DazV

A friend of mine is specifying parts for a new PC. He wants to use wireless networking to connect to a home LAN.

My questions would be:
1) Is wireless networking any good - or problematic ?
2) Which standard would he go for eg. bluetooth, etc...

Cheers All,
-Darren

Nick1

about 4 months or so ago I bought wireless network access point and PCMCI card for my notebook which was the first 22Mbps on the market I had seen. I use it throughout my 5 bedroow house including the garden for application development and ADSL surfing (Scoobynet ) and it works very well and the speed is great, in fact when I am in my study/office I usually pop-in the wireless PCMCIA card instead of pluging in a 100Mbps patch cable as the speed is good.

My kit is US Robotics and I got it from PC World but for a change they were selling it at a good price and they mad a mistake and charged me for the PCI card instead of the PCMCIA card which is about £15 cheaper

HTH

DazV

Thanks Nick -

Do I get 802.11a or 802.11b ?

And whats all this dual band, tri-mode stuff ?

Nick1

Darren I thought it was 802.22 but maybe it's 802.11b, just make sure you get the 22Mbps kit. Don't know about the bands etc, I just setup the security password on the access point and put the pass phrase in the client so it can communicate with the access point and have not done anything else but use it.

Nick

RoadrunnerV2

Quick overview

802.11a (54Mbps) is ideal for businesses Its runs on a clean () 5GHz band therefore you get less interferance from other wireless products. However the range that a single access point produces is poor compared to wireless on the 2.4GHz band. 802.11a isn't compatible with another wireless specification.

802.11b (11Mbs) is currently the norm for wireless. Its runs on the crowded 2.4GHz band providing good range/performance.

802.11b+ (22Mbps) was developed by Texus Instructments. TI managed to squeeze extra performance/functionality (i.e. 256-bit WEP) out of the wireless standard while mantaining full compatibility with 802.11b

802.11g (54Mbps) is the next generation for 802.11b. It runs on 2.4Ghz band, has the same range of 802.11b and is backwards compatible. The benefit is its up to x5 faster than 802.11b.

Dual Mode is an adapter /or access point that accepts 802.11a and 802.11b

Tri-band is an adapter /or access point that accepts 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g

So ........... in a nutshell

802.11b is ideal for accessing your broadband connection wirelessly while 802.11g is ideal is you want to access your broadband connection and perform more local activitiy between computers ie .transfer large files

DazV

Cheers for that (I think!)

RoadrunnerV2

Any further questions - just ask away

camk

best thing I've ever installed