I filed this story for Secure Enterprise about affordable, solid options for WPA Enterprise and 802.1X authentication for SMBs (small-to-medium-sized businesses): The article, which ran last month (sorry for the late ego link, folks), took as a prerequisite that I wanted to review products that required little to no network administrative knowledge. They should be as turnkey as possible, cost $1,000 or less for 25 seats, and offer standard PEAPv0 with MSCHAPv2 authentication to avoid requiring installing a client under Windows XP SP2.

The results were quite lovely. Several companies were invited, and of those that responded and met the criteria, I found four good solutions each for particular niches. Two outsourced 802.1X vendors, WiTopia.net and Boxedwireless, offer good, solid, and simple options that work reliably. Pricing is cheaper at WiTopia, but Boxedwireless offers EAP-TLS (authentication via individual certificates), which is otherwise expensive and tricky to set up even for a large business. The two hosted server solutions were also just dandy. Elektron is flexible, not overwhelming to learn, and relatively inexpensive. Radiator has more options than you can shake a stick out and isn't for the faint of heart, but it's incredibly powerful. It's too sophisticated for most SMBs, but it also can handle the most obscure and particular aspects of Wi-Fi authentication coupled with RADIUS and AAA granularity.

Note that LucidLink went out of business before our invitation letters went out, and that McAfee declined to participate because it hadn't retooled an offering for the SMB market yet. Funk and Meetinghouse were too expensive, but that per-seat expenses decreases for somewhat larger operations (say 100 to 200 users), and they offer extensive support options not provided by any of the firms featured in this article.