This is a good article about the state of wireless networking and wireless gadgets in Europe. We don't agree with all of the author's points - in particular we think hiding the SSID or network name of your wireless network is an important security measure, and we don't think consumers should move to "n" routers yet (stick with "g" routers for now until the industry sets a standard for "n") - see this great article about wireless n routers.
But, regardless, this is a good read about wireless networking in Europe:
From:
http://www.connectedhomemag.com/HomeOffice/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=93194
Home Networking: A Worldly Perspective
By Paul Thurrott
I'm in the middle of a three-week European vacation, and I’ve had home networking on my mind. That’s strange, considering I'm thousands of miles from
home, right? But I've been staying at a lot of bed-and-breakfasts,
which are typically in people's homes, and many of these homes actually
have broadband-connected computers and even wireless networks.
As you might expect, few of them are configured properly. But in this
ever-connected age, I marvel at the fact that people in towns such as
Amstelveen, Netherlands (just outside of Amsterdam), are as connected
as I am back in Boston. Maybe I'm just naïve.
Networking Across the Pond
One problem I've had involves my PCs: Because of the amount and type of
work I’m doing on this trip, I've brought two PCs and an Apple MacBook.
The PCs, unfortunately, are both running the latest prerelease version
of Windows Vista, which features an incomplete, buggy, and—in some
cases—completely broken networking stack, making connecting to networks
difficult. The MacBook and a co-traveler's Windows XP-based PC have had
no such problems. But as industry pundit Jerry Pournelle likes to say,
I make these mistakes so you don't have to. At least that's how I
justify my own stupidity.
Anyway, it's impossible to spend any time in Europe and not think about
the future. Europe, interestingly, is moving down a path that the
United States would be wise to study, and the ongoing push to
centralize around the European Union (EU) will have a far-reaching
impact on all of Europe at a variety of levels. Technologically, Europe
has much better cellular services than the United States does and,
unexpectedly, has much faster Internet access in some areas. There will
always be exceptions, of course—some rural areas of France have proven
impervious to my desires to get online—but the situation is improving
all the time. As I watch kids playing wireless PlayStation Portable
(PSP) games with each other on buses, young adults tapping Short
Message Service (SMS) and email messages on cellular phones, and people
wirelessly computing on park benches in city centers, I have to wonder
where it’s all heading.
Clearly, we're heading toward an age in which all telephone
communications occur over the Internet instead of the switch-based
networks that traditional telephone companies currently maintain.
Wide-area wireless networks will cover urban areas first, and the rest
of the world eventually, in the same way that cellular coverage has
grown from niche to necessity. Until that happens, we're stuck with
reliable but hard-wired traditional telephones, often unreliable
cellular networks, and local Wi-Fi access only—often at alarmingly slow
speeds. I can't help you with the first two concerns, but I do have a
few bits of advice for that last one.
I've seen a lot of mixed 802.11b/g networks in Europe—most of them
unsecure— and of course a selection of expensive pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi
networks at hotels in cities. Curiously, one of the home-based 802.11g
networks that I encountered was secured with the older WEP security
standard instead of the more modern and secure WPA. In one case, I was
even able to connect to a shared printer and print some driving directions, which was most useful. I'd
previously been writing them down on a pad of paper after accessing the
ViaMichelin Web site (Europe's answer to Yahoo Maps and MapQuest).
