Wireless LAN - king of the playroom

3G inches forward while the likes of BT and NTT ramp up their WLAN plans...

What was your favourite toy as a child? Matchbox cars? Star Wars figures? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? How about Lego? A week after Christmas, when the fragile plastic toys were broken and the batteries in everything else were dead, Lego was the stuff this writer would go back to and play with until September. Simple, easy to use but powerful and flexible, it was King of Toys. You could build castles or spaceships, motor cars or missiles to throw at your brother. It gave more fun per pound than anything else in the toy shop. Before the metaphor gets overblown, the WLAN standard known as 802.11b is in many ways the Lego of the wireless world. It's not as well marketed as Bluetooth, it's not as expensive as UMTS, and people use it - unlike GPRS, EDGE, or HiperLAN2 - and they're using it more and more. This is mostly because it's quite simple to use - not as simple as it should be but by the standards of the wireless data world, it's easier than sticking two plastic bricks together. It's a stable, open standard. An Orinoco WLAN card will work with an Intel base station without trouble. Tell us if you know otherwise but WLAN is almost as interoperable as those lovely plastic bricks from Denmark. Best of all, you can do so many things with it. You can build internet access points. You can build peer-to-peer networks in your home. And some people are trying to build city-wide public networks with it. When you're at home, you can use your WLAN card as part of your home network. On the road, it's a wireless modem. Like Lego, you don't need a licence to use it. It's very cheap to buy the kit and once you have worked out what you can do with it, it seems like a complete steal. Sadly, like Lego, it's a bit too easy to break into. The security bug will hang around for a while. But there will be an answer. And if your emails are as boring as mine, it's not something you'll lose sleep over. Wireless LAN, Wi-Fi, AirPort, 802.11b - call it what you will, it's the king of the playroom. The wireless VIP. In fact, it's a lesson to the technology industry as a whole, and the mobile industry in particular. Don't make things that will be boring by Boxing Day. Make building blocks that people can use to make their own dreams real, day after day and year after year. Think Lego.