Re: Need some advice on wireless devices...

"AJM" <ajmnews@xxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:


"Jeff Liebermann" <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:du5f92t0mmhrce67o7ghlrudc8trnp8mif@xxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:32:08 -0700, "AJM" <ajmnews@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I'm looking for the fastest wireless routers that...
1) are the fastest

How fast do you want to go? How many Mbits/sec? TCP or UDP?
I assume you want 2.4GHz 802.11b/g.


Not quite sure? What's the fastest available wireless available today?

Gig-E wireless. 1.25Mbits/sec thruput.
http://www.proxim.com/terabeam/products/gigalink1/index.html
You don't want to know the price.

The reason I asked is that it's YOU that has the applications
requirement. I was hoping for some numbers. When you get beyond
commodity 802.11g speeds, both the technology and the price escalate
rapidly. If I had a clue what you're trying to accomplish and why you
need the speed, it might be possible to offer a more practical
suggestion. For example, a mess of wireless clients sharing an
internet connection don't need to go any faster than the internet
connection as the DSL/cable/satellite limits the speed, not the
wireless. However, if you're running a wireless game network, speed
is everything.

I'll have to look closer at this on all the routers. I assume the setting
would need to be same on all three routers that I currently have?

Nope. You can have each one fixed to a different speed. The client
radios adjust to the speed of the access point they connect with.

This is not good news. I understand, but I was hoping by now someone out
there would have had a better solution.

Better than WDS? Sure, use two radios back to back on different
channels. That eliminates the requirement for half duplex and allows
full duplex operation. I have a repeater running in the tree tops
arranged that way. There's no 50% reduction in speed through the
repeater. However, there's still a reduction in speed due to timing
problems. My guess(tm) is about 20%. Another catch is that such a
two radio system hogs too many channels. There are "dual radio"
wireless vendors, mostly found in the mesh networks area.

BARF. WEP is old and insecure. You should be using WPA or WPA2.
That's how old my routers are... they only support two versions of WEP...

Well, if you have something to protect, or suspect you might be
attacked, then upgrade before the inevitable disaster, not afterwards.

At the moment the three manufacturers that come to mind are LinkSys,
NetGear, and D-Link.
Ok, you also want cheap. Got a price limit?

Cheap? Price limit? Not necessarily. If it is worth the cost then I'd be
willing to bite the bullet. These three manufacturers came to mind. Are
there others out there? I just learned today of another "Buffalo" from this
group. As far as cost... at the moment I'm not thinking dollar amounts, if
the hardware will get what I want then I'll weigh the cost at that time.

Look at wireless offerings by Cisco, Netscreen, 3com, and Sonicwall.
They're considerably more expensive, but generally worth the price.
However, none of these vendors care about speed. It's security and
reliability that their business customers want. Speed is whatever the
technology will bear. If speed is an issue, look into the various
MIMO offerings. (That's MIMO using Airgo chips, not beam forming).

As fast as I can get with wireless. I'm getting back into development and
will be running several VMWare servers through the LAN on my laptop.
Because of the size of the VMWare files storing them on my laptop would not
be feasible and I'd hate to swap them on and off as needed to.

Ok, the network is local and you're doing local file transfers.
Therefore, speed is important, but not critical.

I'd rather not use WDS but at the
moment and the size of my home that's my only current option.

Compromise. Run additional access points to get coverage to the
various parts of the house, but use CAT5 for the backhaul to the main
router. That won't require wiring the entire house, just the
backhauls.

WDS is its own worst enemy because it all runs on one channel. My
favorite demonstration is to setup a WDS network in a single enclosed
room. The mutual interference makes the system almost unusable. It
works much better when only the WDS bridges can hear each other.

With the laptop I like the idea that I can be anywhere in my home and be
both on the LAN and internet, I'm just getting frustrated with the through
put and bandwidth being chopped.

Allow me to offer some general advice. Speed and range are inversely
related. If you want speed, you don't go very far. You can tinker
with the antenna patterns and gains to improve the situation, but
there are limits to what can be accomplished. High speeds also
implies susceptibility to interference. It doesn't take much "noise"
to force an access point to slow down from the mythical 108Mbits/sec
to something slower. High speeds also imply that inter-symbol
interference from reflections and timing problems become more
pronounced. None of these are fatal, but all of them conspire to make
high speed connections rather unreliable.

The current best of the breed are the various MIMO implementations.
I'm partial to the Airgo chipset products. They don't really go much
faster than conventional 802.11g. What the offer is much better
tolerance to reflections, interference, and multipath. What you'll
notice is that you really do have a more reliable connection at
generally higher speeds. Not the fastest available, but certainly the
most stable and reliable. (Retransmissions are a common cause of
apparent slowdowns).

I found an article that compares MIMO with beam forming wireless
routers with some benchmark tests. Of course, I can't find it now.
Maybe later.

Hey Jeff... side note... I like your domain name below
"LearnByDestroying.com", been in the industry now for just about 25 years
and self taught everything.

Well, I have a sheepskin signed by Ronald Reagan (when he was Governor
of Calif). The motto at Cal Poly, Pomona was "Learn by Doing", which
I immediately butchered into "Learn By Destroying". Most everything
else, I learned the hard way. You don't really know the subject until
you actually work with it. Learning tends to be greatly accelerated
immediately after breaking something important. Incidentally, that's
why tech support tends to be so lousy; they don't get their hands
dirty working with the stuff.

Good luck.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

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