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Wireless Routers for Congested Areas?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have been living close to campus at UW Madison for the past six months or so and have come across a problem. We, along with everyone else in the area, have a wireless router, both a Belkin 54g and a Linksys WRT54G. We have Charter 3 Mbit down/.25 Mbit up cable and 6 guys in our apartment. Just on our block about 15-20 people have routers. We are constantly plagued with problems connecting to the wireless, staying connected, getting connected after rebooting, hibernating, and so forth. We have to reset the cable modem and the router many times a day to get everything rolling again. I am thinking that the router is the problem, because my dad always told me that's why they have twenty dollar routers up to thirty thousand dollar routers. What router can I purchase that will help my situation and will work well in a congested college area?"
Of course not dipshit. (At least not with industry standard gear, but given a budget to develop the necessary hardware, yes.)
Like I said, UTP only won out because people are lazy cheap and stupid. If people were capable of handling coax then it would have been used for the newer high speed networks as well, the problem is that users cannot comprehend a BNC tee and will disrupt the network. Installers are lazy and prefer the ease of installation of the star topology, and of course UTP is cheaper.
If you want to understand why coax is a superior signal conductor (even for gigabit speeds, though it not used for the lame reasons mentioned above) look into something called inductive interference and why the geometry of coaxial cable is far superior to twisted pair.
Fiber is another matter of course.