Intellectual Challenge Essay Example for Free

Intellectual Challenge Essay The intellectual property rights for WiMAX technology were distributed throughout the industry found that no single company is in a dominant patent ownership position. The forum’s study was conducted by IPR law firm Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner and Kluth, and found that there are about 1550 WiMAX-related patents whose ownership is distributed among about 330 companies. Samsung owns close to 20% of those patents, but no other company has a larger percentage than that. Also, of the 23 companies that own more than 10 patents, 74% are WiMAX Forum members. â€Å"There is a dispersed distribution of patents,† Resnick said. â€Å"We are promoting the practice of charging very low royalties for WiMAX, unlike what has happened with some 3G technologies. What this shows is that the WiMAX market will be a safe haven for royalties in the future. †(O’Shea, 2006). To provide affordable voice and data connectivity to buildings with no wired connections (Alvarion, 2006). Building on this success, Alvarion will be deploying WiMAX networks worldwide to provide voice and data services in both rural and urban areas. But the ultimate promise of WiMAX will be when it is built into laptops and handsets the way Wi-Fi exists today. Then users will need only one connection for their laptops making broadband access simpler and more cost effective. (Alvarion, 2006) The availability of two, mutually incompatible, versions of WiMAX creates a challenge for everybody in the industry, trying to understand how they will fare in the market, which one will dominate in the long term and which services they will support. 802. 16-2004 WiMAX only supports fixed access, but products are already available. 802. 16e WiMAX supports mobile and fixed access but products are still at least a year away. The report addresses these issues and provides an extensive overview of WiMAX technology, competing technologies, regulation, and business models. It gives a very detailed forecast of subscribers, service revenues and equipment revenues for 15 countries, 6 regions and for the worldwide market. Demand for broadband services is exploding, but both service providers and residential end-users demand very low cost CPE (in the $100 range) to adopt WiMAX extensively. So far, the demand for broadband wireless services has been mainly driven by high-end corporate and government users. Further, many of the cash-rich operators we interviewed said that they prefer not to commit to large network deployments until the mobile WiMAX version becomes widely available. These service providers, which include both current and prospective license holders, view 802. 16e as the best choice for both fixed and mobile applications. The next two years will be key for WiMAX adoption in the country. (Prado Fellah, 2006) Wimax Facts and Security Issue Multiple security mechanisms protect operator, residential customer and enterprise privacy. Weatherized enclosure allows collocation on rooftops – limiting physical access. Advanced encryption protects over-the-air transmission. It has Password protection of all remote management methods. (Winncom Technologies, 2005) The designers of WiMAX were aware of inherent security issues found in Wi-Fi. And as a result greater security functionality was built into the base of the 802. 16 standard. The current 802. 16-2004 (fixed WiMAX) standard specifies using a key management protocol, which adheres to server/client architecture and uses the X. 509 digital certificates to authenticate subscriber stations (SS). (Usekas, 2006) Segment Segregation a wireless network should be treated as having a higher security risk than an internal physical network. It is always a good idea to separate the wireless network from sensitive resources. System administrators should police all traffic passing between a wireless segment and the rest of the network. Figure 1 illustrates a wireless segment separated from the rest of the network by a firewall. In this case firewall is a logical concept and can mean just another Ethernet port on your existing firewall. The advantage of segment separation rests in being able to control the traffic flow to and from a wireless segment by applying policies to the firewall. For example, if all you want is to allow wireless users to browse the web and access your intranet web server, then you can specify rules to that effect ensuring that no other type of traffic will traverse the firewall, and cause a problem in the internal network. (Wimax. com Broadband Solutions, Inc. 2005) In addition most enterprise level firewalls support†per policy authentication methods. This allows system administrators to configure policies preventing traffic outside of clearly defined policies until they authenticate using HTTP, TELNET or FTP protocols, thus adding another authentication layer to the security. User databases can either be maintained locally on the device, or by using selected firewalls, which support the use of existing RADIUS or TACACS+ servers. It is possible to go one step further and integrate per policy authentication with two factor authentication technologies like RSA SecurIDA‚A ®, which provides physical tokens with rotating security PINs. These do provide a much more secure user authentication system than reusable passwords. Provisions for helping to ensure the integrity of user data traffic and control messaging are essential for wide scale system deployment. Security and cryptographic suite support specified in the WiMAX Forum Mobile System Profile represents the latest in state of the art security. Encryption of user data traffic is expected to be based on AES in CCM mode. Management message integrity protection is expected to be based on cipher-based MAC (CMAC). (Intel, 2006)