Many home technology users, especially those who work from home, have two or more computers. As computing devices proliferate in the home, these users can realize some business-related benefits by installing a LAN. Internet connection sharing, file-and-print sharing, and centralized backup are common home-network usage scenarios. Other, less business-related benefits include playing network-enabled multiplayer games, surfing the Web poolside, or sending an instant message to your kids when it's dinnertime.
Although you can easily see the advantages of a home network after the network is in place, installing the network infrastructure hasn't always been easy, until now. Wireless networking is poised to invade homes throughout your neighborhood during the next few years. Corporations and universities have used the primary technology—the IEEE 802.11b wireless standard—for several years, and this technology is now priced attractively for home environments. The 802.11b standard offers up to 11Mbps throughput and effortless installation.
The Pieces and Parts of an 802.11b Network
The type of network components you need depends on how many and what kinds of devices you want to network. The two basic types of 802.11b networks are ad hoc and infrastructure. An ad hoc wireless network consists of two or more computers, each equipped with a wireless adapter. These computers communicate with one another independently and must use the same radio channel. An infrastructure network adds a component called a wireless Access Point (AP). The AP's primary purpose is to let wireless devices communicate with computers on a wired LAN. You might use this configuration if you have a small, wired network in your home and you want to expand it. Another advantage to adding an AP to your wireless LAN (WLAN) is that you can theoretically double your transmission range. For example, imagine setting a laptop on a table and walking 1500' away (i.e., the theoretical maximum distance for a line-of-sight connection) while you use a second laptop to wirelessly communicate with the first laptop. You could install an AP at that point and walk an additional 1500' away and still communicate between the two laptops.
Aside from choosing an AP and specialty devices such as a wireless print server, you need to select the proper wireless adapters for the equipment you want to connect. A wide range of adapters is available, including PCI cards for internal installation, PC Card adapters for laptops, USB adapters for simple installation in desktop computers, and CompactFlash (CF) slot adapters for mobile devices such as Pocket PCs. The Lab has gathered and tested 802.11b networking products from vendors that offer a range of adapters to provide single-brand solutions for diverse home networks. We asked each vendor to provide an AP and adapters using PCI card, PC Card, USB, and CF card technology. SMC Networks, D-Link Systems, and Linksys all provided entire suites of products; NETGEAR and Efficient Networks provided all the pieces except the CF card; and SOHOware provided an AP, PC Card, and PCI card. We considered Compaq's, Intel's, Proxim's, and Agere Systems' wireless networking components for review but didn't include these vendors' products because they didn't provide a wireless PCI card.
The test environment was a two-story house with a finished basement. An office in the basement includes three systems that connect to a 100Mbps Ethernet switch on the middle floor of the house. My primary goal while testing the wireless networking equipment was to provide connectivity for stationary computers on the middle and upper floors and mobile connectivity for a laptop and a Pocket PC device without any additional cabling. Additionally, I wanted to ensure secure network traffic and maintain optimal throughput of 11Mbps. Keep in mind that 11Mbps is the maximum throughput for all connections. As a result, all devices connecting to the AP share the 11Mbps pipe.
Installation
For each brand of products, I installed the same type of adapters in the same machine. I installed the PCI card in a desktop PC running Windows 2000 Professional, the PC Card in a laptop running Windows XP Professional Edition, and the USB adapter in another desktop PC running XP Home Edition. I installed the D-Link, SMC, and Linksys CF cards into a Compaq iPAQ H3800 running Pocket PC 3.0. For each AP, I installed each device in the same location and plugged each device into the existing network switch.
SMC. Each SMC component came with a small printed user's guide and a 3.5" driver/utility disk. The SMC2655W EZ Connect 11Mbps Wireless Access Point features a dual dipole antenna. I used a Category 5 Ethernet cable (not included) to connect the AP to the network switch and installed SMC's AP Manager utility on a Win2K Pro system physically connected to the network. After I configured the managing computer's network adapter IP address to match the AP's subnet, AP Manager detected the AP and I was able to log on to the AP and configure it by using the AP Manager interface. SMC enables a DHCP client on the AP by default, which saves you from manually configuring the IP address if you have the DHCP service on your network. I installed wireless adapters in my other computers to make sure everything could communicate. Installation was simple for every device; Windows detected the adapters and requested the driver media, I placed the driver/utility disk in the 3.5" disk drive, and Windows loaded the appropriate drivers. To load the drivers for the SMC2642W EZ Connect 802.11b 11Mbps Wireless Compact Flash Card onto the iPAQ, I had to use Microsoft ActiveSync to run the installation program on the computer to which the iPAQ was connected. In about an hour, I had added four wireless clients and an AP to my network by using the SMC hardware.
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