[General Angel]

Originally Posted by Chris

Some older computers can't handle the current recommended WPA security and so have to use WEP, which is suitable for keeping out casual bandwidth thieves but not terribly difficult to get past for anyone who knows what they're doing.

Other people may deliberately wish to make their internet freely available - e.g. a coffee shop that wants to encourage customers to linger, and buy more coffee.

Seeing as routers are sold and installed in all sorts of different environments with different security needs, it would always inconvenience a group of customers for any kind of security to be on by default. And even if it didn't inconvenience anyone, and security was on by default, it would have to be supplied with a default user name and password - which puts you right back to square one.

Despite our isolated location, I did have security in place initially, but we had several friends visiting over a period of months, some of whom brought laptops with them, and we found we had persistent problems getting them connected to the Belkin router with non-Belkin wireless cards in their computers. So we switched it off at that point and haven't bothered to change it since. It's very convenient, anyone who comes and needs to get any work done (or babysitters who turn up with their laptop and wish to spend the evening browsing Cliff Richard fan forums, step forwards mother-in-law), can do so without any hassle at all.

Is it possible to have lower throughput with a secured connection? I heard somewhere that it did, but its not worth the risk IMO