How to make a non wirless into a wireless?

[OM2]

what i don't get is: printer manufacturers add hardware to make the printers wireless
these same printers either cost the same or only a little more than non wireless ones
yet, if you were rbave enought o get a device to enable a non wireless into wireless, then you're looking to pay 40 - 60

 

[stratman]

I had a look at smallnetbuilder and it looks a bit daunting, where do you start?

Thank you the kind words. I read posts but work has been taking up too much time for me to respond like I would like to and used to enjoy.

SmallNetBuilder is an excellent source of information about netwoking and network products. The articles are informative and the forum a good place to get specific answers. Is there a specific area you were interested in? Under the SmallNetBuilder logo at the top of the main page are clickable menu headings. For example, placing your cursor over the heading "Wireless", then selecting "Wireless How To" from the drop down menu, then scrolling down the list of articles to click on "When Wireless LANs Collide: How To Beat The Wireless Crowd" will give a decent overview of some issue using wifi such as non-overlapping channels. Also, in this same section you just scrolled down to find the above article you will see a multipart article about wireless repeaters/bridges/WDS.

Are the 2.4G channels on specific frequencies within the band or are they digitally coded channels using any space they can find within the band?

The 2.4 Ghz band is comprised of 11 channels in the USA and 13 (or 14) channels in other parts of the world. Each channel occupies 5 Mhz of bandwidth, so the 2.4 Ghz band ranges from (roughly) 2.400 Ghz to 2.462 Ghz in the USA (11 channels at 5 Mhz each). See here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels.

Wireless routers typically are set to default on a non-overlapping channel (1, 6, or 11 in the USA) at the factory. Your wireless router should allow you to choose which channel you want to utilize, non-overlapping and overlapping. Some wireless routers can scan the bandwidth for a less trafficked channel and automatically select it. Channel selection is on whole numbers and not fractions, so you must select 1, 2, 3, ..., 11 in the 2.4 GHz band in the USA.

Hope that helps a little bit.

 

[Emulator]

Hi Stratman

Thank you very much for the informative post on wifi frequencies.

The wiki article provided a lot of useful background on channel selection and inSSIDer shows up local usage well.

Regards Ian

 

[stratman]

Excellent, Emulator! inSSIDer is fun to check out the signal in your home and to see which of your neighbors are gumming up a channel, who is not playing nice with the Good Neighbor Policy of using non-overlapping channels, and who needs to turn on their security settings.

A couple things to remember about inSSIDer is that it does not tell you how much traffic of data a neighbor is using at the moment and it does not show you those wifi signals not broadcasting their SSID.

So, the way to know if a given channel is good for you is to measure your own throughput of data using something like iperf/jperf and LAN Speed Test. The keys to good throughput are

1) even if a number of routers are occupying the same channel that few or no one else is transmitting large amounts of data at the same time as you - otherwise each will wait their turn and the transmission of data is slowed for all (and this can change based on time of day or day of the week as people come home from work/school and start using their wifi),

2) that there are as little physical objects (walls, ceilings, plumbing, furniture, etc) between router and your notebook, and

3) that there are few if any electrical devices (microwave ovens, baby monitors, remote control toys, refrigerators, etc) causing interference in the transmission of signal.

Figuring what is where and by how much can be fun with wifi, sort of like refilling but without all the money saving!

 

[Emulator]

Thanks again Stratman,

It is strange that router/modem suppliers, eg Belkin, don't always guide you toward 1,6,11. It seems that you can set up more or less any channel as the primary and that the second channel is then selected for you. Anyway after inspecting the local pattern, I have changed to 1 & 5 and typically I am getting over 12Mbs/s on the cheapest supplier option.

Regards Ian

 

[The Hat]

I must be the odd one out on here because I cant stand wireless and wont use it on my router or any of my printers;
I have found it too slow and unreliable especially for printing.

I do however use power line Ethernet adapters, give me wired any day.
I dont for that matter use Cat 5 cable on my printers either, just good old USB..

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

For me it works beautifully for printing. Perhaps you have had some problems with a crowded spectrum.

I suppose in principle you could get a 50% bandwidth reduction with a client bridge or repeater, but I doubt that it matters much in practice because most traffic is one way.