Quick Wireless question - PCI Card or Access Point?

[Jimbo Mahoney]

First a short description of what I have and what I would like to do:

Smoothwall box with two NICs - one to connect to WWW via ADSL, one to internal wired network.

I would like to add a third NIC - wireless - to provide, well, er, wireless!

The question is, will this one NIC suffice if more than one wireless device is connecting at once, or do I need an Access Point like I need a switch / hub for a wired network?

Hope that makes sense.

 

[Jimbo Mahoney]

Ah OK I get it now. Just done some googling.

It seems I could just use NICs to create an ad-hoc network, the drawback being each node competing and leading to collisions, the advantage being decentralised and cheaper (in my case).

Since I'm only going to have a couple of 'nodes' transferring small amounts of data (i.e. <5MBit - the speed of my internet, since I won't be doing file transfers within the network itself), I think I'll just go NIC.