Wireless Buyer's Guide

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis

Sep. 18, 2004

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Introduction

Are you looking to go wireless or do you have an existing system you want to upgrade? If so, then read on. If not, why are you here? After all, going wireless sounds pretty easy! Just get an access point and some wireless PCI or PCMCIA cards and you are free to surf the net, print, share files and do all the things we do with computers minus the hassle of being tethered to a wall. But if it's so easy why hasn't everyone and their brother made the switch to wireless? The short answer of course is that it is not as easy as you might expect. This is the reason why I want to inform you, the wireless buyer, on what to look for and hopefully, how to get as much out of your wireless experience as possible.

Walking into your favorite computer store, you will be inundated with a wide variety of products to choose from. The two that will stick out mostly will be 802.11b and 802.11g. The 802.11a standard is also present, but tends to be used in higher-end products that also carry a high-end price tag. For the average home user who doesn't feel the need to break the bank right out of the gate, it is the b and g standard that will take center stage.

I will now make things easy on you! If you are looking to go wireless now, I recommend that you choose a 802.11g setup. For details on why, read on - unless you have already bolted for the nearest wireless distributor.

The Wireless Standards

What's with the Names?

So why is 802.11b called 802.11b? The answer comes from how a standard evolves. The standards for wireless were determined by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). The IEEE is made up of groups that compile and standardize the requirements for products to help ensure that different vendors' products will interoperate. They take into account information from various sources and piece it all together to form the standard we know and love today. You can thank the IEEE for making it possible to buy a D-link switch and have it work with a Linksys Ethernet card. So, the original wireless standard was called 802.11, and various incarnations of it yield what we know now as 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g.

802.11b

The 802.11b standard was the first wireless for the masses. With its release, laptop users everywhere were free from their desks and cramped corners and able to roam about with ease. Although 802.11b was a big step forward, it may have been too much of one. At the cusp of its ratification as a standard, many vendors began releasing products as "draft 802.11b". This meant that they were basing their products on a standard that could for all intents and purposes change. The idea behind a standard is that products from different vendors work together with minimal interruption. The lure of wireless was too much for anyone to contain, thus began the wireless push.

The 802.11b standard has a published maximum transmission rate of 11Mbps (Megabits per second, not to be confused with MBps which stands for MegaBytes per second) and operates in the 2.4 GHz radio spectrum. Cordless phones that are known to interfere with 802.11b setups also inhabit this portion of the radio spectrum. Microwave ovens are also notorious for causing interruption in the transmission of 802.11b. For all its drawbacks, such as slow speed and interference issues, the draw of a totally "portable" computer was still the overriding issue, besides, most people just surf the net with their network connections anyway. Connections to cable or DSL service usually top out at 1.5 to 2 Mbps, which even a poor 802.11b connection running at 4-5 Mbps will be able to support.

802.11g

This now brings us to the new wireless standard, 802.11g. As with the 802.11b standard, 802.11g, or "54g' as it is often called, operates in the same 2.4 GHz radio band, and thus is affected by the same interference as 802.11b. The 54g standard was approved by the IEEE in mid-2003 which led to a massive influx of new wireless products, which can be seen on the market today. Now you can find 54g products priced comparable to the 802.11b that was so coveted just one year ago.

Besides the obvious bandwidth improvement, many of today's 54g routers and access points (AP's) have better security and are better products overall. Think of 802.11b as the first model year of a car - after working out many of the bugs, you now have a more polished product. One of these "polishing" aspects has been a jump in the published maximum throughput of many manufacturers' products. Rather than the standard 54 Mbps, we are now seeing 108 Mbps and even as high as 125 Mbps. To achieve these great feats of throughput, companies have essentially cheated the standard.

In a strict sense, these products are fully compliant with the 802.11g standard as written by the IEEE. To gain the increased throughput, manufacturers are utilizing proprietary technologies which only work with their own products (i.e. PCI cards, PCMCIA cards, etc.). So if you plan on just buying a new router, then all the speed boosting technology will do you absolutely no good with other manufacturers' cards. As with all new technology, it has its pros and its cons.

802.11a

802.11a is not compatible with either 802.11b or 802.11g networks. This means that an 802.11a card will not be able to connect to a "b' or "g' access point. The big reason behind this is that 802.11a operates at a different frequency, 5 GHz rather than the 2.4 GHz spectrum used by the other standards. Because of this difference, there is less interference with 802.11a than with b or g. That is the good news. The bad news is that 802.11a has much less range. Therefore, to cover the same area you would need more access points for an 802.11a network than what you would need for b or g networks. When comparing the 802.11b with 802.11a previously, the "a' standard did have the faster throughput, 54 Mbps versus the 11 Mbps of the b standard. But since the more recent g standard boasts equivalent speeds, as well as the added bonus of being backwards compatible with b, 802.11a looks like a dead end, at least for the average home user.

For the home user, the only time you might consider a product which is 802.11a compatible would be when buying laptop PCMCIA cards. If you travel frequently in areas that support 802.11a, then a tri-mode card might be a good choice to look at. A tri-mode card is one which has support for 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g. Obviously, this market segment is much smaller than the home buying public as a whole, and those types of cards do not come cheap.

Three Standards... So Now What?

So I have briefly covered the major 802.11 standards, a, b, and g. What all this means to you is this: If you have an existing wireless network it is most likely 802.11b. Upgrading to a 54g router will still leave you with the b speed and will most likely slow down any high speed clients you have running at 54g. The speeds of the "boosted" 54g products are finally approaching speeds that make file transfers and other networking resources operate at close to hardwired speeds. If you haven't implemented any form of wireless, now might be a good time. The costs of the 54g products currently out are comparable to b setups, but if you buy all the needed components (router + cards) of a single vendor, you should be able to blow the old 11Mbps out of the water. This, of course, assumes that your house isn't filled with microwaves and metal studs which will fry the connection of either b or g.

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by Guest on October 20, 2004 - 12:25 am

Can anyone recommend a site/reading that addresses the problem of losing networking (file tranfers) between wireless connected computers in a network. Whenever I try to turn on WEP, I lose network (not internet) connectivity with the other computers on that network.

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