Why Wireless Will Win

You may not know it yet, but you’ll probably end up with a wireless network in your house before too long. David Dorn explains why – not entirely seriously…

Network? Why would I want a network at home?

Well, if you’ve got kids (or if you’re an influential kid!) you probably know by now that the telephone is not there for the use of adults, that the Internet is there so that  the younger generation can spend ages mooching around Chatrooms and playing Project Rockstar, and the computer you bought so that you could type letters and keep the family finances in check has become an interface between the fruits of your loins and the rest of the wired world.

Face it – that’s just the way it is – even our firstborn, now flown the nest and resident in the land where blokes wear skirts has managed to inveigle yours truly to spring for a half decent box and an unmetered AOL connection for her.

So what’s the answer? Well, every so often (like two to three years) you’ll be tempted into upgrading your PC. The software houses see to that by making damned sure that their efforts won’t run on the PC you have. Trust me on this one. If your PC is over two years old, it really isn’t worth trying to upgrade it. You’ll need a new one.

This is where it gets clever. Chances are you’re not going to be able to find anyone brain-dead enough to con them into buying your old box. Not for a decent dollop of cash, anyway. So this is what you do. You network the old one to the new one.

Enter the wireless

Now, networking really isn’t a difficult thing to do – not peer to peer with a couple or three machines, anyway. It’s that easy, in fact, that the Redmond Rangers have wizardised the whole thing in their operating systems of choice (ie Me and XP). The difficult thing to do is wire the house up with Cat 5 cable and keep it looking neat. It’s bad enough having telephone cables draped everywhere after the Sky bods have been and installed your dish and digibox, never mind the extension into the firstborn’s bedroom (you didn’t, did you?). Adding yet more cable just makes the mess worse.

So how’s about a bit of wireless kit, then? It’s actually pretty simple to install. You get a base station, a couple of wireless networking cards, plug everything in and Bosh! (as Jamie Oliver would say) you’ve got a pukka network up and running.

Team that up with a bit of Internet Connection Sharing or a router (again, easy to set up) and you can connect to the Internet from anywhere in the house. Mind you, if you’re not a little bit careful, so can the neighbours and everybody else in your street.

It needn’t be expensive, either – by Christmas, you’ll be able to pick up a wireless card for under fifty quid (does this count as the earliest ever mention of the “C” word in any given year?). Indeed, you can pick one up for under seventy now.

The problem with it is, of course, that you get used to it. Soon, you’ll be off buying a small laptop or handheld so you can surf the web while you’re in bed or on the loo (don’t laugh – what I’m doing today, you’ll be doing by the end of the week) or even sat in the drive in your car.

You’ll be sat out in the summer sun (one day a year) with your lappy on your knee banging an email out to gawd knows who between sessions of back-oiling and ankle-blistering. You’ll whip your palmtop out to search out Alan Titchmarsh’s site so you can identify that disease your rose bush seems to have caught from somewhere, and then log-on to Charlie Dimock’s fan site, just for a quick look!

You’ll invest in a Sony IP camcorder and send footage to your PC from the living room, buy a firewire to wireless cable and beam DVDs around the house to all the PCs, so you can watch the Star Trek Collection no matter where you are – in bed, on the loo (not again!), wherever.

If you get on well with your neighbours, you may all decide to pitch in and get a super-duper ADSL line installed, and form a street area network - wirelessly, of course – so that it’s cheaper for everybody, and still faster than a V90 modem. It puts a whole new take on Network Neighbourhood – and yes, it has already been done. You couldn’t do that with cable. Well, you could, but it would be messy.

So there you go. Were all headed down the wireless route, whether we like it or not. Yet again, in this day and age, the home user will be calling the shots. We demand faster processors and more memory, bigger hard disks and faster graphics that corporate users have absolutely no need for. By the time Bluetooth is pervasive and fully integrated with IEEE 802.11x (wireless networking) there’s nothing we won’t be able to do.

Well, time to get off the loo – I’ll just send this to the edit PC ready to squirt it into the HTML template…

^top

Have your say - click here

David Dorn