Interestingly enough, wireless networks work the way that old wired networks used to work. A transmitter (either wireless or wired) would listen for a signal on the "line" and if it didn't hear any it would assume it could transmit and start transmitting. Now, this often causes more than one device to transmit at a time and cause a collision, so both devices would stop transmitting, wait a "random" amount of time and then listen again and transmit again (if clear). This means that wireless networking can benefit from much of the lessons learned by the old wired networks. However, the biggest lesson was to get a dedicated channel to transmit on in each direction, hence the reason we have switches rather than hubs. Sadly, this is not an option for wireless networks. To a certain extent you can dedicate frequencies to devices in your network but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of rogue networks and devices blundering in and/or interference from outside sources (cell towers, microwaves, cordless phones, etc) It also means that the more devices and more traffic you have on your network, the slower it becomes because every devices shares its bandwidth with every other devices, where with wired networks today (i.e. switched networks) if computer A is talking to B and X is talking to Y, they won't interfere with each other due to the switched nature of the network in question. Thus you have full bandwidth from A->B and also full bandwidth from X->Y. This is one of the biggest reasons that I tell people to wire their networks and reserve their wireless bandwidth for actual portable devices. In other words, run a wire to your home theatre, don't just plug in a wireless card/dongle.
On another note, I am experiencing very high interference levels from my apartment neighbors as we all have wireless networks and are tightly packed together. This is such a big issue that I have even run a wire to my desk and installed a switch there to handle my three laptops and NAS device I have there. The only time I use wireless is when I want to sit in the recliner or work in another room and it is getting to the point where I will probably just run a wire to the recliner. I have even considered going around to my neighbors and offering to configure their wireless access points for them to minimize interference from each other so that mine is usable. My router is the Linksys WRT610N and I have been reluctant to install DD-WRT because the website indicates it is not 100% supported at this time. Andy On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Douglass Clem <[email protected]>wrote: > I myself am running two Linksys 802.11N wireless routers > (WRT310N<http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Promotion_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1175239823413&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=2341322555L03>), > the one with the gigabit ethernet ports. Thus far I've been quite satisfied > with them. I have DD-WRT installed on both. > > I only have two small disliked about this model. First, they can get rather > warm, so don't boost the transmission power above 70 unless you are going to > build some sort of cooling system. I have them mounted on a wall, held > horizontally via an angle bracket. This leaves most of the bottom exposed to > the air, which I've found helps quite a bit with temperature. > > The other minor issue with this one is that the antennas are internal, and > therefore not detachable. For what I'm using them for, I have no need to > attach external antennas, but it would be nice to have the option. I'm sure > someone with more skills than I could probably rig the thing to attach to an > external antenna, but I'm not going to risk it. > > Other than those two issues, it has been a great little device. > > One thing you should keep in mind is that the advertised speed is a little > misleading on any wifi device. This is because, due to the nature of how > radio transmitters/receivers work, only one device can be sending at any > given time on a specific channel, or else signals collide and cause > problems. For example, though the technical speed of 802.11G is 54MB/s, a > lot of that speed is used for the radios to coordinate the timing of who > transmits when. Therefore, you're real life data transmission will be more > like 22MB/s. The more wireless devices on that channel, the more > coordination necessary, and the less actual speed that you get to use. > > > Douglass Clem > crashsystems.net > Public Key: http://crashsystems.net/pubkey.asc > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
