. It is on the edge of downtown, so you would think that the city's free WiFi services would cover it, but this just isn't the case. The problem is that buildings can still disrupt wireless transmitters. A lot of the reception is blotchy, and moving 10 feet in one direction or another can disrupt or improve your services.

This is a big reason why, if you need dependable wireless Internet service, you should buy it yourself. If you only need to occasionally check e-mail, you can probably sniff wireless routers in your neighborhood. If you need uninterrupted connectivity, however, there is no substitute for dedicated Internet service.

If you setup your own wireless Internet service for your business, however, you face some difficult decisions. One of the most difficult ones is whether or not to make it secure and how best to secure it. It may seem obvious to many old-fashioned business types to not allow access to wireless Internet services, but you'd be surprised how many businesses do nowadays. The philosophy is, if you aren't using up all your bandwidth you should allow other people to have access to it too. That way, they will let you have access to their bandwidth, and everyone will be able to connect all over town.

The problems with this philosophy are obvious. Unsecured wireless Internet service is a liability to say the least. It is easy for anyone passing by to spy on traffic, potentially learning business trade secrets. Needless to say, you should make sure to have a top-of-the-line security expert configure your network.