On 11 June 2007, the EN Division, IT Division
and AMC jointly organized a seminar called :WLAN
: 802.11 site survey case study;. The guest speaker
Dr. Philip Tsang, Associate Professor of Open
University gave an overview on the surveying of
wireless broadband security and connectivity.
The speaker opened the talk by providing an overview
on the Wi-fi technology. The 802.11 standard is
introduced in 1990 so as to define the cable-free
local area network with either fixed or mobile
location. Standard are evolved for sending packetsized
data traffic over radio waves in the unlicensed
2.4 GHz band (802.11 b,g).
Dr Tsang went on to elaborate on the war driving
vs WLAN Surveys. He explained that the term .war
driving・ has .negative・ meaning in that it means
.using a laptop to pick up unsecured wireless
networks for anonymous and free high-speed Internet
access・. As opposed to war driving, WLAN surverys
are to collect data about the growth, distribution,
and proliferation of WLANs, determine the ratio
of secure/unsecure WLANs, obtain information about
WLAN provider, estimate connectivity between WLANs.
The WLAN survey data will be used to support research
into Wifi usage, map Wifi access point. A tool
called Netstumbler is used during the survey.
Based on the 2007 OUHK 802.11 survey held on June,
there are as many as 11,00 Access Points (AP)
while in 2006 survey, there were 4698 APs.
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