I'm an odd fellow. I'm odd because I want convenient things like wireless home networking, but I want performance, reliability and simplicity at the same time, and I'm willing to experiment to find the right way to go about it. In other words throw money at it.
So, here is the set up. I rent the top half of an home. The DSL modem, router, and everything else is in the opposite part of the house to where my home office is. Long history behind that, but it was the only way I could keep my significant other from flipping out over reliability issues otherwise. She gets a wired connection to the router, I suffer through with the wireless one. Now, to make a long story very short, I was having serious Internet reliability issues. Web sites could not be found, my DSL connection was going down at least hourly, etc. When you just use the network to surf and do e-mail that's no bid deal, but when your working from home via a VPN connection, and using some fat-bootie e-mail/contact manager tool like Lotus notes, getting bumped off regularly is a big problem. So I put myself and my home network through the grueling ordeal of upgrading.
First, my Netgear router, which yes, was heavily modified by me with the addition of heatsinks and fans, was replaced by a new DLink Wireless N (802.11n) router. No difference in DSL behavior. Contacted Covad who wanted to charge me $100 for a new DSL modem. Apparently they don't understand, for $50 I could have switched to Cable TV's broadband. Finally, after getting them to test the phone line, I did some experimenting and found the problem was that the phone cored was wrapped around too many power cords. Once I straightened up the phone cord, our reliability all miraculously improved.
Next problem was the wireless connection. My PC sits about 45 feet from the wireless router. However, that's 3 open doorways in between. With the first router I had such problems getting a good signal in this room that I used a Linksys G/USB 2.0 adapter that was taped to the back of a bookcase next to the door. That gave me pretty good signal quality, all I needed was 12' of USB cable in between. The new Dlink Wireless-N router worked fine with that adapter, but I was trying to be cool, and bought a new N adapter for the PC, one that would sit inside the case, eliminating the need for the USB cable, and hey, with the 2 antennas, and using Wireless-N I was sure I would get a great signal. Sadly, no. I had exactly the same problems in this location using N as I did with G and B adapters in the past. So, back to the G adapter tied to the bookcase.
No matter what they say about range, or how wireless N should be better, once I introduced the same obstacles into the mix, it all went downhill the same way. I could have bought a N type USB adapter, but I have serious questions about how easily they overheat. In the past I had bought another Netgear product which overheated, a Wireless-G USB adapter. So, I wasn't keen on another one. Which makes the next part of this posting odd.
My end solution was to buy a pair of Netgear WNHDE111 access points/bridges (also available as a 2 unit kit, the WNHDEB111) . What's odd about this is that after having 2 pieces of Netgear products overheating due to cheap ass design I would buy another one. Believe it or not, what convinced me was the case design. It looked like they paid a lot more thought into cooling these units, and that the industrial designers were a completely different group than the one's that designed the original router and USB adapter. As an aside, I think the same people designed the Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR box I use which had the same basic case design and the same overheating issues. I have NO proof of this, just my guess, but if you look at how the cooling can barely make it through the same basic case design, and how they laid out the inputs, outputs, power and main CPU, you'll understand why I would think so.
So, now a little background. Netgear and Dlink are both selling what we can loosely term "media bridges". They are designed to wirelessly enable devices which otherwise may not have a wireless connection, and even if they do have it, provide even better speed than they would have otherwise. Examples of this include devices like Apple TV, SonyPlaystation, and any of the various wired and wireless media players currently out there. These media bridges work to fool your equipment into thinking that it's hooked up to your network via the Ethernet plug out the back. Once hooked up, they are pretty much transparent to the devices. Since the connection to your important devices (PC, XBox, etc.) work on well established networking protocols, Ethernet and TCP/IP, they should work for any Ethernet enabled device you can buy. Basically anything you can hook up via Ethernet, you can now convert to a wireless connection. Their marketing spiel is of course that they are designed to let you stream High Definition (HD) audio and video over your wireless network, which is true but what they do is create a second, high speed wireless network which now runs in parallel to your original one. What they don't tell you is, they really don't care what you hook up to it so long as it talks TCP/IP over ethernet, and what device now doesn't?
Anyway, I purchased one of the Netgear bridges, thinking "Hey, it's a Wireless N device, it should work with my D-Link N router. Well, no such luck. They use the same N protocol but a completely different frequency, 2.7 GHz and 5 GHz. So, in order to make this work, had to have two. Purchased a second one, upgraded the firmware, set up the security configuration on each manually. Powered it all up. And, as if by magic, I have Ethernet-like speeds coming out at both ends. Sweet!
The benefit in my home office is, I can stick one in my bookshelf, in the room's sweet spot, then run 1 Ethernet cable to my desk, where I have an inexpensive DLink 5 port Gigabit switch, and then I can hook up my laptop, my desktop, even an Internet cam. Whatever devices I want to hook up I can, without buying additional wireless adapters. Another major benefit to this all in my mind is not having to install new devices. Half of all the wireless problems I have had have stemmed from getting the drivers installed correctly. Now, my PC and laptop think they are hooked up via the Ethernet cable, and my network's performance has been great ever since.
What's next? Next I'll probably purchase some sort of High-Def media player for the living room and hook it up the same way. I'm waiting for the Netflix/LG settop device to come out, but I'm also thinking about getting a Sony Playstation 3. Even if I never play another game, I think it's the only Blu-Ray player on the market I won't have to upgrade to keep current. Sony has invested a lot of money on the PS3 platform, and it's consistently been the first Blu-Ray player to meet each new specification.
Also, another aside, I think that if this keeps up the other Blu-Ray licensees will figure out they've been had. Sony doesn't want to license Blu-Ray, they want to dominate it. Their continuous evolution of the Blu-Ray player standard will mean that only PS3 owners will be able to keep their players more than a few months before they are obsolete.
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