Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Going Wireless

I just layed down some cash for wireless high speed internet access for my place. I was just curious if anyone has wireless high speed internet access in there house running from road runner, etc. I ended up going with a Netgear MR314 Wireless Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port Switch and a Netgear MA401 802.11b Wireless PC Card for my notebook. The card will also come in handy at school where the Design building has set up their own wireless LAN for its students. More computers to be hooked up in the near future.

If anyone else has wireless cable/dsl, it would be cool to here some pros and cons they have come across. And maybe even a little bit about security good or bad. From what I here, not so good.

-Brian

isn't wireless limited to 11 mbps???

You have me a lil confused, you said you laid down cash for high-speed wireless internet. Then you mention wireless cable/dsl, what are you getting. There is wireless internet available (very $$$) and then there is DSL/cable. The way it sounds me is that you have your broadband going into your router and routing the broadbad over wireless inside your house, correct me if I am wrong.
Wireless, the new 802.11b runs at 22mbps, the 802.11a runs at 54mbps IF your in line of sight, throw in walls and floors it drastically reduces signal strength and bandwidth. As far as security goes, you can normally apply some type of encryption for the wireless transmission.

I gues I need to do more research. What had ordered, now canceled, was a router with wireless capabilty to run with road runner.

mbps, megabytes per second. Right? I guess for me 11mbps doesnt seems too slow, but the way you talk about it, it does. What transfer rates can you tyically get from road runner?

Is this something I should be buying? I could just buy a router and cable, but I thought it would be cleaner and not so much of a bother for the people I am living with/renting from who have their computer and cable modem in their bedroom, on the same floor where my computer would be, just in a different room.

So you have normal Road Runner cable modem service, going into a wireless router so you can share it with multiple computers?

You want some sort of security between your router and your computers, and only allow your computers to connect to the router. Otherwise you could have your neighbors gettin free cable modem service from ya.

11Mbps will be fine for sharing a cable modem, as you're only going to get like 1.5Mbps from the internet. If you going to be transferring files across your local network, then it may feel kinda slow, but it shouldn't be too bad.

I have the 802.11b wireless router and NICs attached to my DSL line in my house. It's good and bad.

My system:
1 PC hardwired to the router
2 laptops hooked up with wireless

1) BAD!-I have two of the 2.4 gig cordless phones in my house and when one is being used, the wireless laptops just about disconnect. They both run the same frequencies and interfere with each other.

2) bad-the range for the NIC's is ~300 feet outdoors, but last I checked, my whole network is in my house. the distance between my router and laptop in my bedroom=~80 feet and reception is like 20% (feels like I'm running 56k modem).

3) good-With the laptops, I can roam damn near anywhere in my house or take it out to the driveway to search for help while playing with car stuff.

With the routers, you can lock stuff down for security - encription and limiting DHCP pooling addresses (basically, limiting the amount of PC's being able to connect to your router.)

Hope this helps.

Megabits per second. A bit different than megabytes. I'm not sure how that translates into how many kilobytes/sec are being transferred, but this is the reason why people are saying it's slow.

Think also of a 56K dialup modem. This is only 56 kilobits a second (which is the reason people only see file downloads of up to about 6 kilobytes/sec). So in relation, 11 mbps is still much faster. You should not notice it slowing down your connection that much.