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Wireless Solution

The author of this report has been asked to assess and offer recommendations regarding the network setup for Richton Toys. There is currently a fairly dated but operational Cat5 setup in the office area, which is located on half a floor of a thirty floor office building. However, some users have taken to using an 802.11b wireless network. The Chief Executive Officer of Richton is very concerned about the wireless security of that setup given that corporate espionage in the toy industry is rampant. The author will give some recommendations about what should be done and why. While the existing Cat5 setup is not a completely dinosaur, the use of an extremely outmoded wireless technology and security standard is a disaster waiting to happen.

Analysis

The one thing that absolutely must change with the Richton internet access setup is the wireless technology in use. The 802.11b router that is being used should be uninstalled and banned from the office as the technology is nearly a generation old (2000) (. Anyone caught using an unsecure router (which that 802.11b router almost certainly is) should be written up for fired on the spot. As noted by the details for this case study, the toy company is on half a story in a thirty story building. That means that there are tons of people within the reception path of a wireless network. The reach was probably not too wide from the 802.11b antenna but that reach would expand greatly if an 802.11n or 802.11ac antenna was used. The author of this report would assert that the former of those two would probably work fine but using the latter, which is much faster, would be the wiser course (Kelly, 2014).

Scrapping the existing laptops to make the switch would not be necessary. However, any laptop that has anything below 802.11n access (802.11b and 802.11g, probably) should be scrapped. If the laptop itself is fine and it is just the wireless that is deficient, a USB network adapter can be a stopgap but those could be lost or stolen quite easily. New laptops with 802.11n or 802.11ac (either would work, since the technology is typically backwards compatible) would be ideal. Regardless, any new wireless router that is installed should have WPA-2 encryption that is operating at the highest bit strength possible. 256 bits should be easy to purchase and easy to implement. That all being said, the use of wireless should be avoided when it's not necessary. Making the use of docking stations that have Ethernet cables plugged into them would make it easy to dock to the network (not to mention physical monitors and a conventional mouse and keyboard) would be better in multiple ways. Regardless, using a wireless router or technology that is not approved by the company should be strictly banned. Any violators should be punished heavily (HTCC, 2015).

Finally, there is the detail about the Cat5 network. If the network is indeed Cat5 (and not Cat5e), then it should be gutted and replaced. The main reason is that the top end of speeds with Cat5 is 100 mbps and that is really not that good (Cable Organizer, 2015). 802.11n can be faster than that and 802.11ac blows it away, with the latter being able to do Gigabit (1000 mbps…ten times as fast) with no wires with the right equipment. So as to future-proof the setup, using Cat7 would be the way to go. It has overall speeds of ten gigabits (10,000 mbps) and has a longer useful life than prior generations of cable, with the average being about fifteen years (Beal, 2015).