Intel Wireless equipment: What else do I need?

[CZroe]

I just need to get my laptop online wirelessly, and Wal-Mart has the Intel Wirelesss PC Cards on clearance for $29. What else wil I need? A "base station" right? How much is that? Thnx!

 

[JackMDS]

Wireless LAN consists on two main components.

1. Access Point (A/P).

Access Point is the Main Transmitter/Receiver that mediate between your LAN, and main computer, to the rest of the Network. It is connected to the LAN's Hub/Switch. It usually supports an excess of 100 clients.

2 . Wireless Client Card.

Wireless Client Card is the LAN card that you should install on your network computers.

Most Client cards are PCMCIA, which work very well with Laptops. For Desktop, it is usually better to use USB Wireless Card. Most PCMCIA Wireless Cards with fixed antenna (stuck behind the PC) yield inferior results versus the Flexible Antenna on a USB card.

If you don't have an established Network, and you want o share Wirelessly Internet connection, you need to buy Wireless Cable/DSL Router instead of the A/P.

A typical Cable/DSL Wireless Router, is a Combo unit, it is comprised of one A/P, three RJ45 connection (for three stationary computers), and one WAN connection for Internet sharing.

Conventional Wisdom* claims that the combination Orinoco Gold (About $90) SMC Wireless Router (About $150) yield the best results.

This link:
ORiNOCO PC Card - Gold.

There are no real big differences between the entry level Routers.

As can be seen in this link:

Wireless Routers Compared

If you just want an Access point:

Access Points Compared

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When it comes to Wireless your mileage may varied, there are too many environmental variables that are unique to each individual setting.
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[ktwebb]

You don't necessarily need a base station/AP or router/AP. It's the preferred method if you want to share a broadband connection however. If the PC's are within a reasonable range you could run two wireless cards in Ad Hoc mode (peer to peer). The PC that the internet connection comes into, whether through a dialup, NIC or USB from cable or dsl modem would be your WAN interface and one of the Wi-Fi cards would be your local access card. That machine would need Windows ICS or some other NAT/Proxy software on it. The other machine would have the other client card. Understand, I am not really an advocate of this practice because it is not always pheasible, nor would you get the best range from PC to PC. Not to mention MAC filtering and other advanced options of an AP but it is an alternative.

 

[CZroe]

I'd rather do it the PC-to-PC way, though I may have 2 laptops again soon. I have a PC w/ 3 network cards in it for VPN that I plan on setting up (For some reason, my ISP lets me lease as many IPs for as many PCs as I can connect to a regular old hub ), so it can serve as a base station I suppose. Thnx!