October 2004  Email this  Print this
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TECH
Wireless Made Easy
With three children and a fourth on the way, Jerry and Lori Tarrant needed flexibility when it came to computer time. "Lori often couldn't use e-mail," says Jerry, "because she couldn't leave three screaming kids to go downstairs" to the Internet-linked computer in their basement office. "Now she can check the Web, e-mail, recipes, whatever" on the machine in the kitchen. A high-speed wireless network connects the two PCs to one another and to the family's cable modem, which provides a high-speed link to the Internet. The Tarrants plan to move the desktop PC currently in the kitchen to the family room for the kids to share. The family will then buy a third PC -- a space-saving laptop -- for the kitchen. All three computers will be on the network.
Why wireless? The Tarrants figure that adding a wireless network is simpler than running wires through their nine-year-old house. And they like the flexibility of moving computers around without rewiring.
If you've been waiting to jump into wireless, the water is safe. Performance has spiked, and the technology behind it has matured. The price, though never a huge hurdle, has also come down. Three years ago, a switching station (called a router) that connects computers and other devices (printers, for instance) cost $230. A router now costs less than $100 at online discounters. It is typically connected to a DSL or cable modem, allowing PCs to share a single Internet connection. Every computer and device to be linked by the router must have an adapter card (about $45 each) or built-in wireless capability.
The lower cost and increased performance and reliability have consumers flocking to wireless. The number of wireless U.S. homes will reach 12 million in 2008, up from four million at the end of last year, predicts Kurt Scherf, an analyst at Parks Associates, a consumer-technologies research firm.
Although many of the bugs have been worked out of the technology, installing a wireless system still isn't as easy as plugging in a toaster. And the different wireless standards and techno-speak can be confusing when you go to buy a system. The following guide will make the process easier.
New and improved
The latest version of wireless (called Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity) is 802.11g. Buy routers and adapters that use this standard, and your PCs and accessories will share data much faster than with the older, 802.11b technology, though nowhere close to five times faster as implied by the specs given.
We'll talk more about speed later, but you should know upfront that your Internet speed won't improve with the g version. Although 802.11g will increase speed between computers and other devices, even the b version of Wi-Fi is fast enough to keep up with the feed from a cable or DSL modem.
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