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Ricochet J

Ricochet J

Ricochet J

Soldato
Joined
29 Jun 2004
Posts
12,957
Is it possible setting up a WLAN just using a wireless router? By possible I mean easy and not very expensive. I understand speed may be reduced vastly as it has no Gigabit Ethernet support therefore sharing large multimedia files will be a pain none?

I'm just getting to grips with what i can and cannot do before I wire the house during redecoration.

If WLAN is not an option is it recommeded to hide the patch panel in the boiler cabinet? I say this because thier's a descreet box that has various wires in it that runs to the boiler cabinet from each room. I can successfully hide the Cat5e cables from each network jack plate in the skirts to this box with various other wires.


Thanks :)
 
It may help if you give us a bit more detail :p

What internet connection do you have? ADSL or cable?

How many desktop computers/laptops do you want to connect?
 
Well wiring the whole house will be long term sorta thing.
I've got two computers I want to network and will have a NAS.
Furthermore it will be a long term minor income investment as we'll be renting this place out soon so the sounds of "Home Networking Ready House Enabled" sorta thing makes people smile :)
 
Yeah go for it wired is streets ahead of wireless, although if your putting the cables in with loads of other wires it might be worth getting sheilded cat 5 to avoid interfearence.
 
You could either wait a while for 802.11N, which will have speeds which will be faster than 10/100, or you could wire with cat6e. Cat6e would be better in the long term, but would take longer, and 802.11N kit would be easy to install, but isn't on the market yet.
 
I doubt a lot that any wireless technology (including 802.11n) will transfer data as quick as a 100mbit wired ethernet connection. The only time wireless gives remotely decent speeds seems to be in manufacturer's lab tests, never in the real world.
 
THG just reviewed a Netgear Pre-N router that delivers faster than wired speeds. If thats what Pre-N can do, N is likely to have very good speeds.
 
THG said:
Closing Thoughts
On the plus side, Airgo's ACE technology really does deliver (just barely) over 100Mbps of real, usable throughput. And while it didn't connect in all of my test locations with its default settings, a simple setting change provided over 20Mbps of average throughput in my toughest test location. Truly impressive!
Click to expand...
Yep, it does according to them, the main problem is that it makes a hell of a mess of the spectrum, but thats something thats not going to disappear with N.
 
eXSBass said:
I understand speed may be reduced vastly as it has no Gigabit Ethernet support therefore sharing large multimedia files will be a pain none?
Click to expand...

Only across the wired part, the lack of GigE isn't going to affect the wireless...
 
Go for Cat6 tbh, you've got the capacity and the ability to put in cable, and you've got no laptops etc (as far as I can tell) so theres no real feasability for wireless.
 
Thanks for the replies guys. I should off mentioned this earlier, very sorry. The family may get a Laptop soon, and we've got a PSP we want to connect wirelessly :p
Shouldn't be a problem should it?
 
Nope, but the psp only has 802.11b networking, which is extremely slow, and even if you got a high speed wireless network, it would slow it down to a crawl.
 
Yeah, as soon as the 802.11b device associates with the network, the rest of the devices will see a considerable reduction in throughput.
 
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