Im a newbee to WiFi, having just got a laptop which is wifi enabled. Ive read up a bit on it and have even connected to a local "unsecured PC to PC network" very local which lets me access to net !

However I do understand that I will have to enrole in an ISP giving secure access in the area I move to but my question is this :
I readup an article by a railways site detailing how to connect on a train and it told users to make sure that encryption was selected to OFF. Now this has me puzzled because I will want to use internet banking which must be secure of course, or am I on the wrong track ?

Most public hotpsots do not use encryption because in order to do so, you would need to know the proper encryption key and would have to manually enter this into your wireless card settings. They do not want users to have to go through all that trouble and plus if the encryption key was made publicly available that would defeat the whole purpose of encryption to begin with. If a potential hacker knows the encryption key, then he can grab your wireless netwrk packets and decrypt them. Wireless encryption only encypts the netwrk packets between your laptop and the wireless access point. When doing any online transactions at a bank for instance, the bank's website use ssl (https://) to securely encrypt your information between your laptop and their webserver, therefore you do not need the wireless encryption. Anytime you enter credit card info, etc on a website, be sure the site is using ssl, this will be indicated by the website url starting with https:// and your browser will usually display an icon of a padlock to indicate you are using ssl encryption.

hope this helps