Pin It
As the weekend approaches and you scan your digital TV channel lineup for football programming schedules, your spouse bursts in with an inspiration and an idea from her favorite HGTV makeover program to redo your home office. Rather than play with matches and risk missing the big game, you reach a compromise and agree to take care of the computer and electronics while she cleans out your office and strip the walls bare like an artist setting up her canvas.

A week later, the walls have been primed, painted and covered with new wall covering. You scan the newly decorated room when your face suddenly turns pale as you notice the cable and the hole in the wall that it once protruded from are gone and covered beneath the freshly painted wood trim. Even worse is that your old furniture has been replaced with wall to wall bookshelves, a small lamp table and upright sitting chairs. Your last remaining hidden domain that you sneaked away to every night has become a public library right in your own home.

Suddenly you feel like your home has turned into a spaceship hurling towards a cosmic black hole. Your main communication center to cyberspace has been terminated. The adjoining family room computer, your wife’s home business computer and your office laptop are now useless appliances. The only link that you depended upon to connect to the rest of the world has disappeared beneath the vertical stripes of fresh Waverly wallcovering

Now there’s another fear; how to explain to your wife that you have to drill holes and rerun more cables to bring all your “systems” online again? Facing Darth Vader without your light saber doesn’t seem to be challenging anymore.

But there is an option, so read on and may the Force be with you…

Going Wireless

Wireless home networking has grown increasingly popular over the past three years. Its growth was made possible with dropping prices, improved network performance, and most importantly, ease of installation for many users. There are many different options available to suit individual homeowners without the need to drill holes and run cables behind walls.

With many options available, it can be challenging to sort out all the different wireless specifications and deciding which technology is right one for the job. That’s why I am writing a series of articles to take a look at the different wireless standards, what these standards mean, how to shop and choose the best technology for your home, how to install them, and finally, how to protect your network from outside intrusion.


The A,B,Gs of Wireless Networking

You probably have seen displays in Best Buy or Circuit City stack sky high with so many different kinds of wireless gear. One thing you may have noticed are the letters A, B and G in large bold print. These letters are suffixes to a specification known as IEEE 802.11. The proper designation is 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. IEEE is the acronym for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which is responsible for developing standards for computers and electronics. This insures that equipment designed and manufactured to these standards are able to communicate with one another in a wireless or wired network regardless of who makes them.

802.11 is the family of specifications that cover wireless LANs or local area networks. Equipment manufactured to these specifications often display the WiFi certified label on the packaging like the example below.

Image

What this means is the equipment in the package conforms to one of the three 802.11 specifications, 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. Some of the differences between each specification are data rate, number of simultaneous users supported and maximum range that the data can be transmitted through a wireless spectrum between base station and the wireless device. When we talk about data rate, we refer to how fast the data can be transmitted through a wireless spectrum from the base station to your PC. You probably won’t find anything that meets the 802.11a alone except if it is 802.11a + g. 802.11a has seen limited use for homeowners and has been replaced by b and g. Devices that meet 802.11b specification have data rates of up to 11mbps (megabits per seconds).

Compare that to old dial-up telephone modem connections of 54.4kbps, which is a small fraction of the wireless rate. The newer 802.11g has improved data rates of up to 54mbps – actually a thousand times faster than the old telephone data rate. Devices that conform to 802.11b handle fewer simultaneous users at a time than the 802.11a and 802.11g devices, an important consideration if you are planning to install a Hot Spot in a high traffic area. While the number of users it can handle may be lower, 802.11b devices have a longer range capability – up to 300 ft from the base station than the a and g devices which are limited to 150 feet.

For home networking, it is likely that you will be willing to compromise range (300 ft) for higher data rate (54 mbps). Wireless equipment that meets the 802.11g standard would be the best choice for home networking, although many wireless equipment on the market today will support all three specifications. Be sure to select wireless devices that operate at the 802.11g specification and are not just compatible with 802.11g. Compatible devices can operate in a 802.11g network, but can only transfer data at lower 802.11b data transfer rates.

In the next article, we will look at the different products available and how to choose, install and connect a wireless network in your home.

----
v1i13

Pin It