I have 3 PCs in seperate rooms, and a laptop, that I’d like to network. I know a fair amount about PCs, but nothing about these new-fangled wireless contraptions 
I took a look at best buys site, to get an idea of what’s available, but the variety of routers/hubs/4-port ethernet controllers/access points/wireless USB/A-B-G options has me thoroughly confused.
What do I need to know before I can think about buying?
Thanks,
There are 3 main “standards” for wireless communication, 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. Generally speaking, you can use any of the three, but all components in your network (router, network cards, etc.) must match. Most home networking setups use 802.11b, but more and more are now going with 802.11g which is faster (and usually more expensive).
You didn’t say whether or not you are planning on using broadband internet access (DSL, cable, etc.), but if so you will want to use a router instead of a hub, since the router will provide Network Address Translation (NAT) so that all of your computers can share a single internet connection.
Typically, you will have one computer at the same location as the router connected with a standard (non-wireless) NIC, and all other computers will have a wireless network card installed.
Hope that helps get you started.
Also, for more information go to http://www.dslreports.com and check out their FAQ section.
One thing to take into account: I seem to get cross over interference on my home wireless network if we use our higher frequency cordless phone at the same time. I suspect that I sometimes also get phone interference from my nearby neighbors cordless phones, but that’s not as easy to prove.
Here is an article on setting up a home wireless network. This ought to get you started. I would recommend that you get a router with a build in print server because that way any computer can print through the router without having a dedicated computer running. I use a wired D-Link which works great. They also make a wireless version. Link
I have wireless and right now I’m trying to figure out why I can “see” my neighbor kids computer via my wireless hub. I’m not sure he’s on my network but I’m trying to figure out how to lock him out since I don’t need somebody competing with my family for bandwidth on the DSL line.
Bubbadog
Disclaimer: Bubbadog is in no way related to Beezlebubba, unless of course, Beezlebubba is incredibly wealthy in which cas yes, we’re cousins.
Things to know…
ignore 802.11a
802.11b has a throughput of 11mbps
802.11b+ has a throughput of 22mbps
802.11g has a throughput of 54mbps
For regular DSL / Cable, 802.11b has sufficient enough throughput that the bottleneck in your speed will still be your DSL / Cable modem. It’s not until you approach T1 speeds that you will start to choke your throughput.
First you’ll need a wireless router. (I recommend 802.11b since they are cheapest) Then you’ll need wireless adapters for your computers. (they serve the same purpose as NIC cards) You can mix and match standards, just be aware that your network will automatically scale down to the slowest component. (similar to putting a 10base ethernet card in a 100base hub.) So feel free to buy 802.11g adapters, they will work fine with your 802.11b router, they will just run at 11mbps.
Once you get the hardware set up, you’ll have to configure the software. Most of the routers these days come with installation disks that handle most of the set up automatically. If you don’t have the installation disk, or if you are trying to do something advanced, then you will need to connect to your router directly and set it up based on the manual it came with.
Some things to be aware of when setting up a router:
If you have a static IP address for your computer, make sure that you write down all of your IP, DNS, Gateway and Subnet mask info and then switch your computer over to dynamic IP before connecting to your router and booting up your computer. Generally, in order to log into your router, you will need an IP assigned by the router so you are on the same network segment.
If you have done a lot of web surfing, you may have spyware on your computer that is redirecting your requests for websites. Most routers use reserved IP addresses in the 192.168.2.xxx block. Some spyware is designed to ferret out URLs from your browser and redirect through a 3rd party site so they can glean info on your browsing habits. I recommend downloading Spybot search and destroy and removing all spyware before attempting to set up a router.
Location, location, location. Try to find a central location that is not too close to heavy metals or electrical lines for the best broadcasting ability. Play around with it until you find a good spot.
Ok, once you have your software set up, you will want to secure your wireless network. This is done in a few easy steps.
Turn off the broadcasting of your SSID. This is a beacon that broadcasts the existance of your wireless network to all computers in range. Turning it off makes your network harder to detect.
Turn on Encryption. Most wireless routers offer 64bit or 128bit encryption. For most users 64bit is sufficient and will not impact the speed of the network. This way, even if someone is able to find your wireless network, they will not be able to log on.
Good answer wet marble. Just one question. What advantages to the user are there for using 64 bit encryption instead of 128 bit? I was under the impression that the decryption took place in hardware so there should be impact to the user between 64 and 128.
I have this router connected to my cable modem. We have two laptops both sony vaios. One of the laptops has built in 802.11b the other has a PCMCIA card. I have my setup pretty much as wet marble talks about SSID off 128 bit encryption on. One thing that Wet Marble forgot to mention is that you should rename your network to something different than the default.
http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=33&scid=35&prid=544
To be honest, I don’t know for sure.
I would guess that 64bit encryption would be faster to encode/decode on older hardware, but that a user with the latest and greatest would probably not notice a difference. My advice would be to use 128bit and if you notice that it is slowing down your network, then switch to 64bit. I guess I didn’t really think it fully through in my last post. heh.
For small things like internet traffic, I doubt you’d notice a difference, but if you were in an office setting or had significant distributed applications running using high network traffic, then the bump up to 128bit could adversely affect performance, that’s just a guess though.
Personally, I run 802.11b with 128bit encryption on my network, which is being fed by a 768 SDSL and I have not noticed any performance issues.
Thanks, all.
One thing I’m fuzzy on is the router. I don’t have a broadband connection (it’s like we’re living in the wilderness). All I want to do is challenge the wife and kids to the occasional deathmatch. Is the wireless router the equivalent of a hub, or are the wireless adapters peer-to-peer?
I guess the question is - if I’m not sharing a broadband connection, do I still need a router?
Sorry, BubbaDog - no new fabulously wealthy cousin for you today.
A router like I am talking about is a device that is used to share a broad band connection using NAT (network address translation or something like that) It also functions as a hub both wired and wireless.
The driver setup options on my 802.11 cards imply that you can have a peer to peer network set up but I really don’t know how to set it up. Linksys generally has the manuals online so you might want to read the manuals to see if you can set it up so that one computer talks directly to another computer instead of using the wireless hub.
A hub is just a “splitter” for Ethernet. It’s good for adding ports, but that’s about it.
A router contains a switch as part of its internal structure. A switch is a device that joins two networks together—the two networks in this case being the Internet and your LAN. The additonal aspect of a router is that it can assign private IP addresses to the machines on your LAN, thus sharing the IP given to you by your ISP. A swtich by itself needs valid IP addreses on the back side to be ther already, and that can’t happen with most ISPs, since they only give you one address. Routers are smart switches that can perform NAT and act as a hardware firewall, doing things like packet filtering and port forwarding.
Finally, a wireless router is just a regular router (with the switch inside) and a wireless access point all rolled up into one. You can have them as separate boxes, with the WAP plugged into one of the router ports. But it’s nice to have one integrated unit.
Anyway, without broadband, it’s gonna be hard to use a router. You could plug the router into an ethernet card on the computer with the modem…but that’s messy.
Instead, you could get wireless cards for each computer and setting up an ad-hoc network. That’s where the cards talk to each other without a router. You just have to set up Internet Connection Sharing on the host machine, and you’re set. It can be a little tricky to set up, but most products make it idiot-proof.
Bezzlebubba I’m somewhat wary about posting this because I’m not sure that it will be clear. (Disclaimer ends)
My home network has four computers. Three of the computers access my network via wireless means. Each of the three computers have a wireless card. Since one computer is a laptop the card fits right in the pcmcia slot. Another desk computer has a laptop type card in an adapter that slides into one of the 16 bit expansion slots on the motherboard. The third computer has a wireless adapter that sits external to the computer and plugs into a USB port. All seem to work just fine.
These three computers all use a wireless hub. The wireless hub has a line connection to small router and the router has line connections to my 4th computer and DSL modem. So on my setup I have both a router and a hub. Why? At the time price/configuration worked best to do it this way.
Now inexpensive routers exist that contain the wireless hub and the router in the same piece of equipment. Even if I did not have a broadband need and I was starting over I would pick up one of the comnbination type.
I suggest:
Buy a combination wireless hub/router, they are cheap enough. Put that hub/router near one computer and use a cat5 connection from the PC to the router. (a cat5 cable is cheaper than a wireless card and you will probably need at least one line to the hub for installation and setup) Buy wireless adapters for the other PC’s.
I used DLink equipment for my setup and had few problems using the setup software that came with the equipment. My guess is that the Linksys equipment is just as easy to work with.
good luck
It looks like Audilover, I, and others are giving you conflicting information and I’m sorry about that. Its because there are many different ways to go about setting up a network. Each way has its strengths and weaknesses.
I hope we didn’t confuse you.
After my answer, I just noticed you asked a direct question there.
In my answer, I should have made it even clearer that the cards can work peer-to-peer (that’s what “ad-hoc” mode is…as opposed to infractructure mode which uses a dedicated access point).
This will work just fine for your LAN, and will do the job for playing games. You can then share the internet connection from the dial-up computer if you like.
HTH
OK, some background info:
A hub, as previously stated, simply splits the ethernet connections into more trunks. Hubs are dirt cheap because they don’t really do anything in essence. Hubs are not ideal for networks because they don’t do any packet routing. For example, let’s say you have 3 computers on a network, all connected via a hub. If you are on computer 1 and send a packet to the network, the hub merely replicates that packet to every port, so regardless of whether you are trying to access computer 2, computer 3 will recieve a duplicate of the packet. This translates to lots of packet collision in a busy network.
A switch on the other hand only sends packets to their proper destination, so to use the same 3 computer example, sending a packet from comp1 to comp2 will not result in comp3 getting any packets.
Lastly, a router is like a switch, only it has the ability to bridge multiple network segments, and route traffic across those network segments.
As far as I know, there are no wireless hubs or switches, only routers, although, I haven’t looked too hard.
So, to get back to the OP’s questions…
having no DSL connection will not prevent you from using a wireless router in your home to beat the tar out of your wife in half life. In many ways, it makes your life a lot easier because you don’t have to worry about connecting to your ISP, assigning IPs, DNSes, etc. Simply plug in the router, use Internet Explorer or something like that to set up how many dynamic IPs you want your router to provide to your network, set up the security features and you are good to go.
A router might be more muscle than you actjually need, but they are cheap enough that it shouldn’t be a problem, and it will give you greater flexibility in case you ever decide to get a cable or DSL line. One thing to consider however…
For deathmatching (or playing any games over your network) you probably want to go with an 802.11g setup because those games will use the extra throughput. This option is a bit more expensive than the 802.11b setup, but not so much that it will break the bank. You can set up 3 computers on a 802.11g connection for under $200 easily, compared to $80ish for a 802.11b connection. (You can actually get an 802.11b for even less if you shop around and don’t mind rebates. I managed to get a router and 2 wireless adapters for a grand total of $35 after rebates.)
I have no experience with the adapters providing peer to peer capabilities, so I can’t comment on that.
ah cool, I always wondered what ad-hoc mode is, thanks audilover
BubbaDog, nothing’s really conflicting. TO me, it seems like we’re telling different parts of the same story.
Also notice that in Beelzebubba’s last post, he said he doesn’t have broadband, so a router doesn’t make much sense. A router would only work as designed if it were plugged into an Internet “source,” which in his case would be the computer doing the dialing.
But he doesn’t seem to care about sharing internet, just having a LAN. If that’s the case he can use an ad-hoc WiFi network. He can still share his internet connection this way if he wants to, but he’ll have to use software NAT, like Windows’ ICS. But even if he used a router behind the first computer, he’d have to use ICS anyway.
What it boils down to is that without a broadband device to plug the router into, it’s redundant, and overkill.
audilover
Agreed. I still recomended the router since the router/wireless combos are so cheap. Who knows, he might have a reason to go with a broadband connection in the future and, if so, he’s ready to go. But that’s his call.
And I realized that my terminology was careless if not downright incorrect. wet marble politely pointed out the correct terms.
Understanding this stuff is one thing, explaining it is quite another. I probably shouldn’t have waded into this conversation.
From one bubba to another - good luck!