One of the core problems with wireless networks way back in the late 1980s and early '90s was a serious lack of throughput. Wide-area wireless networks provided paltry speeds of between 2.4Kbit/sec. to 4.8Kbit/sec., and effective WLAN throughput was well under 1Mbit/sec.

As a consequence, It was often wrote in those days that wireless was most suitable to augment wire but that it would not replace wire anytime soon. That assessment was accurate until about five years ago, when it became clear that advances in radio technology would eventually provide something close to parity in performance from a throughput, if not a time-boundedness, perspective.

This, in turn, has led many to say something that they never thought they would: In some cases, at least, wireless will, in fact, replace wire. Cell phones are an excellent example of how this is coming true. Perhaps 20 percent of users today have made their cell phone their primary or, sometimes, their only phone. That's particularly true with teenagers and twentysomethings who grew up with wireless and have made it an essential element of their lives and culture.

Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) secretary general, Peter Cassidy, said a structured data model is necessary to improve incident reporting, share information and allow forensic searches and investigations.

Cassidy said the first base specification was submitted in June 2005 and the Incident Object Description Exchange Format (IODEF) XML Schema with e-crime relevant extensions will be a recognized IETF standard in about six weeks.

Third-generation (3G) wireless will grow up at the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando this week, finding its place in Cisco Systems Inc. business routers.

The blue-chip networking vendor is set to introduce on Tuesday a 3G module for its Integrated Services Router (ISR) line of branch and small business routers. The 3G Wireless WAN High-speed Interface Card will provide a link to the Internet over the EV-DO or High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) networks of mobile operators that are working with Cisco, said Inbar Lasser-Raab, director of marketing for network systems at Cisco.

That's what operators of the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant discovered last August when they were forced to manually shut down one of their plant's two reactors after networking problems caused two water pumps to fail and threatened the stability of the plant itself.

On August 19 2006, operators found themselves in a potentially dangerous "high power, low flow condition," when one of the plant's two operating reactors was not recirculating enough water to properly cool itself, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a note sent to operators last month. Operators were forced to perform a "manual scram," or shutdown of the plant.

Built in 1974 in northern Alabama, Browns Ferry was once the world's largest nuclear reactor.

Although the Browns Ferry incident wasn't anywhere close to a nuclear meltdown, it was a serious situation, said Eric Byres, CEO of Byres Security Inc., in Nanaimo, British Columbia. "They realized that their recirculation system wasn't working and they were in danger of something undesirable happening," said Byres, an expert in industrial systems security who was consulted on the matter.

The cause of the pump's failures? "Excessive traffic" on the closed Ethernet network used by the plant's control systems, the NRC said.

The NRC report said the origin of this excessive traffic was unclear, but Byres suspects that the problem was due to faulty networking code the controllers used by the plant's recirculation pumps. They may have suffered from the same well-documented networking flaw that has taken down similar systems in food processing, steel, and pulp plants in the past, Byres said. "I'm personally aware of at least a dozen incidents at this point that relate to this particular fault," he said.