Interoperability

In 1999, the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) was formed. In 2002, it was renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance. This nonprofit industry group is composed of more than 300 companies whose mission is to ensure interoperability between 802.11 products. To that end, the Wi-Fi Alliance established interoperability labs and a testing methodology to ensure that one vendor's 802.11 products worked seamlessly with another's. Once approved, these products could carry the Wi-Fi logo, indicating compliance with the testing standards. This process is similar to the Good Housekeeping Seal, indicating that a product had passed a series of tests.

As an industry advocate, the Wi-Fi Alliance has also taken strong positions to help promote secure wireless networking. In late 2002, realizing that security is a major cornerstone to Wi-Fi acceptance, the Wi-Fi Alliance created WPA as a subset of the 802.11i working group. This interim measure provided greatly enhanced security over WEP. At the time of this writing, WPA addresses all known WEP vulnerabilities and holds great promise for increasing 802.11 security. (More on WPA in Chapter 5.)