In its recent zeal for reducing expenses, my company has decided that maintaining an office solely for my benefit (there’s one other guy here a few days a month) is a luxury they can do without, and they’re terminating the lease on the space at the end of the month. Apparently, I’ve proved I’m worth something in the six months I’ve been here, since they aren’t terminating me at the same time. In any event, I find myself faced with the prospect of being a reluctant home-office worker in a few weeks.
I have DSL service at home, sharing the connection between our home computer and my work laptop with no problems. Unfortunately the desk with the home computer, the DSL router and the hub is downstairs in the family room, which doesn’t work at all as a workspace for me: I have two children under the age of five at home, and my wife stays at home with them. There’s just no way I can expect to get anything done down there. We recently finished moving things around to create a small office area in the master bedroom, which is otherwise empty all day. The problem is that it’s upstairs, at the opposite end of the house, and I’m not that thrilled about pulling Cat5 cable through the walls and ceilings to get a network connection up there for work.
The other factor in this is that I occasionally travel to our home office for a few days a month. When possible, I set up in a cube whose occupant happens to be away for the day, but on my most recent trip there were none available, and I kept getting bumped from one place to another, and having to run net cables to the nearest data port – I spent four hours of the eight I was there with no net access, and for probably two hours of that I wasn’t able to get to my machine at all (upper management took over the conference room I was working in while I was in the john, and I wasn’t able to retrieve my laptop).
It strikes me that one possible solution to both these problems would be to use one of the 11Mbps wireless network products on the market, setting up the access point off the downstairs hub at home (which would allow me to work anywhere in the house that’s not occupied by someone else) and taking the whole rig with me to California when I’m in the home office (it’s a small enough company and I’m on good enough terms with the IT crew that putting it on the net there shouldn’t be a problem). Having been in the network hardware and software business in the past, I’m fairly familiar with the players in the market, but I haven’t paid any attention to developments in the wireless arena lately. So I’m looking for advice, experiences, and recommendations from any of the Teeming Millions who may have actually used these products: what’s worked or not worked for you, tips, etc.