Wi-Fi Alliance goes for WPA

Wi-Fi Protected Access favoured over Wep in bid to attract big business

The Wi-Fi Alliance has ditched Wireless Equivalency Protocol for securing 802.11 wireless access points in favour of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), in a bid to attract big business.

Products sold from August will have to support WPA, which was certified at the end of last month and can be installed on existing hardware using firmware upgrades.

But a full implementation of 802.11i, which is being renamed WPA version 2, will require a hardware upgrade to deal with encryption.

"It became apparent to us that enterprise markets were avoiding Wi-Fi because of security worries," said Kirk Allchorne, marketing co-chair at the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry body that represents wireless equipment vendors and service providers.

"We rather naively thought Wi-Fi adoption would grow automatically," he said. "However, it has been SMEs that have been driving growth.

"Hopefully, our new security standards are addressing the concerns of enterprises, although the economic situation hasn't helped."

Michael Wall, analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said enterprises do not need convincing to get Wi-Fi. "It is a done deal," he said.

"There have always been security tools but there is a lack of education by vendors and a trade- off between ease-of- use and security. These moves are going to help a lot."

But Mark O'Hara, managing director of networking reseller Hydra, said: "People still need to be convinced it is secure. Having a new security standard is great, but you have to let it loose on hackers before you know it is secure.

"Another reason it is being held back is enterprise IT directors prefer to invest in more of the same rather than new technology."

The new 802.11g standard, offering 54Mbps bandwidth, is set to be ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers by August. Some vendors are already shipping 802.11g products.

"The people shipping 802.11g now are working on the best guess of what the final standard will be," Wall said.