Leo Need's Wireless Home Network Recommendation
Leonardo
Wake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, Alaska Icrontian
Looks like I'll probably need to go wireless in my new home. House is three stories: computer third floor, computer second (main floor); and XBox on ground floor. Is it possible to connect the XBox via wireless? LOL Xander plays XBox games online.
Computers are those listed in my signature. Unfortunately, I will probably make my purchases retail. In Anchorage we CompUSA, BestBuy, WalMart, and a couple of the big office super stores. Oh yeah, we also have Sam's and Costco.
I'd be interested in your tier 1 suggestions, as well as 'value' suggestions.
Thanks in advance.
Computers are those listed in my signature. Unfortunately, I will probably make my purchases retail. In Anchorage we CompUSA, BestBuy, WalMart, and a couple of the big office super stores. Oh yeah, we also have Sam's and Costco.
I'd be interested in your tier 1 suggestions, as well as 'value' suggestions.
Thanks in advance.
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Comments
I don't have enough experience to recommend components. I don't think they're terribly different by brand, actually, so I would say any wireless G is a good bet; the network config is the biggest question. Also if you want to have decent tech support, try to get components of the same brand.
I would not bother with two switches, but depending on floor material, you may end up with a wireless gateway per floor except where the XBOX and modem are. Multimedia your network, use what you have for wired "TRUNK" as much as you can. LATER, MAYBE, you might run wirelss totally, but study how to secure it first, PLEASE. Wireless can be a major pita to REALLY secure.
Lesseee.... Cat5E hardwired runs can go 250 YARDS with plenum wire, minimum, with no booster. And it does not care, with plenum wire, what the heck the rise or horizontal run is inline. Plenum wire has a foil shield (or dual shields for best plenum wire) that is best (most effective) when shielding is GROUNDED. Then the foil grabs noise, and earthing\grounding routes it to earth, and grounding makes the plenum wire shielding a noise remover. 1000' spool of that costs about as much as two real good _very securable wireless gateways, without taking into account wireless NICs. Cheaper to hard wire with shielded plenum for trunking, if you can.
Then it is harder for folks to hitchhike on your wireless net to get online, because you simply do not have one....
//EDIT:
250 yards my arse. Maximum rated specification for Cat5E with perfect termination and environment is 100 meters.
Not too concerned about someone piggybacking on the signal - there are only a handful of homes within a square mile.
I won't know until Tuesday whether this works or not. That's when I move the last of our stuff from the apartment to the house. I'll let you guys know.
I've set up everything in the apartment to proof the hardware before I set up tomorrow at the house. So far, excellent performance. It's actually running noticeably faster than with my previous D-Link 604/ethernet work group.
Just for the heck of it. It's too late now but just out of curiousity. Newer homes are starting to have a cable chute as part of the design. It's typically where the cable comes into the house.
It's a vent sized access that runs from the basement to the attic. If your house is more than 10 years old it may not have it. But there is where you could run CAT5 fairly easy.
In my home I don't have that option.
My cable line for my cable DSL also comes in to my 3rd bedroom on an inner wall but, if I'm going to be ambitious about it, I plan on dropping CAT 5 from the attic down that wall. The CAT5 would go across the attic to the outside wall and drop down that. I'd have to open up part of the wall to drill through the joist to get to the inner wall of the floor below...then drop it down that wall to an outlet by my home theatre.
Thus I'd have a hard line from my router to the downstairs.
So to recap...from the 2nd floor bedroom where the router is...sort of an up and over and down and through a floor and down and out path.
Newer house have CAT 5 already run...4-5 lines that you just put the modem and router in the basement and route off to whatever room.
But my place is 20 years old.
I may Tim the toolman my house...but it'll be fun....I think.
I've done the drilling, tapping and Cat5 snaking before. It was in Georgia in the summer...most of the work in the unventilated attic. Thought I was back in Saudi Arabia in August!
The chute I'm speaking of will originate where your cable TV/phone line main junction box is. That's if the house was planned this type of house. It's a chimney of sorts that leads vertically all the way up from the basement to the attic. It's meant for easy cabling between the floors.
If the DSL is based on phone lines then, if you wanted to be real handy, you could put your modem and router down in the basment and run every line off of it to whatever room you wanted to.
Unfortunately my basement is finished so it sucks for doing that in the basement ceiling. I'm also choked as it makes it a pain to run my rears for the surround system.
If the chute isn't "in your face" obvious...then it doesn't exist and you'd have to go back to the old fashioned route of drilling holes in walls and floors.
OOOOO...Satelitte...go buy a widescreen HD ready tv.
Big, HD TV? Nope again. After investments, fixed expenses, car repairs, and such, the expendable income is going for skiing in the winter, and fishing in the summer. Also, need a cash pool for travel. Most flights from Alaska to the rest of the continent are rather pricey.
Here's how it worked for mine.
1) I was supplied a specific webpage that could be accessed from my home once the DSL line was live. That was the only page that could be accessed.
2) I entered my MAC address of my machine. I was online.
that simple.
Do this before connecting your router. Then in your router configuration you clone the MAC address of that machine you registered with. The router then broadcasts the MAC address to fool the DSL connection to think it's looking at the computer you registered with.
The rest is just hooking up the other PCs and configuring the router as you see fit.
That's how it worked with mine...batteries not included, void prohibited by law...no moose or beavers were hurt in the making of this post.
On the wireless front, my experience is that 802.11b does not transmit as far or through as much as 802.11g does much better. At work, my office is encased in several feet of concrete. We have one wireless antenna at the other end of our floor and above and below me. With a 802.11b wireless card... nothing. 802.11g card, average signal strength.
Didn't work. When I did the simple step first, modem directly to computer, there was no ethernet signal LED no matter what I tried. I took the modem back to the ISP and they exchanged it. Second modem - no go. Turns out the telco was giving out patch cables with the modems instead of the required crossevers. Didn't figure this out until I called tech support. Rather than make a second trip into town for a crossover (I've only got Cat 5/5e at home) I just skipped the basic step of modem to computer and set up straight through the router. Wham - instant success.
Thanks for mentioning security. I don't know a darn thing about security settings on this wireless. I'll have to learn. Right now though, it shouldn't be much a concern. There aren't many homes up here on the mountain, and no businesses. (Just black helicopters buzzing my house!
I haven't made much of any changes to the router configuration yet. I'd like to at least start by renaming the Wireless Network Name (SSID). That's easy enough under the router config settings; but how did I change it with wireless PCI adaptor cards?
Everything is going through an UPS. I haven't had any power spikes but the power does go out often. At least up there in Anchorage you have stores!! I order all my computer stuff on the internet.
Maggie is totally right. Use a wired computer to change your settings. The settings are really easy to find and change. Don't use the Linksys manual. Use the manual on the disc. It tells you how to change each of the settings. I recommend changing one at a time and then waiting a while to make sure there are no problems.