Excellent Practices When Setup Your Wireless Router

With the increased numbers of the wireless routers and the increased coverage ranges associated with newer Wi-Fi equipment, it's important to review a number of network design issues for everyone's benefit.

In terms of security, it is important to realize that being a technology based on radio transmissions, all data that you transmit is broadcast IN THE OPEN for all to "see". With any one of a dozen free software tools that exist out there, any person that can pick up your wireless radio's signal (including people just parked out on the street with a laptop) is able to capture anything that you're sending over the network, including passwords, credit card information, banking information --- unless your information is encrypted. Most web sites that request that information use SSL (https) technology to provide that encryption; however, not all do. The good news is that your wireless router has the ability to encrypt the information that's transmitted over the air (i.e. between your machine and your wireless router); the bad news is it looks like many of the people with wireless routers at home aren't turning that on.
Yesterday, for example, I saw five home wireless routers (other than my own) that are within radio coverage of my house (how I know that is something I'll cover later) -- two of them have no encryption configured on them.

There are two primary mechanisms for encryption with Wi-Fi technology in homes - one of them is part of the original standard and has to be on all devices, the other is newer and won't be there on older equipment: these mechanisms, respectively, are called WEP and WPA. In both cases, you set a "key" (or password) that you configure on your wireless router and on any device you have in your home that uses the wireless router. That key acts both as a password, restricting access to those who know the key, and as an encryption mechanism that keeps the data from being easily "eavesdropped" on. If you can use WPA (again, many older wireless routers and older computers don't support this), USE IT (with a secret key), as the encryption mechanisms are much stronger; but even if you can't use WPA, you really should be using WEP for your own safety. And remember to change the login ID and password on your home router from the default.

It is extraordinarily easy for anyone to see what other wireless routers are within the radio coverage area of their house. There are free tools out there, like NetStumbler, that can show you the names (SSIDs) of available wireless routers/access points, whether or not they're using encryption (WEP/WPA) and what channel they're transmitting on (more about that later). There are two ways that you can limit who can connect through your wireless router: (1) WEP/WPA configuration as indicated above, or (2) restricting access to specific network hardware addresses. Even if you don't do the WEP/WPA thing, you should at the very least restrict access to the specific network addresses of the devices in your house. Otherwise, ANYONE that "hears" your wireless router can connect to it and use your Internet bandwidth (and you wonder why your network throughput has sucked lately!). Not only does that affect your own Internet access, but if someone other than your family is using your network connection and doing really bad things out there, you will probably hear about it.

So how can you tell if someone else is connected to your wireless router? Most of these devices have a web interface to them that provides the configuration/setup pages; those pages usually have a place that shows you what other hardware addresses are connected. Another thing to do is to make sure you know what your baseline Internet performance numbers are; if you think your connection "seems slower than normal", verify it quantitatively.