Happy Holidays & Bridging The Wireless Divide

The holidays are a great time to reflect on the precious joys we have in our lives, as well as be reminded, often times unintentionally, of the persistent annoyances in our lives.

So, it was the case that the two weeks leading up to the magical date of December 25th, was peppered with such dual natured revelations regarding the noisey world of wireless networking...

Revamping The Wireless Backbone

As noted in an earlier posting, my family and I had just moved. One of the things we discovered, shortly after settling in, was the fact that the previously praised network jacks already wired in the walls were actually very poorly placed. The central breakout box, where the ports are all conjoined, doubly so, as there was no power outlet anywhere near it, to power a network switch.

After some head scratching and some candid discussions with my better half, it was decided that stringing 50-100' Cat 5e network cables from one room to another was not a workable solution. It was not safe, it was ugly, and it was not a very practical solution. So, two weeks got burnt trying out various wireless network devices in vain to get a wireless bridge going.

Now, prior to the recent wireless router I employed, I owned two linksys wrt54g routers. I had them flashed with one of the free open source replacement firmwares, and they were capable of doing some really cool things. Like bridging your wireless and wired network, so you don't have to run cables all over the place.

I had replaced my old linksys routers with a Trendnet wireless N router. My personal opinion is that had I known then what I had known now.. I would have spent the money on quality gear instead of saving a few dollars. I would heartily recommend people to NOT buy the Trendnet Wireless N gigabit router. Part of the problem being that bugs which were resolved in newer firmware revisions... could not be resolved, because one of the bugs was that the firmware update feature on the one I bought was broken. Something I didn't realise until after the return period had elapsed. Another bug was unstable wireless connections, a hub configuration for the gigabit ports, and no 5Ghz band support.

I discovered all of these issues as I performed the following tasks:

1. Bought another Trendnet wireless router and wasted 3 hours to learn that it could not join the existing router as a guest to bridge the wired and wireless halves of the network. (Switching roles didn't help either.)
2. Returned Trendnet in favor of another Trendnet device, which was advertised as a bridge. It did in fact join the network as a wireless guest. But could not actually maintain a stable wireless connection for more than 5-10 minutes.
3. Returned Trendnet and after consulting with some coworkers, went and bought an Apple Airport Extreme. It did a fine job of joining the existing Trendnet network. It did not, however, actually route any traffic. It did share the printer wirelessly, but did little else.
4. Returned to the local store and bought a second Apple Airport Extreme. Used one as the internet connection sharing gateway. Used the second to extend the existing wireless network along the 5Ghz band, leaving the 2.4Ghz band for the legacy devices, while maintaing WPA2/PK security/encryption.
5. Everything worked flawlessly and I was much happier.

What have I learned from this two week ordeal of trying to save a few bucks? My time is worth more than that. That was two weeks of stressing out over really bad bugs, design issues, bad/no information on box packaging, poorly written instructional pamphlets, and alot of mismatched implementations of the 802.11n draft specs.

I also learned that Apple Airport Extreme(s) do several things really well:

• Expanding and bridging your wireless and wired networks. (superb)
• Documentation and support on the Apple support website. (superb)
• Printing to a printer hooked up to the Apple Airport Extreme. (superb, provided you have the drivers and it is a supported printer. I'm using the Canon Pixma IP4500/USB)
• Apple Airport Extreme can diagnoses connection issues automagically and tell you in a no-nonsense way, what needs to get done. (awesome)

In our household, we use Apple laptops. The one desktop is a fileserver, so it is hand built. Would have preferred a Mac Pro, but it doesn't have ZFS. :) Now, our wireless infrastructure is entirely Apple as well. Since I use it to stream HD video content to my networked devices(TV, PS3, TivoHD), it needs to be reliable and it needs to provide stable bandwidth. Kudos to Apple on designing and producing a great product.

In the end, my original $100 budget was blown out of the water by the two Apple Airport Extremes weighing in at $180 apiece. However, they just work, which is how I'm aiming to have most, if not all, of my technology at home working.

Old Setup:

• 802.11a/b/g - 54mbps-100mbps tops - 2.4Ghz, goes out with microwave usage
• WPA2/PK
• Direct USB printing from laptop
• Lot's of long runs of cable(cat5e @ 1gbps)

New Setup:

• 802.11 b/g/n 2.4Ghz/5Ghz ( backbone using 5Ghz to avoid microwave and neighbor interference ) - 150mbps-250mbps
• WPA2/PK
• Shared USB printing from Apple Airport Extreme
• No more unruly cables!

I'm quite happy with the setup, though now I'm wondering if it is possible to add an AppleTV into the mix.... perhaps next year.