Wireless Router

[LuckyTaxi]

Currently I have a Linksys router hooked up to a 4 port HUB at home. I recently purchased a laptop, and would like to use it throughout the house. I've noticed that there are many options for me to go wirless, but my question is -- will my dsl speed suffer on the laptop because of this? I intend to put the other PCs (which are desktop) on the normal NIC CAT5 setup, but the laptop would go wireless. Any issues concerning this setup?

Also, will there be an issue using the wireless setup on different floors in the house?

Sam

 

[fargus]

Well, the current 802.llb wireless cards are 11Mbps, and you should get at least 2Mbps at a minimum; you don't say what kind of DSL connection you have, but it's probably slower than that, right? So your WAN connection is still the bottleneck, and you probably won't notice much difference between the wireless and a cabled connection as far as the outside world is concerned.

As far as the different floors goes... it depends. Distance, construction types (brick vs. wallboard, etc) all come into play. You may need to move things around and test. I know some of the wireless stuff comes with signal strength testing utility, don't know about the Linksys, not my brand.

 

[MJT2k]

Typically the high you can get your wireless access point (WAP) or wireless router the better. If you plan on using it on more than 2 floors you might find that it would be best to get 2 WAP's. You also have to take into consideration interferince (sp?) electrical wires or any other metal. They really down grade the single. Also line of sight is best with any wireless solution using the 2.4 GHz spectrum.

 

[Eug]

The Linksys doesn't have the best reviews in terms of range, but YMMV.

With a good connection however, wireless will easily max out the bandwidth of DSL or cable. Note that if you activate WEP, it really downgrades performance on some units, but with a good connection it should still be fast enough to max out most high speed internet access bandwidths.

BTW, with your setup, you don't need a router with wireless ($$$$). You need just the access point ($$$).