Flashes of Panic

The new apartment complex has complex-wide wireless through some kind of service agreement with a local company. In the complex newsletter, they have a sort of table comparing the provided wireless with cable modem and DSL. The problem is, most of the claims they make are bogus on closer examination.

Bandwidth. They claim this service has equal bandwidth to cable modem and greater than DSL. This may be true if you can jack in to the network at the router, which nobody in the complex can. Instead our bandwidth rates vary by our physical location, and generally are significantly worse than we would get from in-apartment service.

Furthermore, the bandwidth bottleneck for most people is not their service, but the hardware of their own network (wireless cards, routers, etc.). Show me someone who can saturate a cable modem connection, and I’ll show you someone with the technical know-how to laugh at this bandwidth comparison chart.

Security. “Because we have a firewall!” Who can spot the weakness in this argument? Yes? Is it that anyone who doesn’t plug their computer directly into their broadband connection these days usually has a router which uses NAT to distribute local addresses and therefore has a reasonable firewall from “go”, limiting their computer’s exposure to computers on their network and therefore probably computers they own, whereas this service leaves users exposed to every other computer using the service in this complex?

To use an analogy, if you only drive your car anywhere, you’re only exposed to the sneezes and coughs of your family, but once you get on an airplane, you’re sharing recirculated air with all the hundred-plus people you’re flying with.

In other words, this service is no more “secure” (and don’t get me started on “security” as a binary condition, as though connections can be classified as “secure” and “insecure”) than anything else; it simply moves the security decisions out of the hands of the end-user—who, I will admit, might not be competent to make them—and into the hands of a service provider up the line… who might not be competent to make them.

The fact that the people pushing this service can circulate such risible arguments with a straight face is a direct consequence of our unfamiliarity with the basics of how computers and their networks work. (Seriously, guys, I hope you didn’t get venture money with this kind of argument.)

Can’t we get a snappy word, like “illiteracy” or “innumeracy”, for this problem?