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Implementing WiFi in the Real World
John Jorsett writes "Seduced by the siren song of wireless access throughout the home, many a user has experienced the discrepancy between the manufacturer's advertised claims (150 feet indoors, 300 outside) and real-world implementation (the living room and upstairs bedroom may as well be on different continents). In steely-eyed determination to exercise his inalienable right to network access anywhere on his property, MSN author Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves, using only mass-market consumer hardware."
This whole time I've been using my Airport network in the fake, alternate-universe world? Freaky.
Vonal Declosion
I don't have internet either. Thanks, Paul, I just looked up your address. Who's up for some wardriving?
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
This is how to do it in 3 steps:
1)Buy a Wireless access point
2) Plug it into a network.
3) Visit slashdot to see how you should have done it.
There is no god
Later that month Mr. Boutin's beloved cat, Fluffy, was taken to the vet after sprouting a second tail.
"It's not all that concerning, no more than this third ear I've grown," said Mr. Boutin of his cat's irregularities.
MSN author Paul Boutin decides apple makes the best products
MSN author Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer
Even my mom was able to setup her 802.11b card to use my access card. Are Microsoft employees that daft ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Getting an engineer to come and help? A few Pringles cans would have been a heck of a lot cheaper. Geez, those Microsoft guys, always reinventing the wheel.
A Slate article advocating the purchase of AirPort Extreme??
How long until this guy gets 86'ed?
In the meantime, I think he's got a great point. We use Airports in and around our department at my university because a) educational discount and b) easily extendable whenever a new hall would like to be added to the network of base stations.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Next time I'll bring my coffee to his house to warm it up in the morning.
--Mike--
The first time you dispose of a tedious backlog of e-mail while kicking back in your favorite lawn chair...
Just make sure that your kids don't decide to COWABUNGA all over you and your pricey laptop...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
This jump in logic baffles me. Those aren't exactly difficult standards to meet. Wouldn't any old Linksys wifi router suffice for mass-market? Why exactly would it be difficult to have multiple instances of the "same model"? The author doesn't jutsify the choice or even explain any of the differences between Apple's product or anyone elses.
i know this will be beaten to death, but it really is great to be able to cancel your DSL service after a neighbor leaves his wifi unencrypted.
when my phone service was dropped, i threw a d-link access point on the back fence and ran a 50' ethernet cable in through the back window. thanks Laura'sP4! i appreciate your having broadband and a linsys router!
and thanks mr. boutin for not mentioning WEP encryption!
go get it
Everytime I have grabbed my checkbook, and gotten ready to head out for wireless...the articles say "in a few months_____________", the new standard, the longer range, etc. is going to come out, and render my purchase just foolish, and I will be so embarassed I didn't wait.
.g standard is ratified, I'm sure one WAP for only $199 would cover his whole house, and garage and his patio too.
Gee - If he had waited until "this summer" when the new
But, the one coming out after that....
to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves
How many hits per second during a typical slashdotting session again ? Poor Paul Bouttin must have received a good dose of radiation by now.
Paul, the iodine pills are in your left drawer. Good luck buddy !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I'm completely unwilling to come over to his house and configure his AirPort Extreme until he works on that attitude. Looking askance at hardware/software that just works: let him use solutions through his corporate overlord.
There are much cheaper bases and access points that will accomplish this for you (linksys, dlink) and they dont require you to find someone with a mac (surprisingly I dont know someone with a mac laptop). His solution of 'it doesnt reach? spend $200 more!' isnt very adequate for a typical home user
I've got an extreme near the front of the house and an old graphite in the bedroom.
The nice option about the airport is it will let more than one airport act as the same network - so when I walk from the back to the front of my house, I'm not switching from network 1 to network 2. I know it says it in the article but it's nice to see in action.
FWIW, bathroom tiles are bad for range and for some reason, I have trouble connecting one room away with my tibook unless it is turned just right.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
...I really think Mom and Pop are going to find it SO easy to get an Apple and set up their Airport! Especially if it's broadcasting to PCs
instead of Macs!
Really though, why on earth would anybody waste their time doing this? Sure the Airport is good, BUT spend less time, buy a Linksys or a DLink or a Cisco or something, plug it in, plug some wireless cards into the computers, turn it on, and let the wireless router and software do the rest!
Man.. I wonder if this guy gets paid more than I do! *grin*
The article says that to configure an Airport, you need a Mac.
Really?
Every firewall/router I have used, including the ones that have 802.11b features, are configured using any web browser. Is it really true that Apple did something different, which requires a Mac?
If so: I suggest you buy a Netgear instead.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer to help him bathe"
taking things out of context is always more fun than adding insightful comments
YOU SUCK BALLS!
"Most important, it's the only home consumer base that flaunts its support for the Wireless Distribution System, which knits multiple access points together to act as a single network. An AirPort base plugged into the DSL or cable modem can bridge to up to four additional AirPorts, nearly doubling the network's wireless reach in four directions at once. Even better, the method lets you put an AirPort right in the room with you, rather than trying to beam the connection through a wall. This approach vastly reduces the amount of squirming in your seat required before your laptop will pick up enough signal from the other room."
Total BS. If this guy was a real expert, he'd know you could also buy the Intel 2011 access point (and I'm sure there's others out there with the same feature set). It can also act as a repeater (scroll down on that link a little). I know because I have two in my house, and one repeats the signal to the back half of the house. They work phenomenally.
The Intel may be more expensive (~$500), but I can guarantee it covers more area. The antennas are about 8 inches each (diversity!), and I can actually get my whole house on one of them (why'd I get two? optimal coverage for multiple people...plus it's cool!).
$650 so I can surf from poolside? I'll take a 75 ft. patch cord and a window that is open 1/2 inch, thank you very much. No new NIC required, either. And don't even get me started on Wi-Fi security.
This article really illustrates how far Wi-Fi has to go before it's widely and *easily* adopted by consumers.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
And what stoopid trade-off he's proposing. Sure, Airport stations can be both AP's and bridges. But, as he notes...
There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it. Since you'll only need to do this once, though, it's not a big problem. Only a small percentage of us own an Apple computer, but we all know someone who does and never stops reminding us. Not only will your Mac Buddy come over and set up your AirPorts, he'll be hurt if you don't let him. Go ahead, ask him and see.
WTF?! What kind of trade-off is this for a PC owner? Thanks, Paul, you saved me from (gasp!) buying two kinds of hardware, but now I have to call my smug "Mac Buddy" over every time I want to manage it. AND, this smug Mac Buddy of mine has administrative rights on my LAN. I better stop calling him smug.
Airport is great, Macs are great, but this is a horrible solution for the mission he set up for himself: Propose the dead-simplest full-coverage wireless home network for your average (i.e. Windows-using) person.
All the nodes on my WiFi network talk in ad-hoc mode, using Mobile Mesh for routing (including the Zaurus). Traffic is then encrypted with IPSec and authenticated against my LDAP server.
As a result as long as I am in range of any one of my nodes (not a difficult thing in this house) I get a good signal - the cloud covers most of the garden too. And all without dropping a bundle on network engineers, antennas, amplifers or anything else.
But then again what do you expect of someone who works for MSN? Routing? Isn't that the thing you do with some kind of workmans tool?
Beep beep.
D-Link makes the WAP-900+ access point. Cool thing about it is that it can be used as a wireless repeater. I bought one on sale for 69 bucks a few weeks ago. Two of these and a D-Link DI-614+ wireless router ($49 bucks after rebate). would have done the same thing he did for less then the cost of one Airport. Plus you don't need an Apple computer to configure it (any web browser will do).
I bet people have the best results in wood framed, drywalled houses. Does anyone know if lead paint and pressed steel fabrication has a negative effect on wi fi signals?
TallGreen CMS hosting
I first set up my home wireless network with a SMC2632W PC Card adapter. It quickly became obvious that one access point (SMC2655W) wasn't going to cover my 2100 square foot house, so I set up one access point in my study at the front of the house and another in the laundry room at the rear.
Flash forward a year or so, and my employer issued me a spiffy new ThinkPad T30 with an integrated (MiniPCI actually) Cisco Aironet 350 adapter. This adapter uses an antenna that's actually built into the laptop, and what a difference!
There's no question that I could get by with a single access point now. I see 67% signal strength when the adapter is associated with the access point at the other end of the house -- 70 feet away, through four or five walls. In fact, I had a terrible time getting Windows XP to associate with my secured network; it kept associating the adapter with my neighbors unsecured network. (I've promised myself that I'll tell them about this if they ever kill the dandelions in their yard.)
This really isn't surprising when you consider that the PCMCIA adapter has to cram its antenna into the small portion of the card that sticks out of the laptop, while the integrated adapter gets to use an antenna that runs throughout the laptop.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Here's a Java-based configurator for the Apple AirPort Base Station and Lucent RG-1000 wireless access points. It should run on any platform with a Java 1.2-compliant runtime environment installed, permitting the configuration of a base station from any host. The download for Unix/Windows consists of a zip file containing the software and HTML help file. The runnable is supplied as a "jar" file; run this in the usual way (double-clickable in Windows if using Sun's JRE 1.2 or higher runtime environment ; from command line in Unix). The download for the Macintosh expands into a folder containing a double-clickable application plus the help file; a download containing two necessary Java libraries from Sun is also available (see notes below).
The 'duck' antennas that come on Linksys APs are 2.2dBi - they pretty much radiate in a flattened bubble shape.
... think of its pattern as more of a fluffy pancake shape rather than the slightly flattened ball pattern you get with a low gain duck.
If you replace the 2.2 dBi duck with an external 8.2dB omnidirectional antenna you'll have something roughly twice as tall that will put four times as much energy where you need it
I live in an old house with solid wood doors. My desktop provides an adhoc network for my laptop in my room. If either my bedroom door or the office door is open it works with a duck, if they're both closed I get no signal. I had a 17dB panel and the appropriate cable - using this put 32x the energy where I needed it and I get solid connections with both doors closed.
I previously lived in a newer split level. The AP was at one end of the house in the basement, my room was all the way at the other end on the second floor. A 30mw Linksys with a duck was just useless, but adding a 12dB Cushcraft 90 degree sector gave excellent service all over the house.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Does this help?
Now, antennas of various design can give you different shapes. If you are trying to fill an area that is all roughly on the same elevation, use a Higher gain (aroung 8-10db) omnidirectional antenna. If you are setting an access point up in one corner of the property, buy a directional antenna to fill in only the areas you are trying to cover.
In this way you are effectively boosting the output of the equipment without introducing extra noise, or bringing the FCC to your door.
The hard part is interfacing the access point to the external antennas. The back of my linksys's have a reverse-TNC connector. Most aftermarket antennas use the ham-radio style N-type connectors. After a bit of scouring I found an outfit that actually sells the pigtail I needed.
The antennas were from an outfit in Canada called "Superpass". They have a great website with the radiation patterns, but their market is someone buying a messload at a time. I forget where I got the pigtail, but I could probably find it again if asked.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
buy Cisco cards, they cost a bit more but they will have drivers for their 11a and 11g stuff eventually and already have it for their 11b cards. They have a person dedicated to linux development including drivers and support software for their LEAP secure authentication system.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Cheap APs have 100 mW or less, and very bad antennas (less de 1 dBi). Nevertheless, a 100 mW card plus a short 2 dBi omni antenna is enough to cover a medium-to-big flat, assuming that the stations' antennas are still internal.
By the way, the Apple Base Station Antena is crap, it only gives good coverage if you have all the stations' antennas at the same level/height, otherwise better to turn the base station on its side or hang it in the wall.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
See Tom's Hardware for an article on D-Link's Repeating WAP.
How about pumping your wireless network up to 100 watts... Uh, because it's bi-directional??? How long is your laptop battery going to last, transmitting constantly at 100 watts? And by the way, that's 100 watts going directly into your lap! By contrast, low end microwave ovens cook food with 600 watts. That warm, fuzzy feeling you're experiencing probably means you'll never be able to have children...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
802.11b/g:
;)
:)
If you have a Linksys 802.11 b/g router (WRT54G), then you have boughten a piece of crap. No seriously, that router has terrible range. I should know, I used to have one. I verified on the net, that is was the case. I exchanged it for a Netgear WGR614, which uses an Intersil PrismGT chipset, and my coworker bought the DLink variety, which also uses the Intersil PrismGT chipset. It gets MUCH MUCH better range.
With an Intel 802.11b gateway that I used to have, I would get -65db signal in my master bedroom, and XP would report VeryGood connection. With the Linksys G router, I got -77db, and XP reported Poor signal connection. When I connected the Netgear G router, I got -57db and XP reported Excellent signal strength. I borrowed a friends signal booster, and connected it to the linksys, and found it to be useless.
I ran NetIQ and did some through-put tests. With the Linksys, I got 17mbit/sec when I was in mixed mode, and 20mbit/sec in G only. On the netgear, I always got 21mbit/sec. With the 802.11b, I got 4.5mbit/sec...
802.11a:
With an AP based on the Atheros 5000 chipset, I got crappy signal at our work. Thanks to Tomshardware, I bought a Netgear WAB102, which is the ONLY A/B dualband AP that uses the second generation A, (Atheros 5001) chipset. This thing is awesome. At our work, its coverage actually exceeds that of B.
At home, I get -59 to -65db in the master bedroom on A. However, the cool thing is the throughput. In non-turbo mode, I get a constant 24mbit/sec in the master bedroom. On the G router, it seemed to be more sensitive to the signal strength, as it would always connect at 36mbit/sec or 48mbit/sec, consequently, I only get 21mbit/sec throughput if I was in the computer room. In my bedroom I got between 14-18mbit/sec.
With A however, I got 24. And I enabled Turbo mode, and it connected at 108mbit/sec, and I measured a constant 35-40mbit/sec everywhere in the house! and thats a two story house, with the AP upstairs.
Keep in mind the "b" radio in the Netgear WAB102 is a piece of crap Atmel chipset. Everytime I "accidently" rest my arm on my card, I lose connectivity. I found my Prism2/Prism3 cards would go into 1mbit/sec mode, and never recover, unless I unplug the card, and plug it back in. The A radio in it on the otherhand is truly awesome.
In the end, I returned my G router, and kept the Netgear WAB102 dual band A/B, and reconnected my Intel gateway for the B, and use Netgear for A.
Atheros has an white paper they posted talking about range and such of A and B, and testing results in an actual home environment and corp environment. Its rather interesting. I verified it myself at our office here with my own testing with various A and B equipment along with Netstumbler and NetIQ, and it is truly suprising.
So anyways, most range problems can be attributed to a shoddy AP, not the "technology". I mean, I've tested the Netgear WAB102, Netgear WGR614, Linksys WRT54G, Linksys WAP54G, Intel ProWireless 5000AP, Intel Gateway, DLink DI-624, and the Linksys BEFW11S4. I tested with Orinoco Silver, Linksys WPC11V3, Linksys WPC54G, Linksys WPC55AG(my fav card), Cisco Aironet 350, Linksys WUSB11 v2.6, and assorted generic Prism2 cards, so I can safely say I know what I'm talking about
(I work in a lab and have lots of wireless toys, if you guys can't tell
Crimony, how many times does it have to be said! Microwaves (and other RADIO freqs) do NOT cause cancer, sterilization, mutation, etc. Those are caused by IONIZING radiation, such as ultraviolet, gamma, and X-rays. Ionizing radiation lives at the OTHER END of the radiation band from radio/microwaves. Yes, microwaves can cause injury, but that injury is limited to THERMAL effects (i.e. cooking), and maybe burns from inductive electrical effects causing arcs from metal objects. Again, let it be said: radio towers don't cause cancer! RF from power lines doesn't cause leukemia! Microwaves won't make you sterile! Your cell phone did not give you brain cancer! It's radio for gods sake! It's not a "nookular bomb"!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.