Alan Stevens

Wireless is arguably the first networking technology to be driven as much by the home market as by business use.

But while home users can choose from an ever expanding range of cheap and reasonably quick 802.11g wireless LAN (WLAN) hardware, little has so far been done to make building a network easy, particularly when it comes to encryption and other security features.

However, help is on its way from a somewhat unexpected quarter. The help is unexpected because it is neither the wireless vendors nor the various standards bodies that are acting to simplify wireless networking ð Microsoft has decided to tackle the difficulties facing home users and teleworkers by providing new wireless capabilities in Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP.

A much hyped and anticipated release, SP2 is a major update to XP, designed primarily to improve desktop security through firewall, antivirus and other enhancements.

Less well publicised is the fact that it includes the first major overhaul of the wireless networking features of Windows since XP was introduced in 2001.

There are lots of networking enhancements in SP2, including a much improved wireless client, which makes it easier to locate and connect to a WLAN. For example, wireless networks are now listed in order of signal strength and the client software takes care of most of the setup when you opt to connect.

There are also new automated wireless provisioning services designed to make it easier to locate, subscribe and connect to wireless hotspots. However, these rely on hotspot providers implementing back-end technology that will not be available until next year. For home networks, though, the news is a lot better, since Microsoft provides a new wizard to make the process a lot simpler.

To set up a wireless network at present, you configure the main access point or wireless router plus every client PC individually.

With the SP2 setup wizard, this only needs to be done once, and there is the option of leaving the wizard to come up with suitable Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption keys. These keys and other settings can be stored on a USB flash drive together with software to configure other devices.

All you then have to do is plug this drive into the various client PCs, wireless routers and access points for the settings to be transferred automatically.

As the more astute will have noticed, the fly in the ointment is the lack of a USB port on most access points and routers.

However, given that it could slash the cost of supporting their products, vendors are soon likely to start adding this facility to take advantage of the XP setup wizard. Some are even talking of bundling flash drives with their hardware.

In the meantime, home users can still use the wizard to configure client PCs and print out the settings to set up their access point/router.

It's not often that Microsoft introduces something new without being accused of self-interest or taking unfair advantage of its position. But in this case the SP2 wireless network setup wizard should benefit all of us.

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