Wireless Devices, What to Look For: Range, Speed and Standards
Michael Knowles
Not sure what you\’re doing in your wireless card shopping? Want
to make sure you\’re buying the right thing but have no clue 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 specification for a Linksys wireless PCMCIA laptop
card I just bought:
11 Mbps A IEEE 802.11b wireless Type II PCMCIA-type network card
giving you wireless Ethernet access up to 1,640 feet away / For
Windows Rugged metal design with integrated antenna Advanced
power management features Compatible with Windows 95, 98,
Millennium, NT, & 2000 To use with your desktop PC, add the
Linksys WDT11 Instant Wireless PC Adapter
Now, some of those things can be pretty much ignored. Really,
Compatible with Windows 95, 98, Millennium, NT, & 2000? 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 1,640 feet\’? This tells you that the
maximum range of the wireless card you\’re looking at is 1,640
feet. That\’s what it would be if everything was perfect. In
practice, thick walls and interference can reduce this 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.
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.
On your local network, 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. For Internet use it is less
important 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 realizing 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!
About the author:
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intact. Michael Knowles http://www.freedomisyoursonline.com
Copyright 2005
I currently am the webmaster for several sites.
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