Introduction
Wireless networking might not seem like the most invigorating subject for a review, but its usefulness knows no bounds. When I decided I’d rather be writing reviews in the garden during this fine spring, I set about looking at the various options open to me. The first and most obvious is to connect your modem to a wireless router and then have a PCI / PCMCIA daughter card which connects to said router. Due to the high cost of such a setup however, I decided to look into getting a more affordable peer to peer setup. A quick chat with out resident network guru Major revealed that the best format to go with for cost / performance was a pair of IEEE 802.11b based wireless adaptors. Before taking the plunge, I thought I’d do a bit of research about this protocol.
IEEE802.11b is now by far and away the most popular wireless protocol, and has been labelled by marketing pundits as “Wi-Fi”. 802.11b has several improvements over the original 802.11 standard, the most important of which is an increase in theoretical bandwidth to 11mbs rather than 2mbs for the original. The only time you are ever likely to see such a high rate is if the two adaptors are in the same room as each other, within a couple of inches, in a vacuum, with no interference – in other words, never. However, unless you live in super fast Sweden like our webmeister Major, who enjoys a 10Mbit up / 10Mbit down internet pipe, you are not going to need such speed to share a net connection with total efficiency. Living in old blightly, I have one of the fastest available connections, a 1MB line from Blueyonder. If I can use this at full speed in the garden – I’m happy!
I don’t even have to give Amil at Chillblast my credit card number anymore, I think he has it tattooed to his forehead for safe keeping, but the total cost of two adaptors was £70 ex VAT (£35 each) – a very decent price for networking freedom. Next day, two shiny “Zonet” wireless LAN adaptors arrived on my doorstep. My first impression was how light the package was, containing little in the way of superfluous extras or packing. Inside the box, you get the adaptor, lead, and a driver disk – 'nuff said.
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