“With the ever-increasing use of the Internet, everyone is
scrambling to find a way to offer high quality Internet service
that can cover more people with less expensive infrastructure. This
is a problem shared by both commercial and grassroots Internet
service providers (ISPs). Both are choosing wireless as the means
to solve this problem.“After choosing the wireless route, one is left with a few
options. One can either buy an expensive (often proprietary) vendor
solution, or go with an open-source, standards-based solution that
takes advantage of existing customer premise equipment (CPE).
Unless you have large funds to pull from, the second option is the
way to go.“Due to the large amount of 802.11b devices already in the
customer’s hands, the choice was obvious as to people’s preferred
access method. On the other hand, 802.11b does not offer much in
terms of securely identifying users and allocating them the proper
resources. Using the built-in security features of 802.11b, one
encounters numerous access and authentication configuration issues
that can confuse your less technical customers. After searching for
a solution that could enable secure identification of users and
easy resource allocation, we discovered NoCatAuth…”