On Sunday, Jun 1, 2003, at 18:42 US/Mountain, Tina Capozzola wrote:
I have a cable modem with my G3 and want to be able to connect my IMac so I have a wireless network in my house. I saw a good deal on a wireless router on Amazon and am wondering how difficult it is to hook up a wireless network?
Do you have a notebook you are going to use with the wireless network? Otherwise, a wireless network is a pretty big expense to link two desktops. You could just buy a 5 port hub or switch, some cat 5 cable, and connect the cable modem, and the two computers to the hub. Or get a little more fancy and buy a router/switch combo, hook the cable modem to the internet port on the router, and hook the two machines up to the switch ports. If you go wireless, you will need a wireless adapter for each machine to want to hook up wirelessly. On an Imac, this will have to be a usb adapter, on the g3 (depend's on the model) you might be able to find an airport card adapter that fits into one of the pci slots, but it might be cheaper to get another usb adapter for it as well. Then you need the base station. The easiest way to do that is to buy a wireless base station/router/switch combo unit (netgear has an EXCELLENT model I think it's the 814, usually $79-$99 u.s.) and hook your cable modem into the internet port, and then you will have to at least hook one computer up to it's wired switch to configure it, but it can be removed after configuration. The Apple airport base and airport extreme base is more expensive, and seems to have the same range and same feature set as the netgear and other "pc" company routers. You also need to figure out how much speed you want over the network. A wired network can usually (some exceptions) support 100mbs, the airport (or 802.11b) can support 11mbs, and the airport extreme (or 802.11g) can support 54mbs. The airport has greater range than the extreme, and can support a more constant speed over greater range. The extreme speeds drop of really fast and the signal gets really crappy once you get even remotely close to the edge of the range. Consider this, I can get in my car, drive down a block or so and still get a useable signal from my 802.11b netgear network on my ibook with an airport card. Hope this helps and doesn't confuse!!
Damon
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