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The first time I heard someone evangelise about wireless, some five years ago, it put me off the technology for months. It didn't help that the evangeliser was an over-enthusiastic American for whom the chief benefit was: 'You see, I can keep working on my monthly report while sitting on the sofa watching the Super Bowl!' It also didn't help that his exuberant endorsement for wireless took place at 8am, over that most dreaded of American inventions: the working breakfast.

For me, the combination of these two facts crystallised the idea that wireless equated to taking work home. What the evangeliser dressed up as bringing 'flexibility to the mobile workforce' my cynical mind interpreted as never having any free time again. So it would come as quite some shock to my five-year-ago self that I'm now a wireless evangelist, boring anyone who comes within five yards about the benefits of installing a wireless LAN.

Because, irritatingly, it turns out that my drawling breakfast partner was right; to a degree, at least. Although I very rarely do 'real' work sitting on the sofa while watching a Premiership match, my wireless LAN means I can check email that must be checked without going into a separate room, booting up my PC and logging on. My wireless router is logged on at all times, so I just need to lift the lid of my notebook - or switch on my wireless PDA - and I'm online.

It's helped that broadband speeds have increased too. My narrowband dial-up connection of 2000 has turned into

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2Mb broadband, and that extra bandwidth means all those vital applications - as any other parent will know, by this I mean the CBeebies animated stories (I recommend Blue Cow to the uninitiated) - come flooding down the line without hesitation. If I miss the news, it means I can jump to www.bbc.co.uk and stream the most recent programme direct to my laptop.

What my American colleague couldn't have predicted five years ago would have been the explosion of voice-over IP. My wireless router includes a phone port, so I can just plug in my normal BT phone (also wireless) and use it to make calls for free. This is yet another topic I bore people about quite regularly.

Despite this, I'm assured that I'm still living behind the times. For my wireless network is still only 802.11g, meaning that the signal struggles to reach my bedroom or the garden. This makes it all the more annoying that PC Pro's deputy editor, David Fearon, sits right beside me in the office and has recently started to boast about his MIMO network. 'I've watched DVDs streamed from one PC to another,' he's mentioned more than once, 'and haven't dropped a connection since I installed it.'

No doubt David's already low opinion of my wireless network would drop even further were he to discover that, ever since I installed it 18 months ago, I've been unprotected. I haven't hidden my SSID. I haven't activated WEP security, never mind WPA. Like many others, I've assumed that no-one will be wandering past with a wireless notebook or PDA and, as I'm pretty certain that none of our nearby neighbours have actually got a PC, let alone wireless, I felt fairly safe.

But having read David's feature on how to set up a secure, fast wireless network, and just how foolish it is to leave your network open to attack, I've realised the error of my ways. And the even better news is that I followed his ten-minute walkthrough on setting up WPA security, and it really did take only ten minutes. So thanks, David. But please stop talking about your MIMO network now.