Well, after messing around on eBay for awhile bidding on parts, I said the hell with it and went to the Apple Store for an Airport card for my iBook. After installing it and testing it at the Borders in Pentagon City, I then went over to Best Buy to get a WiFi router. Getting it installed and running took a bit of doing -- the cable modem apparently had some kind of a problem with the router's DHCP requests, and I had to spend a while on the phone with tech support tracking down an obscure problem (turned out to be something to do with WEP -- I'm still not sure what it is).
But it's all working fine, although I still need to do some security configuration. I'll set up the firewall and MAC filtering this evening, I think, then I need to investigate WEP a bit more. It may take a while to get that configured, but I'm not terribly worried about it for the moment.
The Airport card has a somewhat limited range compared to a lot of other WiFi NICs, but I'm still quite impressed. Everywhere in my apartment, I get about an 85-90% signal strength, and I even get about 40-50% strength in the basement of my building where the washers and dryers are. Outside, I can cross the street and almost get to the swimming pool before I lose the signal, and I'll bet I could get to the pool if I put the router in the window instead of along the far wall (where it is right now).
For anyone interested in looking up the specs on this router, it's the D-Link DI-614+. So far, I've been very pleased with it, except for the snafu with WEP.
I'm at the Silver Spring Starbucks right now, and I'm enjoying my T-Mobile "free trial". I still think wireless is a niche technology, and I probably always will, but I have to admit it's pretty neat. :-) I wonder when we'll have WiMAX...?
Posted by Zathras at July 19, 2003 03:46 PMMy answer to trouble I can't solve on my own is to return the product. *grin* If it's intended for (typical no-experience) consumer use and *I* can't get it working reliably within about three hours, imho the company doesn't deserve my money. (I believe very strongly in voting with one's wallet.) I wouldn't recommend anything to a layperson that even a certified tech can't handle solo, that's just going to drive the poor person nuts..!
Then again, my router isn't powerful enough to extend that far. (Either that or my card sucks, which is also another possibility. I'm going to investigate it by buying a different manufacturer's card for Wanderer this weekend.)
Posted by: Moggy at July 19, 2003 05:02 PMOkay, never mind, I looked up your router -- it looks like it has greater signal strength in order to support the proprietary D-Link "super" mode. I considered that router back when I bought mine, except it was extremely expensive at the time because of the enhanced features.
Posted by: Moggy at July 19, 2003 05:11 PM