Recommended wireless setup?
entropy
Yah-Der-Hey (Wisconsin)
Alright, I've been pretty ignorant of wireless, seeing as how 1) we don't have it and 2) I don't have a lappy to go wardriving 
. So, does someone wanna give me the lowdown on what's good, what to stay away from, look for, etc. I think my parents will be paying for the router itself and 1 card, and my brother and I will each have to buy our own card for our computer (they will buy their own).
I threw out a price, assuming they buy a router and 1 card, and told them $100 or so. They said that'd be fine, and would be quite flexible on the price (I hope). So, keeping in mind that we don't know where things will be wired up in our new house, meaning it could be ten feet away or through the entire house, could someone recommend me a good setup, or give me some links to look around at?
Requirements:
Best price/performance
Fast enough to host LANS of 7 or 8 on, with as small of lag as possible
I don't want to be disconnected almost ever
Secure (but Windows takes care of most of this, right?)
And, if possible, it WON'T crash while letting eDonkey run wild (my current router (D-Link 604+) bombs if eDonkey uploads more than 9 kB/sec
and it pisses me off)
. So, does someone wanna give me the lowdown on what's good, what to stay away from, look for, etc. I think my parents will be paying for the router itself and 1 card, and my brother and I will each have to buy our own card for our computer (they will buy their own).I threw out a price, assuming they buy a router and 1 card, and told them $100 or so. They said that'd be fine, and would be quite flexible on the price (I hope). So, keeping in mind that we don't know where things will be wired up in our new house, meaning it could be ten feet away or through the entire house, could someone recommend me a good setup, or give me some links to look around at?
Requirements:
Best price/performance
Fast enough to host LANS of 7 or 8 on, with as small of lag as possible
I don't want to be disconnected almost ever
Secure (but Windows takes care of most of this, right?)
And, if possible, it WON'T crash while letting eDonkey run wild (my current router (D-Link 604+) bombs if eDonkey uploads more than 9 kB/sec
and it pisses me off) 0
Comments
2. If it's 54G wireless, you're looking at about 20Mbits total, which equates to 1/5th of BASE100 wired LAN. One client is looking at about 2 megs/second dedicated, or 256 KB/s for 8 clients dedicated. It doesn't get much better. Anything rated above 54G is marketing bull****.
3. If you configure it right, it won't.
4. No, Windows doesn't take care of any of it. It only negotiates a connection once you give it the parameters, and it only autoconnects on XP. You'll need to learn MAC filtering (Not hard), WEP (Not hard), and how to disable SSID broadcast (Not hard).
5. It won't.
You're looking at about $60 for a good, but not great card. And $100 for a good, but not great WAP+Router+Switch.
And don't 108 mbps actually use dual frequencies, so that it really IS more bandwidth? You prolly know a lot more about it than I do, but I'm just wondering.
I think the number should work out well enough. With my brother's computer, my parent's computer, and mine, each should get around 813 KB/sec, which is far more than I need, as I very rarely do file transfers with my brother.
After thinking about it, for the most part, his friends (for the LANs) wouldn't have wireless anyway. Or if they did, they'd rather do wired just for the extra speed. They've got their own 32-port switch they can use, so they'll probably jack into the hard lines of the wireless router.
So $100, huh? And $60 for a good card?
Anything less and you'll run into undesired connection troubles.
I don't use it since my new laptop has built-in wireless.
Thrax (or anyone): will this $100+ router/WAP/whatever be able to go through, like, 4 or 5 walls and a hardwood floor (or two)? It appears that the router will be in my brother's room, and mine is on the exact opposite side of our new house...
Rock or wood?
It may be better to get 802.11A, too. Much higher signal frequency, good punching power. Roughly the same price as I outlined.
I keep hearing a lot of good things about this D-Link and this Linksys router. I'd actually prefer to stay away from the D-Link, due to my experience with the 604+, and already there's a review or two that says it has issues with eMule/eDonkey (same issues this one has). Would you recommend either of those, or something else, even higher-end?
(And, really, what's the deal with 108 mbps? Doesn't it use two frequencies? So technically it could be faster....)
802.11G is alright for wood walls. I personally recommend the WRT54G, and holy ****, that got cheap.
Slightly off-topic, but somewhat related. Right now we're renting (or, at least borrowing) a Motorola SB4100 modem. Should we just spend the $50-$60 and get an SB5100, because it's obviously newer/probably better? I'll have to double check if we're actually be renting it or just using it, but would it be worth getting a brand new one anyhow? The folks in the house right now have an SB4200 (I looked lol), but it's a totally different cable company out there, so I don't know how things work...
I was quoting the $100 price from brick and mortar, where the price has scarcely budged. I didn't realize the price from eCommerce had taken a flaming nose dive.
Wireless is wireless, honestly doesn't matter, but I like keeping consistent equipment.
It's good that you don't need 7-8 users because that's quite difficult for wireless to accomplish at reasonable speed. A wireless network can't be switched like a wired one.
5 interior drywall walls may completely block the wireless signal over any practical distance. If possible, put the access point somewhere central to the places you want wireless access.