Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 5: Choosing Wireless Home Networking Equipment
Certification and Standards Support
We talk in Chapter 2 about the Wi-Fi Alliance and its certification process for
devices. At a minimum, you should ensure that your devices are Wi-Fi certified.
This certification provides you with the assurance that your wireless
LAN equipment has been through the wringer of interoperability and compliance
testing and meets all the standards of 802.11b, g, or a, and the draft
standard for 802.11n.
In fact, there’s even more to Wi-Fi certification than just meeting the 802.11b,
g, a, and n standards. Wi-Fi certification means that a piece of equipment has
been thoroughly tested to work with other similar Wi-Fi equipment, regardless
of brand. This is the interoperability part of the certification, and it
means that you can plug a D-Link adapter into your desktop computer, use a
built-in Intel Centrino adapter in your notebook, and install a NETGEAR AP as
the hub of your network, and everything will work.
Back in the early days of wireless networking, this interoperability was not
assured, and you needed to buy all your equipment from the same vendor —
and then you were locked in to that vendor. Wi-Fi certification frees you from
this concern.
The Wi-Fi Alliance certifies the following:
� General Wi-Fi certification: For 802.11a, b, g, and n equipment (as well as
multimode equipment that supports more than one standard at a time —
such as 802.11n gear that also supports 802.11a, b, and g), this certification
simply lets you know that a given piece of Wi-Fi certified gear will
connect to another piece of gear using the same standard.
This certification is the bottom-line “must have” that you should look for
when you buy a wireless LAN system. We recommend that you choose
products certified 802.11n unless your budget is very tight (in which
case you should feel just fine about choosing an older 802.11g system).
� Security certification: Equipment that has been certified to work with
the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and WPA2 security systems (see
Chapter 9 for more on this topic). WPA certified equipment can be
certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance for any of these types of WPA:
• WPA and WPA2 Personal: This is the minimum you should look
for — equipment that has been certified to work with the WPA
Personal (or WPA-PSK) system described in Chapter 9.
If you can help it, don’t buy any Wi-Fi gear that isn’t certified for at
least WPA2 Personal. We think that this is the minimum level of
security you should insist on with a Wi-Fi network.
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