WiFi phones offer free calls at a price

Today’s New York Times fea­tures an arti­cle on WiFi tele­phones. These are mobile devices that can place tele­phone calls over an 802.11b con­nec­tion by using VoIP (Voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col). While these are sim­i­lar to Skype phones that con­nect to a com­puter with a USB plug, WiFi phones are cord­less. Here are some links to WiFi phones from Net­gear and Belkin. The cur­rent mod­els run Skype.The bat­tery life of a WiFi phone is some­what lim­ited, because WiFi sig­nals require more bat­tery power than cell phones. A user might get only one or two hours of talk time on a WiFi phone. On the other hand, if there are free WiFi net­works avail­able, the user may be sav­ing a lot of money on their calls.

WiFi phone users may have prob­lems roam­ing from one access point to the next. The cell phone net­work is built to han­dle mobile users, as the net­work can hand-off a call from one tower to another as the caller walks, rides or dri­ves across a cov­er­age area. WiFi net­works assume that the users will stay within the access point’s cov­er­age area.

The arti­cle offers some com­pelling rea­sons why any­one who owns a WiFi access point should encrypt its sig­nal. Encryp­tion doesn’t stop other peo­ple from see­ing or using your sig­nal. WEP or WPA just makes it less con­ve­nient for a free­loader. Run­ning an unen­crypted WiFi router is like keep­ing the front door unlocked.

As I dis­cussed on Octo­ber 31, only about 10 per­cent of WiFi access points included in a recent sur­vey ran WPA. Sixty per­cent of the access points found in this sur­vey were unencrypted.

Users should run WPA in its pre-shared key (PSK) mode at home if their com­puter and WiFi access point sup­ports that stan­dard. The older WEP stan­dard is what the uni­ver­sity uses on its wire­less net­work. How­ever, WEP is almost triv­ial to crack with freely avail­able soft­ware. Once some­one gets the WEP key to a con­nec­tion, they can mon­i­tor data sent to and from the con­nected computers.

Check the router’s doc­u­men­ta­tion to learn how to enable WPA encryp­tion. Before doing the setup for WPA-PSK, check the com­put­ers that will be con­nected, as older mod­els may not sup­port WPA with­out a soft­ware or hard­ware upgrade.

Tagged as: computer, data, free, hardware, Internet, mobile, network, power, Skype, software, technology, university, USB, VoIP, WiFi