More airports and hotels now offer wireless Internet. But is it secure?
By Lois Madison Reamy
June 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine
More airports and hotels now offer wireless Internet. But is it secure?
In this age of beepers, cell phones and portable computers, you can leave the office, but the office won’t leave you. Yet if you must work while on the go, you might as well make the most of it. Wireless ethernet services sprouting up at airports and hotels make mobile communications much simpler and faster. But this ease comes with a caveat: You must take precautions to ensure that your message isn’t intercepted.
At pioneering airports - Dallas/Fort Worth, Hong Kong, Ottawa, San Jose, Seattle-Tacoma, Stockholm-Arlanda, Vancouver and Singapore’s Changi - wireless access to the Internet is available throughout. You simply slip a local area network wireless adapter card into your laptop, enter the setting for your airport’s network provider and click on to your regular Internet service. Transmitting data is far faster than over a conventional dial-up system.
At other airports, wireless service is provided in certain airline lounges. American Airlines, for instance, has it in all 32 of its Admirals Clubs in the U.S. SAS expects to have installed wireless in all 17 of its premier lounges around the world by the end of the year.
Some hotels have been in the vanguard of wireless, and others are scrambling to catch up. The Four Seasons Hotel Austin purports to have been the first to install the technology, back in 1997. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts properties worldwide are continuing to go wireless. An executive of the Four Seasons Hotel Washington, D.C., reports that meeting planners “tell us they won’t use hotels anymore that don’t have ethernet.” Planners apparently like the split-second connections as well as the system’s ability to link members of a group in an ad hoc network. Another plus: Wireless Internet access at every seat in a conference room.
A number of other chains are also embracing the technology, including Sheraton Hotels and Resorts’ Four Points Hotels, Hilton Hotels, Sweden’s Scandic Hotels, Sonesta Hotels and Resorts, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Summerfield Suites by Wyndham. Also venturing into wireless are individual hotels, such as Dallas’s Mansion on Turtle Creek and Hotel Crescent Court, the Peninsula Beverly Hills and the Fullerton Singapore (see “Hotel Gems”).
You can generally link to the Internet through a subscription service or for a flat fee, without having to pay phone charges (wireless, after all, is not a phone-based technology). SAS offers basic wireless free to its frequent flyers and business-class passengers. But in most cases, users pay a supplier directly for the service, typically by credit card. For instance, MobileStar Network Corp. (www.mobilestar.com), a major wireless installer, charges an access fee of $2.50 for 15 minutes of usage and $15.95 for 200 minutes a month. Another big wireless company, Wayport (www.wayport.com), commands $6.95 for an airport connection lasting 24 hours, or $4.95 with a prepaid membership card costing $49.95. At Hong Kong International Airport, Pacific Century CyberWorks charges $5 per hour or $10 per day for a hookup. Guests at the Washington, D.C., Four Seasons are likewise billed $10 a day (group rates are lower).
To gain access to the typical wireless service, you’ll need a PC adapter card. Airports and hotel lounges may lend or rent them (for about $2). But it’s more dependable to buy one online from Amazon.com or Buy.com or at a computer store. Prices range from $100 to $300. The more expensive cards provide relatively seamless roaming, easier monitoring of your network and better security. Look for a Wi-Fi-certified (IEEE 802.11b standard) wireless LAN card by Apple Computer, Dell Computer Corp., Intel Corp. or another reliable company. New notebook PCs from Apple, Dell, Compaq Computer Corp. and IBM Corp. now offer wireless cards as accessories.
But be careful what you send over the ethernet - you never know who’s listening. Information technology experts warn that using wireless in public places for private e-mailing can be risky unless your computer is secure. The same radio waves that allow you to cut the cord from a conventional dataport and transmit through cyberspace (so long as you’re within roughly 300 feet of an access point) also allow a sophisticated hacker to eavesdrop and even tamper with your message.
For confidential e-mailing, you need a firewall to keep out snoops and a virtual private network encryptor - or scrambler - to safeguard your messages. The basic IEEE 802.11b adapter card does not contain enough encryption to guarantee confidentiality. And a typical 30-megabyte VPN designed for desktop computers is too big and slow for a laptop. But the wireless industry has ample incentive to make the system more secure and should be introducing safeguards by this fall. That’s also when Microsoft Corp. intends to unveil Windows XP, which should provide a higher level of security than earlier iterations. Meanwhile, at least one company makes a 100-kilobyte VPN for laptops that provides a fair amount of security but can be clicked off when you don’t need it, such as when you’re perusing a newspaper online (Web site: www.fortresstech.com).
Wired connections nevertheless remain the most secure. Even as they go wireless, many airports maintain communications centers and kiosks that provide wired T1 lines. And if all else fails, there’s always the pay phone.
