Howdy
On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, David Hillman wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 scott.hall@comcast.net wrote:
>> can anyone shed some light?
>
> Don't even bother. If you don't already, you will soon have a laptop
> or other portable device. For that reason, plus it's a lot easier, go
> wireless.
There are some downsides to wireless...
1) Less secure, particularly for the novice user who doesn't know which
settings to tweak to make things more secure. You may think this doesn't
matter, and it actually might not, but if you don't want to be sharing
your internet connection with the world, exposing your financial records
to prying eyes, etc. etc. it might.
2) Reception quality... I live in a 2300 ft2 ranch and because of various
things have my wireless AP in a corner of the house. The other corner
gets spotty reception even with spending some time ensuring I've got good
quality cards with good reception.
3) connection speed. Wired connections are twice as fast as "G" wireless
and ten times as fast as "B" wireless (all nominal). You may think this
doesn't matter, and it doesn't if all you share is an internet connection,
but if you're transferring a show from one tivo to another (for instance),
you want that baby to run as fast as possible.
Now, all that said, I've got wired connections in our home office and
wireless to support roaming laptops and the two tivo boxes because
wireless is certainly easier than running network cable. _However_, I
also plan to eventually get off my butt and run wires to at least the tivo
boxes to help speed up transfers.
There's benefits and tradeoffs to each approach. The downsides to wire
are that its a pain to install and has a tethered/fixed location. Upsides
are speed, security, and reliability. Wireless has essentially the
opposite attributes. Costs are similar if you're doing the work yourself.
As to the original question...
Presuming that you're using a cable modem... You want:
cable -> cable modem -> cat 5 -> broadband router -> cat 5 (multiple) ->
computers.
The broadband router is a special little deal that lets you share your
internet connection among all your computers. Its a little different than
a regular router in that it supports a firewall, multiple computers
sharing a single internet connection, assigning ip addresses to the other
pcs on your network, etc.
A wired example is at:
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=403464&RecommendedForEDC=196823&RecoType=upsell
One that supports wireless as well is at:
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=447401
Don't buy anything less than Wireless-G stuff these days... G has more
power & better range than B in addition to more speed, and costs are very
similar.
Given that you're going to pay similar prices for a wired-only or
wired+wireless broadband router, I'd get the wireless one. You typically
can turn off the wireless portion if you desire, in which case it acts
just like the wired one above.
Hope that helps some.
Mark
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