Shopping for wireless

Monday, January 30th, 2006

I’m becoming frustrated enough with the dead spots in wireless coverage in our house to want to spend money on the problem. Luckily, everything is much cheaper now that it was a few years ago. I think my first step will be to replace our first generation Apple AirPort (802.11b) with this:

Linksys 802.11g access point

After that I try that in place for a while, I’ll see if it is really necessary to add another access point or a bigger antenna or a range extender or a repeater or something else.

I don’t particularly want to run any cables, so if I need better coverage, I’d like to have one wired AP, and one or more APs that can relay to the base AP. I’m not sure what Linksys calls this configuration or how many APs they allow to relay to the main AP.

I started looking at Netgear’s products for this, but ran into the limitation that their AP must either be an AP or a repeater, not both. If that’s true, I would have to buy twice the number of APs. Silly.

Lots of people complain about the clarity of the documentation for both Linksys and Netgear. There is also a disturbing number of complaints for random lockups from both companies. But I’ve had good experience with Linksys before, so I’ll stick with them. And besides, its only about a $60 investment, so I won’t get too worried about it.

Hmm, this reviewer seems to be doing just what I want to do.