What to Look For in Wireless networking: Range, Speed and Standards.

Not sure what you’re doing in your wireless card shopping? Want to make sure you’re buying the right thing but just have no idea what it is you’re looking for? Well, you’ve come to the right place. When you’re looking to buy a wireless network card, I can tell you right now that you’re looking at three key issues: range, speed, and standards.

A Typical Specification.

This is a typical specification for a Linksys wireless PCMCIA laptop card:

11 Mbps high-speed transfer rate; interoperable with IEEE 802.11b (DSSS) 2.4Ghz-compliant equipment; plug-and-play operation provides easy set up; long operating range (up to 120m indoor); advanced power management features conserve valuable notebook PC battery life; rugged metal design with integrated antenna; compatible with virtually all major operating systems; works with all standard Internet applications; automatic load balancing and scale back; model no. WPC11. (source: amazon.com).

Now, some of those things can be pretty much ignored. Really, ‘virtually all major operating systems’? That means nothing. The reason I’ve put it here, though, is so you can see which things are important to keep an eye out for.

Range.

See where it says ‘up to 120m indoor’? This tells you that the maximum range of the wireless card you’re looking at is 120 metres — that’s what it would be if everything was perfect. In practice, thick walls and interference can reduce this number by as much as 90%.

Without enough range, your wireless network is going to be pretty useless. It’s not much fun having no wires when you have to keep all the computers in the same room to get them to connect to each other.

As a rule of thumb, unless your walls are made of drywall or wood, it’s best to buy about four times the strength you’d think you’d need. Even in perfect conditions, get twice as much, to be safe. If you need to convert from metric to imperial units, remember that there are 30 centimetres (0.3 metres) in a foot and about 2.5 centimetres in an inch — you shouldn’t have too much trouble.

Speed.

Do you see where it says ‘Mbps’ in that description? That number is the speed of the wireless connection. 11 Mbps is about one and a half megabytes per second — to convert megabits (Mb) to megabytes (MB), just divide by eight. 802.11b wireless cards all have a speed of 11Mbps, while 802.11g ones run at 54Mbps — the next generation will be even faster.

Speed is important to your wireless network because it’s going to directly influence how long you have to wait for things like files to transfer from one computer on the network to the other. It is less important for Internet use, however, because there are currently very few Internet connections running at speeds over 11Mbps — it’s really as much as you need, at least for now.

Standards.

Somewhere in the specification of what you’re looking at, you should see the number ’802.11′, followed by a letter ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘g’. This is the standard that the wireless device conforms to, and tells you whether you will be able to use it with your other wireless devices.

Basically, 802.11b and 802.11g are compatible with each other. 802.11a is not compatible with either and is quite a bad standard all round, so you shouldn’t buy 802.11a. Out of b and g, b is cheaper but slower, while g is more expensive but faster. It’s worth considering that adding a b-speed device to a network that has g-speed devices will often slow the whole network down to b-speed, making the g-devices pointless.

If your wireless device doesn’t conform to the right standards, it’s not going to be much good to you. I often see naive people bidding for used wireless equipment on eBay, not realising that it’s going to be terribly slow and not work with any other equipment they might have. Always make sure that you check what standard the wireless equipment is — if you don’t know the 802.11 letter, don’t buy it!

Ad-hoc or Access Point? Network Structures Explained.

What happens to many people is that they’re just about to buy some wireless equipment, and then they have a sudden realisation — they have no idea how their network layout is going to work with a wireless connection. Well, there are a few things you need to think about when you decide how you’re going to connect up your computers with all that great new wireless stuff.

Ad-hoc Networks.

Ad-hoc networks are the ones your wireless devices create more-or-less on their own — they are also known as peer-to-peer networks. In an ad-hoc network, each computer on the network acts as an equal ‘peer’, with each one sending data to any other. This arrangement is most often used in place of a real LAN, to allow employees in a company, for example, to exchange files. You can create ad-hoc wireless networks between any computers that have wireless equipment — access to the Internet is not required.

These networks work using something called an ‘SSID’ (Service Set Identifier). Essentially, this is the network’s name, decided on the computer that was the first to connect to the network (yes, a network consisting of just itself). The other computers that connect to the network can then simply connect by finding the network with the name (SSID) they want.

This is powerful. You can put your wireless-enabled laptop next to a friend’s, and the two computers can create a little network for themselves on the fly. Thanks to the way wireless networking works, they keep the connection even if you move them around — the only thing that will force the computers to disconnect from each other is if they go out of range. For many people, this spells the end of messing around with CDs and floppy disks — they can finally use their laptop just like a briefcase, carrying everything from one place to another.

Arriving somewhere with your laptop and being automatically included in the wireless network also gives you access to shared resources, such as printers. Imagine being able to take your computer to somewhere where there’s a printer, press print, collect the document and walk away again. Ad-hoc networking makes this a reality.

Access Points.

An access point, on the other hand, is a way of connecting your ad-hoc wireless network to a real, wired network. Note that this network could just be a LAN, or it could be the entire Internet. There are hardware access points and software ones, with either kind allowing you to connect your wireless device to a wired network. Internet Connecting Sharing, for example, is a software access point to the Internet, while a wireless router is a wired one. If you have wireless access at your office, the chances are it is provided as a wireless access point to the wired network, to let people bring in wireless devices and connect them to the office LAN.

A network that contains an access point is sometimes called an ‘infrastructure’ network, as opposed to an ad-hoc one. It’s worth remembering, though, that part of the infrastructure network still consists of the ad-hoc network between the computers — they can still communicate just the same as they could before.

If you think about it, you can see that the access point structure allows you to create a series of networks, all interconnected. The Internet, in this scheme, is just another wired network. You can connect your wired network to the Internet, connect your wireless network to an access point to your wired network — whatever you want.

The string of networks is potentially never-ending, with wired networks being able to break out into wireless ones as often as they need to. This concept is sometimes called lilypad networking, because it lets your computer be like a frog, hopping from lilypad to lilypad. Even though the whole area of the water isn’t covered with lilypads, the frog can still get through — and you can make wireless networks work the same way.

Fighting with Windows: Getting Wireless Set Up.

It was supposed to be so easy, wasn’t it? Well, usually it is — but sometimes, for some reason, Windows just doesn’t want to play ball. Here’s a quick guide to what to do when you’ve plugged in all your wireless equipment but it’s not connecting yet.

Insert the CD.

It’s not enough to just plug in your wireless card the first time you use it — you need to put in the CD it came with and install the drivers. If you’ve already done that and there’s still nothing, then you might need to update your drivers by paying a visit to the manufacturer’s website.

Note that the instructions below apply to Windows XP. If you’re determined to use Windows XP, then what you need to do next will be different depending on your wireless equipment’s manufacturer — you should take a look at your manual.

Use the Wireless Network Setup Wizard.

While it’s easy to use Windows to connect to an existing wireless network, you still need to create the wireless network to begin with. Don’t worry — once you’ve created it once, your whole network will be able to connect to and remember it, even if the computer you used to create the network is never switched on again.

The easiest way to open the Wireless Network Setup Wizard is through the Start Menu: go to All Programs, Accessories, then Communications, and you’ll find it there. If you can’t find it, you might need to visit Microsoft’s Windows Update at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com to get it.

The first thing to do when the wizard appears is read the welcome message, and click Next. Type a name for your network — anything will do, as long as it’s relatively unique to you. You’re allowed up to 32 letters to express yourself, but remember that your neighbours might get to see this name at some point! If you bought equipment with WPA (stronger encryption), tick that box. Click Next again.

Unless you have a USB flash drive (it’s unlikely), choose the option for manual setup. Don’t worry — it’s just a matter of printing out some settings and entering them into your other computers. If you don’t use encryption, you can usually skip this step.

It Still Doesn’t Connect.

On one of your other computers, right-click on the wireless icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen — it looks like a small computer with two lines on the right of it. On the menu that appears, click ‘View Available Wireless Networks’. Now, you should see a list of the wireless networks your computer is in range of. Look for the name of your own network. This will be the name you typed in the setup wizard earlier or, if you use a router, it will probably be the name of your wireless equipment’s manufacturer.

Note that this is the screen to come to if you ever want to connect to a wireless network other than your usual one — just double click the one you want, wait a while, and it should work.

The most common problem is to find that your computer is trying to connect to another network near you, usually one belonging to your neighbours. If their wireless network has an unnecessarily wide range, it’s not at all unusual for you to be able to receive their signal in your house — I sometimes find as many as five networks in my area available to connect to. Fun as it would be, though, to go through all their shared files, your priority right now is getting their wireless network out of the way to let you connect to your own.

Getting on Your Network.

To make sure Windows knows which network is yours, you need to click ‘Change the order of preferred networks’ on the left of the available networks screen. You should click the ‘Add’ button to add the name of your network to this list, and use ‘Remove’ to take away any that aren’t yours.

When you’ve highlighted your network, click Properties, and then go to the Connection section. Make sure ‘Connect when this network is in range’ is ticked. If all else fails, you might have to take your printout from the Wireless Network Setup Wizard and enter that information on each computer.

Before you buy any wireless equipment, you need to be sure about what you’re doing. There’s nothing worse than having everything there and finding that it doesn’t work in your house, or with your computers, or over the distances you need. Here’s a handy checklist of the things that you really ought to do before you go out and spend any of your hard-earned cash on wireless networking equipment.

1.0 Check What Your Walls are Made Of.

Wireless can, in theory, pass through walls and other partitions easily. In practice, though, some walls are more solid than others, which means that they are more likely to block some of the signal. Note that it’s only your interior partitions that matter, not the exterior ones. This does, however, include your floors, if you want the connection to work between levels.

Wireless does well with partitions made from: drywall, plywood, other wood (including doors), glass.

Wireless has trouble with: brick, plaster, cement, metal, stone, double-glazed glass.

Basically, it’s all to do with how porous the materials are — ones that let more of other things through also let more of your wireless signal through.

If you have a wall made of one of the ‘bad’ materials, it’s not the end of the world. It just means that your wireless connection might have a slower speed or a shorter range. You may want to spend more than you otherwise would to get better equipment and overcome this problem.

Check for Possible Interference.

While it won’t stop a wireless network from working altogether, interference in its frequency range can slow it down significantly, as well as reducing its range. If something is causing interference, the first thing you’ll know about it is when your connection stops working — unless you know what to look for.

There are two very common causes of wireless interference: wireless phones and microwave ovens. 2.4Ghz, the most common wireless networking frequency, is also a commonly-used wireless phone frequency. It is possible, though, to find phones that use other frequencies. Microwave ovens, on the other hand, operate at around 2.4Ghz by definition. It should be alright to have devices like these in your house, but certainly not in the same room as any computer that you plan to use a wireless connection with.

Decide Your Budget.

You need to stand back, take a look at your needs, and decide how much you’re going to spend. Do you have long distances to cover? Do you want your connection to go through stone walls? Each factor will help you decide how much you should be looking to spend — remember that the more problems you have, the more power you will need. On the other hand, if you live in a small wooden house, you can probably just go for the cheapest thing you can find.

Read Other People’s Reviews.

It’s well worth searching a site like amazon.com for wireless equipment, and taking a look at people’s reviews to see what the different brands out there are like, and what you can get for your money. It is always a very bad idea to buy something without getting a second, third and fourth opinion, especially if you’re buying it online. If you can, try to get to a computer shop and see some wireless networking equipment in action before you commit yourself.

Install and Update Windows XP.

Finally, your wireless life will really be improved if you have the latest version of Windows whether XP, Vista or 7. Because wireless is such a new technology, it wasn’t really around in any significant way back when Windows 98, ME and 2000 were released, and support for them wasn’t built in to the system. You’ll have a lot more trouble getting wireless to work on systems like these than you would on Windows XP I know when I first set up wireless on my laptop (old Windows) I had a devil of a job to get it to work – you need to be able to allow windows to manage the wireless connection transparently an not have to worry about Windows Zero Configuration (WZC) and all that. Also normally you do not have to worry about installing specific software for the router or USB wireless – this is all taken care of. To get around this I upgraded the operating system to Xp and the installation of wireless was done in five minutes!

Even if you’ve got Windows XP, though, that doesn’t solve the problem entirely. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (an updated version of Windows XP) contains much easier-to-use tools for configuring and using wireless than the un-updated versions do. If you’ve been using your copy of Windows for a while without updating it, you should really make sure you’ve got all the latest updates from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com before you go any further.

Royston

There are all sorts of different devices you can buy that will give your computer wireless networking capabilities. If you’ve taken a look around, though, you might have been confused by all the kinds of equipment being offered — how things that look so dissimilar do the same task?

Essentially, the main difference between wireless devices is in how they connect to your computer. There are three main connection methods: PCI, PCMCIA and USB.

Desktops: PCI Cards.

PCI stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect. It is an old and established way of installing new equipment in a desktop computer. If you find a wireless card that looks like a green rectangle with something sticking out of the end, then what you’ve got is a PCI card.

To install a PCI card, you need to — horror of horrors — actually unscrew your computer, take the cover of, and plug the card in inside it. Scary as that might sound, it is designed to be very easy, and once it’s done your computer will have internal wireless networking capabilities for the rest of its life.

You should go for this option, then, if you own a desktop computer, and you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty (perhaps literally — I’ve seen years worth of dust in those things) by installing it yourself. Or, of course, if you’re willing to pay someone to do the installation for you.

Laptops: PCMCIA Cards.

PCMCIA stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. A PCMCIA slot is a small slot in your laptop that allows you to insert these cards and so add functions to your laptop quickly and easily. They were originally for memory expansion, but are now more often used for networking.

Almost all laptops have PCMCIA slots. If you’re not sure whether yours does, take a look at the side of the machine — you should see a slot there, probably near the CD drive. Even if you do have a slot, you need to make sure it’s free, by pressing the button to eject anything that might be in there. If it’s an Ethernet card then, well, not to worry, as you can just replace that, but if it’s anything else then you might want to consider using USB instead.

For 99% of laptop owners, at least, it’s best to use PCMCIA — the only reason some go with USB is because they didn’t know they had an alternative.

The Third Way: USB.

Whether you’re using a desktop computer or a laptop, you can use USB (Universal Serial Bus). USB ports look like very small slots, and could be almost anywhere on your computer — but it will help you to locate them if you remember that they very rarely appear in groups of less than two. Computers have come with these USB ports for years now, and newer computers often come with four or even more. If you need more space, you can buy a splitter (a USB hub) that allows you to use more devices than you have ports for.

So where’s the problem? Well, you wanted a wireless network, right? With USB, your network won’t be entirely wireless, as there will still be a small wire between your computer and the USB device — it might not sound like much, but it makes USB wireless on laptops a bit of a joke.

Another factor is that small USB devices are very easy to break — when I used to use USB wireless, I went through three new receivers inside a year. This is offset, of course, by the fact that USB wireless cards are usually the cheapest ones, and are far simpler to install than PCI.

Essentially, if you’re a laptop user without a free PCMCIA slot, or you’re a desktop user who doesn’t relish the prospect of opening up your PC, then USB is a good ‘third way’ for you.

If you do go the USB route, however, and you have a reasonably new computer, you should check whether the device you’re buying supports USB2. Most newer computers have USB2 ports, and using specially-designed USB2 devices with them can give you a significant speed boost.

Before you buy any wireless equipment, you need to be sure about what you’re doing. There’s nothing worse than having everything there and finding that it doesn’t work in your house, or with your computers, or over the distances you need. Here’s a handy checklist of the things that you really ought to do before you go out and spend any of your hard-earned cash on wireless networking equipment.

Check What Your Walls are Made Of.

Wireless can, in theory, pass through walls and other partitions easily. In practice, though, some walls are more solid than others, which means that they are more likely to block some of the signal. Note that it’s only your interior partitions that matter, not the exterior ones. This does, however, include your floors, if you want the connection to work between levels.

Wireless does well with partitions made from: drywall, plywood, other wood (including doors), glass.

Wireless has trouble with: brick, plaster, cement, metal, stone, double-glazed glass.

Basically, it’s all to do with how porous the materials are — ones that let more of other things through also let more of your wireless signal through.

If you have a wall made of one of the ‘bad’ materials, it’s not the end of the world. It just means that your wireless connection might have a slower speed or a shorter range. You may want to spend more than you otherwise would to get better equipment and overcome this problem.

Check for Possible Interference.

While it won’t stop a wireless network from working altogether, interference in its frequency range can slow it down significantly, as well as reducing its range. If something is causing interference, the first thing you’ll know about it is when your connection stops working — unless you know what to look for.

There are two very common causes of wireless interference: wireless phones and microwave ovens. 2.4Ghz, the most common wireless networking frequency, is also a commonly-used wireless phone frequency. It is possible, though, to find phones that use other frequencies. Microwave ovens, on the other hand, operate at around 2.4Ghz by definition. It should be alright to have devices like these in your house, but certainly not in the same room as any computer that you plan to use a wireless connection with.

Decide Your Budget.

You need to stand back, take a look at your needs, and decide how much you’re going to spend. Do you have long distances to cover? Do you want your connection to go through stone walls? Each factor will help you decide how much you should be looking to spend — remember that the more problems you have, the more power you will need. On the other hand, if you live in a small wooden house, you can probably just go for the cheapest thing you can find.

Read Other People’s Reviews.

It’s well worth searching a site like amazon.com for wireless equipment, and taking a look at people’s reviews to see what the different brands out there are like, and what you can get for your money. It is always a very bad idea to buy something without getting a second, third and fourth opinion, especially if you’re buying it online. If you can, try to get to a computer shop and see some wireless networking equipment in action before you commit yourself.

Install and Update Windows XP.

Finally, your wireless life will really be improved if you have the latest version of Windows. Because wireless is such a new technology, it wasn’t really around in any significant way back when Windows 98, ME and 2000 were released, and support for them wasn’t built in to the system. You’ll have a lot more trouble getting wireless to work on systems like these than you would on Windows XP.

Even if you’ve got Windows XP, though, that doesn’t solve the problem entirely. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (an updated version of Windows XP) contains much easier-to-use tools for configuring and using wireless than the un-updated versions do. If you’ve been using your copy of Windows for a while without updating it, you should really make sure you’ve got all the latest updates from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com before you go any further.

Wireless networking, like so many things in life — and especially the ones that have anything to do with computers — is filled with jargon. Don’t be intimidated, though: here’s a quick computer-speak to English guide to help you get by.

802.11. The name of the wireless networking standard, set by the IEEE. Ensures that wireless devices are interoperable.

Driver. A piece of computer software that tells the computer how to talk to devices that are plugged into it. For wireless networking, the drivers you need to install will come on a CD with any equipment you buy.

Ethernet. The most common way of connecting to a LAN. Any wires you might have connecting your computers together now are Ethernet wires, and the cable connecting your modem to your computer is probably an Ethernet wire too.

Ghz. Gigahertz. A measurement of frequency — one gigahertz is one billion cycles per second. You may recognise the measurement from computer processor speeds, which are now also measured in Ghz.

IEEE. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In charge of the wireless networking standard, as well as many other computer-related standards (including the Ethernet standard). They ensure that computer equipment made by different manufacturers can work together.

Interoperable. Means that two pieces of equipment are compatible — you can use them together, because they stick to the standards. You should not get any wireless equipment that isn’t interoperable.

LAN. Local Area Network. A network that is generally confined to one building, such as a home or office. A wireless LAN is also known as a WLAN.

Linux. An alternative operating system to Windows. Computers running Linux can run many programs and connect to the Internet without needing Windows. Linux is free to download and you are allowed to give it to friends to use. A lot of wireless devices run Linux, or are compatible with it.

MAN. Metropolitan Area Network. A network that covers a larger area, for example a town or city. Wireless MANs (men?) spread Internet access all over the area, but are expensive to set up. They are sometimes used on university campuses.

Mbps. Megabits per second, a measurement of connection speed. Not to be confused with MBps, megabytes per second. There are eight megabits in a megabyte.

PAN. Personal Area Network. These are networks made up of devices connected together in one small area. For example, your computer with a USB keyboard and mouse connected is a PAN. PANs can be wireless, using a technology called Bluetooth.

PCI. Peripheral Component Interconnect. This is a way of installing new devices inside your computer, such as graphics cards and network devices. If you want to install a wireless card inside your computer, you will be using PCI.

PCMCIA. Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (some say it should stand for ‘People Can’t Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms’). A standard for plugging credit card-sized devices into a laptop, to give it extra capabilities. PCMCIA is a great way of adding wireless networking to your laptop as easily as inserting a disk.

USB. Universal Serial Bus. A port used for connecting all sorts of devices to a computer, including keyboards, mice, printers, external drives, and almost anything else you can think of. If you don’t want to open up your computer and you don’t have a laptop, you can get a USB wireless device.

WAN. Wide Area Network. A network that is connected over more than one physical site, such as a business that has its computers in two countries connected on one network. The Internet, for example, is a WAN — the biggest WAN in the world.

WEP. Wired Equivalent Privacy. The old standard for encrypting wireless networks. Unfortunately, it was found to be insecure back in 2001, and so should no longer be used.

WPA. Wi-Fi Protected Access. Basically an upgrade of WEP to fix its security problems. WPA-encrypted networks change their encryption method often, to avoid becoming vulnerable, and also shut down for thirty seconds if they detect a suspected attack.

Wireless networks work using radio waves instead of wires to transmit data between computers. That’s the simple version. If you’re curious to know what’s going on in more detail, then it’s all explained in this article.

Ones and Zeros.

I’m sure you know that computers transmit data digitally, using binary: ones and zeros. This is a way of communicating that translates very well to radio waves, since the computer can transmit ones and zeros as different kinds of beep. These beeps are so fast that they’re outside a human’s hearing range — radio waves that you can’t hear are, in fact, all around you all the time. That doesn’t stop a computer from using them, though.

Morse Code.

The way it works is a lot like Morse code. You probably already know that Morse code is a way of representing the alphabet so that it can be transmitted over radio using a dot (short beep) and a dash (long dash). It was used manually for years, and became a great way of getting information from one place to another with the invention of the telegraph. More importantly for this example, though, it is a binary system, just like a computer’s ones and zeros.

You might think of wireless networking, then, as being like Morse code for computers. You plug a combined radio receiver and transmitter in, and the computer is able to send out its equivalent of dots and dashes (bits, in computer-speak) to get your data from one place to another.

All About Frequencies.

You might wonder, though, how the computer could possibly transmit enough bits to send and receive data at the speed it does. After all, there must be a limit on how much can be sent in a second before it just becomes useless nonsense, right? Well, yes, but the key to wireless networking is that it gets around this problem.

First of all, wireless transmissions are sent at very high frequencies, meaning that more data can be sent per second. Most wireless connections use a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (2.4 billion cycles per second) — a similar frequency to mobile phones and microwave ovens. As you might know, though, a frequency this high means that the wavelength must be very short, which is why wireless networking only works over a limited area.

In addition, wireless networks make use of a technique known as ‘frequency hopping’. They use dozens of frequencies in the range they are given, and constantly switch between them. This makes wireless networks more immune to interference from other radio signals than they would be if they only transmitted on one frequency.

Access Points.

The final step is when it comes to all the computers on a network sharing Internet access. This is done using a special piece of wireless equipment called an access point. Access points are more expensive than wireless cards for one computer, as they contain radios that are capable of talking to around 100 computers at the same time, and sharing out access to the Internet between them. Dedicated access points are only really essential for larger networks, though — if you only have a few computers, it is possible to use one of them as the access point, or you could just get a wireless router.

They Understand Each Other.

That’s all well and good, then, but how does wireless equipment made by entirely different companies manage to work together when this is all so complicated? Well, the answer is that there are standards that all wireless devices follow. These standards are technically called the 802.11 standards, and are set by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). It is thanks to people sticking to their standards that wireless networking is so easy and cheap to use today.

You Don’t Need to Worry.

If all this talk of frequencies has you a little worried, you don’t need to be — wireless networking hardware and software handles all of this automatically, without you needing to do a thing. Don’t think that you’re going to have to tell one wireless device what frequency another is using, because it’s just not going to happen, alright? Wireless networking, for all its complicated workings, is really far more simple to use than you’d ever expect.

Wireless networking is just what it sounds like — a way of creating networks without any wires! If this sounds exciting to you, then read on.

With a wireless network, you can create radio connections between computers that let them communicate and connect to the Internet without you having to go to all the trouble of connecting them with wires. The computers don’t even need to have a clear path for the signal, as the wireless signal can go through walls and between floors easily.

Where Did It Come From?

The story of wireless networking is a rather strange one. It is basically an application of a technology called frequency hopping which was, believe it or not, invented by the actress Hedy Lamarr and a musician named George Antheil, back in the 1940s. Seriously, do a web search — I promise I’m not pulling your leg here.

They received a patent for their invention, which was intended to help in the war effort. Hedy was Jewish, but had been made to hide it and socialise with Hitler as a young woman — she had to drug her husband and run away to London to escape her native Austria. The importance of what they’d done, however, wasn’t recognised until many years later.

The U.S. military adopted the technique in the ’60s, using it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hedy never saw any money from it as the patent had expired (don’t worry, she was a film star!), but she was given a Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997, three years before her death.

Wireless at Home.

When most people talk about wireless networks, they are talking about wireless LANs (local area networks). A local area network doesn’t mean that it covers your whole neighbourhood — the ‘local area’ in question can be only one building, such as your house. So if you want wireless networking in your home, you want a wireless LAN.

Once people have wireless in their home, they always seem to act as if there’s been an absolute miracle. After years of drilling holes in the walls and running wires all over the place, suddenly seeing them gone is really amazing.

The Myths.

Wireless networking is expensive. Well, wireless networking used to be expensive when it was new, but now the prices have come way down thanks to competition and mass production. There are hundreds of manufacturers of wireless equipment, with something for every budget. Your costs will depend on how many computers you want to connect and how far apart they are, but a typical family should still be able to do it for less than $100 overall. If you’re willing to leave one of the computers on whenever you’re using the other one, you could do it for as little as $20! Best of all, once you’ve spend the money, there’s nothing more to pay after that.

Wireless networking is hard. Again, this myth is a holdover from the early days of wireless. It used to be very difficult, with you needing to fiddle endlessly with the configuration on each computer just to get the simplest things to work. Now, though, Windows supports wireless out of the box, and setting it up is easier than ever. You can usually plug in what you’ve bought, put the CD in the computer and then sit back and watch it all work perfectly!

Wireless networking is insecure. You might think it’s dangerous to have all your personal data floating around in the air for anyone to read. Well, if you want, it’s dead easy to enable encryption for your wireless signals. It’s already difficult for outsiders to intercept wireless signals at all, and they certainly won’t be able to decode them as well.

Not Just at Home.

It was home users that were quickest to adopt wireless technology, willing to pay any amount to finally be free of needing to run wires all over their house. Since then, though, the technology has started to spread to offices, universities, and all sorts of other places.

Chains of coffee shops and cafes have found that their customers will stay for hours if they offer wireless Internet access, and it’s also becoming more common in hotels and airports. This means that once you set up a laptop for wireless, it becomes far more portable than it ever was before.

Well, you’d be surprised. There really are all sorts of things you can do with wireless networks — you’re only really limited by your imagination! Here are a few weird and wonderful ideas to get you started, but don’t be afraid to try out anything else you think of.

Store Files in Your Car.

If you put a small wireless-enabled hard drive in your car, you can use it as a mobile file server, avoiding the need to send files around on the Internet or burn them to a CD. This can be especially good if you often move large files around. You could, for example, upload your files to the car-server when you’re at home, and then download them again when you get to work.

There are other uses of this too — you could, for example, send music files from your computer to the car to play on your journey, without having to physically move anything at all.

Build a Real ‘Network Neighbourhood’.

You can extend wireless networks as far as you want, using repeaters and directional antennas. If some of your neighbours put repeaters in their houses, then any networks in the area could be extended to cover a gradually larger range.

Ultimately, if you have co-operative neighbours, you could turn your whole street into a wireless hotspot: you could even all share one super-fast Internet connection, paying less per person than you usually would for a much slower one. There is even a name for this: a ‘freenet’ or ‘community net’. People who have tried it find that it makes people feel much closer to each other, bringing back long-lost social ties within the local community.

Bear in mind, though, that you’re basically running your own ISP if you decide to do this, with all the support issues that could involve. You might want to ask your ISP’s permission first, in case they get upset about you sharing your connection so freely. Whole books have been written about this topic — for more information, you might want to read one of them, such as Rob Flickenger’s ‘Building Wireless Community Networks’. If you live in a big city, you might even find that someone’s already trying to do it in your areas.

Make Cheap Phone Calls.

If you get a Bluetooth-enabled headset, you can use your wirelessly networked computer to make cheaper (or free) phone calls. Voice over IP (VoIP) software such as Skype makes it easy to call anyone in the world, and using a headset makes it even more convenient than using a phone — you can do whatever you want while you talk.

Most VoIP software is limited to calling other VoIP phones, which is free. Services like Skype, however, allow you to call real phone numbers too. Since the call is made in whatever country the number is in and then routed over the Internet to you, you can call worldwide for not much more than the cost of a local call. There are few things more fun than chatting to your friend half the world away for an hour and knowing it only cost you 50 cents — and that all they had to do was pick up the phone.

Watch Media on Your TV.

There is a new wave of wireless media devices that connect to your TV like a cable box or a DVD player, but allows your TV to play media files you have shared on your wireless network. If you use an operating system like Windows Media Center Edition or similar, it’s easy to watch videos from your computer on your TV — you even get a remote control. On top of that, you can record shows from your TV, TiVo-style, and then share these recordings over your wireless network.

You want things you digitally record on one TV to be viewable on all your TVs? Now they can be. Simply get two wireless-enabled digital recorders and they’ll form a network all on their own — simple as anything.