London has more wireless points than New York but is beaten by Paris

A recent survey detailed on The Register has found that London is the most wireless city in the UK with the survey spotting a total of 12 276 wireless access points throughout the city, whereas there are 3 000 fewer points in New York.

Home wireless broadband networks were found to be the most popular access points with the survey finding that 55 percent of all points being used by home users. The survey also found that as many as 90 percent of networks in London secured their networks with some method of data encryption compare to business that came in with 80 percent of its connections. One intriguing revelation was that in Paris 75 percent of its home networks were protected by advanced methods of encryption compare to London which only has 48 percent of its network protected to this level. New York showed that of its home users 61 percent used more secure encryption standards but strangely only 1 or 2 percent of the business there had similar levels of advanced protection.

The type of encryption used in London has been broken down into two groups in the survey and they are WEP, used on 44 percent of networks and WPA-PSK (the standard WPA system), used by 37 percent of networks. The best secure encryption recommended for wireless networks is WPA or WPA2, which was introduced recently. Although, the choice of network key is the most important factor in ensuring that a wireless network is fully protected and to that end choosing one that cannot be guessed is essential (addresses, car registrations, family names, etc should always be avoided). With the use of the right software WEP encryption can usually be hacked into in a matter of minutes but often it is better to have this than nothing at all and with the sheer number of open wireless networks most opportunist hackers will overlook any protected network in favour of unprotected connections.

London businesses are currently showing 20 percent of their wireless network connections are open but it is most likely because receptions in most businesses use open connections to allow their visitors to check their mails. Generally most open connections in businesses don’t connect to their internal network so no company data is at risk.