It's too risky. The love of wireless is taking the world by storm and there are movements, both underground and hierarchical, to make cities wireless ones. The argument is to break the digital divide and enhance business and economy by providing Internet for free to all subjects of the evolving technological kingdom. Actually, free Internet would be immediate citizenship papers to those wishing to enter such a kingdom.

But, it's too risky. Free riding on wireless connections would be a hacker's dream-come-true. It involves all the technological risks one could imagine, even with passwords and so-called ‘security' features in place. Commerce is going online, which means our banking info, trade secrets, personal profiles and so on are tasty bait to modern-day desperados. As we go online, the black hats will follow, and there's not much we can do about it. They attack, IT companies respond with new security. They attack again, IT companies respond with more security. They attack yet again…well, you get the idea. They just seem to figure it out every time.

Sometimes the wireless hackers purposely set up free wireless connections in your block as a sort of ‘honey trap' to woo you into their scheme of finding out everything they need to spy on your computer. Other times they covertly install special spying software on your innocent neighbour's open wireless connection, so that when you free ride (thinking you're still in a trustworthy sphere), your computer joins the ‘hack me, I'm free' club. Then there's the packet sniffers, who don't even need access to your computer, they can just read information that is floating around between it and the wireless router. And the list goes on. If you were all connected physically with a wire, there wouldn't be much the hackers could do, unless they found a way to dig up your phone lines.

Then there's the speed issue. Today, people are using the Internet for multimedia applications, such as watching videos and talking over VoIP, all of which need physical fiber connections if they are to maintain the amount of data traffic that needs to travel between a server in cyberspace all the way to your machine, then translate it into something a human being can understand. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something to happen on a screen is no fun, and wireless connections, as they are today, do not help this problem.

But it's true, we do need wireless connections sometimes, and for that there are measures we can take to at least make life a lot more difficult for the hackers (such as setting up MAC address filters and firewalls). It is likely that neither of the two technologies will be replaced by one or the other, but that they will continue to coexist and complement one another's usages. For example, on the go, a business person will need wireless access to the Internet on their smart phone, while at the office, they'll need to work on files that must remain on the company server, and the company server only, so they'll plug in. Often the solution for businesses will be to have two connections, one for wireless purposes only (that gives limited access to servers), and another for the more serious operations and file sharing on a network. In cases where this is not an option, let us all be sure to follow all the security tips we can find.