Mi, a name, I call myself, Fi, a long long way to run.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size of an old, first-gen iPod.  Current solutions for connecting a router to 3G or EV-DO networks are bigger, bulkier, often require an additional card, and don’t have a cool, marketing friendly name.

Which begs the question, if it’s the first Mi-Fi device, where do they get off numbering it as “2200?” Were there 2199 prototypes that we don’t know about?  Will it hit the market in the year 2200 A.D.? Is it really 2.2, but someone accidentally misplaced the decimal point? I miss the days when technology started at 1, and worked its way up to… 3.11, then skipped ahead to 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000, then XP, and then back again to 7.

But back to the matter at hand – a mobile router that is smaller than a cellphone would have multiple uses in an enterprise environment.  Note that I did not say that would have multiple uses foran enterprise environment. The way I envision this thing heading into most organizations is via being smuggled in, to bypass restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, or other sites.

Of course, a computer that can connect to either the corporate network or to the unsecured general internet provides unique security problems, but also some infrastructure problems.  Who wants to tell the CEO on the 3^rd floor that the data entry team on the 2^ndfloor is using a 3G router and the signals are interfering and that’s why he can’t go online?  What happens when a crucial piece of equipment auto-connects to the wrong network?

We’ve mentioned the hurdles and headaches in supporting 3G devices like the iPhone in the enterprise; though when we did so in January 2007, it was speculation, and since then Network World has written an article with more concrete real-world examples of the problems that IT pros face in integrating iPhone techwith the rest of the enterprise.   Supporting not just 3G devices, but, essentially, 3G networks which can spring up anywhere at anytime is likely to be far worse.

And now, the obligatory pitch: how do you catch someone using illicit or misconfigured 3G network devices?  Simple – the same way you catch someone operating an illicit FTP server, or a malware outbreak.  You baseline your data, analyze the traffic, and look for anomalies.  Interestingly enough, most problems in the network are marked by a severe increase of traffic over the norm.  Illicit and misconfigured 3G traffic will show up – not as an unusually large traffic volume on the corporate network, but an unusually small one.  But with visibility into the network, these things should be detectable.