| Broadband Wireless - Wireless LAN |
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Wireless broadband with the use of wireless LAN or WLAN is a wireless local area network of computers which serves a local or geographically limited area such as a university, office building, or home. It uses radio waves as its carrier |
to give a network of connection to all users in the surrounding area. Areas can range for a single room to an entire campus or office building. The network’s backbone usually uses broadband cables, with one or more wireless access points connecting the wireless users to the wired network.
Originally wireless LAN hardware was quite expensive to consumers and its' was only used as an alternative to cabled LAN in places where cabling was difficult or impossible such as old protected building or classrooms. As technology became more advance over the recent years WLAN components have become cheap enough to be used in the home, with many being set-up so that one PC (a parent's PC) can be used to share an broadband internet connection with the whole family whilst retaining access control at the parents' PC.
| The main issue with wireless LAN is the lack of default security. Due to this many broadband ADSL connections not offered together with a wireless base station/ADSL modem/ |
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firewall/router access point. Further, many laptop have wireless networking built-in within them, thus eliminating the need for an additional plug-in card. This might even enable, by default, without the user realizing, thus "broadcasting" the laptop's accessibility to any other computer nearby.
The basis security measured used for a WLAN was originally WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) but this has shown to provide little security due to serious weaknesses. It wasn't until later that WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security protocol was created to address these problems.
Other different types of Broadband
Wireless Internet:
WiFi | EVDO
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