I hope everyone had a great holiday, I figured a post about toys might be appropriate…
Fresh from CES, Broadcom is announcing a WiFi video phone chipset which includes 802.1x and WPA. It will be interesting to see how the commercial WiFi market embraces 802.1x as well as the home telephony space. Certainly using 802.1x as a mechanism for accessing the network makes sense and by having everything in a single handset you overcome some of the supplicant challenges enterprises are dealing with today. In theory you could also use the 802.1x authentication credentials to differentiate service to users. Federated hotspot roaming can’t be far behind, but the requirements on the back-end AAA infrastructure will be tremendous.
Along this same vein, Kodak announced one of their cameras would support 802.1x a while back. This strikes me as a tad ambitious as I wouldn’t expect any home users to advance beyond WPA personal for some time. That said, Kodak likely didn’t self-develop the supplicant and perhaps it came along for free with the rest of the WPA toolkit. Somehow I wouldn’t expect EAP-TLS anytime soon.