The Curse of Wireless Networking

The advent of wireless networking is suppose to have brought about a revolution in home networking, finally doing away with the need for all that specialised cabling trailing all around the house and the need to have hubs, switches, etc. It’s suppose to free your computer to live wherever you want it to and let you surf the web on your laptop in the garden.

 

The reality in my view is that we still have a long way to go and I’m not sure wireless is going to be a long term solution for home users. I have owned a 802.11g wireless router since first having my own broadband connection and while the wired side of it has served me well I have been less than impressed with the wireless service.

 

The challenge with wireless is getting a good signal and maintaining a continuous connection, to do this you need to ensure you are well within the wireless router’s range, the further you get away from it the weaker the signal will get but unless you live in a tiny apartment then you will probably have your computing devices spread out throughout your home. The signal issues really become obvious if you subscribe to the concept of the digital lifestyle like myself, while web surfing doesn’t demand much from your wireless connection the streaming of media content certainly does.

 

My Belkin router for whatever reason doesn’t like maintaining a connection no matter how good the signal strength for more than about 30 minutes without having a connection blip, these blips which don’t have an obvious cause became very apparent to me when I first attempted to watch a movie wirelessly by connecting my main computer upstairs to a laptop connected to the TV downstairs in a small house. The connection blip lead to the movie player getting suitably confused and requiring a restart and a repositioning of the film progress twice during a film. While the film was a low bitrate one, I did try a similar attempt at streaming digital TV which is far more demanding I wasn’t successful at all. When I later moved house to a location where my main computer was forced to rely on a wireless connection from the room upstairs I soon discovered even the most basic tasks of web browsing and instant messaging were easily upset by connection blips.

 

Another big problem I noticed is the security aspect, if you want easy configuration you need to leave your wireless connection open which then leaves it open for your neighbours or passers by to enjoy the fruits of your network and Internet connection. If you enable the security system then you are often left having to type in a long set of hexadecimal numbers twice every time you want to configure a computer to use the connection, not exactly a user friendly process. While some devices allow you to use a pass phrase to make the process easier, it’s not all that common an option so you normally have to resort the hex numbers anyway. For the average person there is a high chance they will not be aware or not be knowledgeable enough to set up the security without which is similar to leaving your front door unlocked, you are leaving yourself open to others accessing your personal files or abusing your Internet connection.

 

There is an alternative that hopes to marry the convenience of wireless with the consistency of wired connections and that is to use your home’s power cabling. These devices are still in their infancy but within the next two years I imagine they will be widely available at reasonable prices. The concept is simple, almost every device that needs a network is going to be plugged into a wall socket and all those wires meet up somewhere so you’ve already got a medium that can potentially carry the data. All that’s needed are some devices to transmit and receive the data over your power cables, and these devices are now on the market at less than £100 a pair. OK so it’s a bit pricy, the units are a bit bulky and with typical speeds of around 14Mbp they aren’t even a quarter the speed of your typical 100Mbps wired network but these are still early days. Within the last year the HomePlug AV standard was approved which promises to offer speeds of up to 200Mbps which could easily serve the networking bandwidth of the typical home for several years yet. It may also lead to your various devices around the home being able to talk to each other e.g. your alarm clock could turn on your TV and your AV equipment could carry data between devices without the need for all those messy wires. Over time the bulky adapters will hopefully get integrated directly into computing devices and appliances to make the setup easier and look more aesthetically appealing.

 

Power line networking won’t replace wireless as you will still need wireless networking for laptops, PDAs, mobile handsets and other networked battery operated devices, however it may be that wireless becomes a complementary form of networking. In built up areas there are big problems with wireless networks reaching saturation levels where there are so many other wireless networks around that there isn’t room for any more, also there are big problems with interference. Many people also complain that while wireless networking can work through walls and floors it isn’t always very good at it so power line technology appears to be a promising way forward.