Your Guide To Wireless

Pick A Wireless Network

In crowded urban areas, it is common to find multiple available wireless networks that are in the same location. To make a selection, right-click the Wireless Network Connection icon in the System Tray and select View Available Wireless Networks from the pop-up menu. Each network is listed according to its SSID (Service Set Identifier). The listing also includes pertinent information such as signal strength and security status. Unsecured networks require no password or encryption key, but se...

Keep Drivers Up-To-Date

Drivers are small pieces of software code that allow an operating system to access wireless adapters and other hardware. Unlike many other types of drivers, those used for wireless technology constantly undergo changes and improvements. A driver that worked flawlessly last month may not be able to connect to a new or improved wireless access point today. Before hitting the road, check the Web site of the manufacturer of your wireless adapter or your laptop for driver updates. Keep a copy of t...

Revive Your Wireless Adapter

If you see a big, fat, red X on the Wireless Network Connection icon in your System Tray, then your wireless adapter has been disabled. This can happen for a number of reasons; some of the more common are laptop power management features, which disable network adapters for longer battery runtimes; manually turned off adapters; and loose or disconnected adapters. Re-enable or reset the adapter as applicable and click the Wireless Network Connection icon in the System Tray. In the Network Connecti...

Control Automatic Connections

Whenever you connect to a new wireless network, Windows XP adds it to a list of preferred connections. Over time, this list can get cluttered with entries, at least some of which are in the same geographic location. You can easily end up connecting to the Wireless Network A when you thought you were connecting to the Hotspot B. WinXP creates the list, but you can control the order of preference. You can also determine whether your computer should make an automatic connection. Click the Wirele...

A Wi-Fi User’s Guide for SmartPhone

Wi-Fi access, it seems, is just about everywhere. If you recently purchased a Wi-Fi-enabled handset or plan to do so, you'll be glad to know that hopping on the Internet via Wi-Fi doesn't have to be difficult. How It Works Phone manufacturers enable Wi-Fi access in their devices the same way they enable cellular connectivity: They install a chip embedded with a radio that can send and receive a transmission over a particular type of network. In most consumer-grade Wi-Fi phones availabl...

Your Laptop and Wi-Fi

Using your laptop to access a Wi-Fi network while on the road is usually as simple as finding an open network. The majority of notebooks now have wireless cards built in, and if yours doesn't have one, you can easily add an inexpensive external wireless card. At home, creating and securing your own network is also simple. Because wireless connectivity is so userfriendly these days, many people don't actually understand how the connections are made or how they work. Knowing how everything wor...

How To Improving WiFi Network Range

This is continue of yesterday post. Upgrade your base station Routers that are based on the Draft N specification incorporate MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antenna arrays. MIMO can improve range as well as speed. The Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO Router released in 2007 use Draft N, and Belkin claims that the standard has twice the range of its predecessor. In the tests, range has improved a lots as other brand, such as Linksys and several other companies sell Draft N routers. Because those routers improve both transmission power and reception sensitivity, you can update just the gateway and continue using the older adapters on all your computers; the range of your network should still improve. Add an antenna You could also install a large, strong antenna on your base station so that it could blast out more-powerful signals. Many WiFi gateways have antennas that you can unscrew and replace with another antenna that produces a stronger signal. HyperLink Technologies has been selling antennas, and providing compatibility information about which gateways and wireless cards they work with, for years. The information is a bit technical, but it’s an exhaustive resource. Apple has always kept its antennas inside the housing of its AirPort Base Stations; just a few of the 802.11g AirPort Extreme Base Stations came with an antenna jack for adding an external one. MacWireless has antennas, tools, and instructions for adding antennas to all AirPort models. MacWireless also offers a High Power 11g Access Point at $180. This unit has a regular-size antenna but a much more powerful radio, which provides more than 10 times the raw output power of most consumer gateways. There is one downside to upgrading your antenna: while it can help your network, it can also mess up others. That’s because nearby networks may pick up your signals, and their performance will degrade as they try to cope with the barrage. Upgrade your radio If you have an older wireless network adapter without 802.11n built in, you can improve its range by attaching an 802.11n adaptor. QuickerTek nNano USB adaptor, for example, works with any Mac running Mac OS X 10.3 or later. The company also has a CardBus card and PCI Card that work with PowerPC models running Mac OS 10.3.9 or higher, and upgrade kits for Intel Macs starting at $100. All of these adapters have one important limitation: they operate only in the crowded 2.4GHz band. But they can still improve range by transmitting farther and listening more carefully. Add more base stations Another way to extend network range is to build a network with many base stations, all with the same network name. WiFi adapters look for a network name, not a specific gateway. If one base station doesn’t cover your home or office, perhaps two or five or 10 might. You could deploy a bunch of network base stations or AP, but that’d get expensive. Other 802.11g and 802.11n WiFi gateways start from around £20. In a standard network of multiple base stations, you configure one base station as the gateway, plugged into a broadband router. You connect additional base stations through Ethernet, or wirelessly through WDS (Wireless Distribution System), which is built into the base station and other gateways. To make the multiple-base stations setup work, you need to configure the main base station as a gateway to your broadband connection. You then configure the other base stations to pass traffic in bridge mode; that way, they leave the responsibility for assigning IP addresses to the primary base station. To set this up with the AirPort Extreme, go to AirPort Utility’s Internet pane, select the Internet Connection tab, and select Off (Bridge) from the Connection Sharing menu. Plug the WAN (Wide Area Network) port from these subsidiary base stations into a LAN (Local Area Network) port on the primary base station, or into an Ethernet switch that’s plugged into the LAN port. For other base stations, you’ll have to check the manual. As an alternative, you could use home power-line networking to connect base stations. Many power-line vendors offer combos consisting of a wireless access point with a built-in power-line adaptor; that way, you can extend your network without using WDS or Ethernet.