Wi-Fi Wild Wild West

The challenge of configuring laptops for wireless connectivity, and keeping them up to date, is probably the single biggest nightmare IT professionals face daily, they say.

IT must decide which air cards to use, and if they’re going to employ encryption or set up a VPN, and if so, for which employees and under what circumstances. Should the company support mom and pop providers for its users on the road, or only big, trusted carriers? What about employees with their own routers and networks in a home-office environment? The questions go on and on, as do the support issues, IT managers say.

And it’s made worse by the fact that most users are clueless, says Vince Kellen, vice president of information services at DePaul University in Chicago. “Wireless overwhelms nontechnical people,” he says flatly. “There are literally 20 to 30 different topics related to the choices we make about technology and upgrading, and the users just can’t grasp the complexity.”

So not only is he trying to stay ahead of the Wi-Fi curve, he’s often making the case to do the right thing to stay secure to a user community that is at best confused and at worst completely uninterested.

BNSF’s Hanson knows exactly what Kellen is talking about. “Wireless is the biggest nightmare we have right now,” he says. “The technology changes all the time and we just can’t keep up.”

His particular pet peeve is air cards, where, he says, the standards take so long to settle and become “commercial” that by the time they do, they’re obsolete, leaving him stuck with a long-term contract to purchase cards that no longer do the job. “The connection managers can’t keep up, and then the cards don’t work,” Hanson explains. But to streamline support, the company has to standardize on something. Can someone say catch-22?