&gt; View them as two systems, or assume they can be merged into one system.<p>It&#x27;s the <i>merging</i> and the details of the same that&#x27;s the complicated bit, and the only thing worth talking about in this sub-thread.<p>You made the assertion that the &quot;the committees designing [wireless communications] protocols don&#x27;t think [that things screamed on the street corner are public data]&quot;. [0] This is simply not true. The folks who designed 802.11 had to make several key-management-complexity&#x2F;computational-power&#x2F;ease-of-use tradeoffs.<p>&gt; ...while a private network can obviously hide its existence to the public completely...<p>Not if it&#x27;s a relatively-high-performance radio network operating in a relatively tiny slice of spectrum, [1] it can&#x27;t.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10950276" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10950276</a><p>[1] As 802.11b&#x2F;g&#x2F;n does