Lab Notes

eWeek reports that Wi-Fi users are confused by poor Wi-Fi product documentation and support. As a result, they often misconfigure their Wi-Fi security settings or never enable security at all. The article cites as the main source of confusion the "inconsistent nomenclature and presentation of the basic components".

We've run into the same problem here. When writing product documentation or customer communications, we've had to consider how to refer to our Wi-Fi capabilities. For instance, do we call the protocol enabled by Elektron "WPA Enterprise", "WPA-802.1X", or "WPA-RADIUS". They're all the same thing, but different people might know one term but not another. We've settled on "WPA Enterprise", because that the official term coined by the Wi-Fi Alliance, but if you read our stuff carefully you'll notice we occasionally drop the other terms in there as well to make sure we've covered all of our bases.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has a nice glossary of terms if you ever get stuck.