Choosing the Right Antenna As you learned, the strength of your wireless signal is a critical feature of your network. It’s what separates the more expensive equipmen...
Network Neighborhood Security When you start providing networking services for your neighbors it’s a little like inviting them into your house for a visit. You can let t...
Outdoor Access Points and Antennas The requirement of placing equipment outdoors imposes some important restrictions on the kinds of devices you can use. First and foremost, ...
Wireless Community - Mesh Network A number of towns have created public wireless networks with wide geographical coverage. These mostly use the extended network model, or cr...
Wireless Community - Extended Networks An extended network is what you would have when you give domain privileges to your network neighbors . Doing so implies that you have creat...
Wireless Community - Captive Portals There are different configurations for setting up a wireless network that your neighbors can use in the infrastructure mode. Infrastructu...
Wireless Community Types Most of the discussion in this blog centers on what is called infrastructure mode wireless networking. In this mode, for example, an acc...
Creating a Wi-Fi Communities Given half a chance, most people want to live in communities and connect with other people. Maybe it is the hunter-gatherer in us looking t...
Isolating Networks To Protect Data Network isolation provides a barrier that hackers must surmount to gain access to your data. The advantage of isolation is that penetration...
Power over Ethernet If all you want to do is provide a location where you can put a remote access point, your best bet is to plug the remote access point into ...
Roaming and Throughput With a single wireless access point , you can move about with a laptop and still be connected to the same network. The situation gets mor...
Setup Access Point in Bridging Mode Not all access points or routers enable you to configure them in a bridging mode , and those that do often aren’t particularly good at br...
Wireless Distribution System Using the Wireless Distribution System, you can expand your wireless network and even create an entirely wireless one. The WDS has the abil...
Wireless Bridging Bridging is a connection you make between two LANs at the link layer, each node of which is identified by the device’s MAC address. Any nod...
Expanding Wireless Networks You can add additional wireless devices to your wireless network to enable you to cover more area, or to give you greater bandwidth over wh...
Improving Wireless Connectivity There are several methods for improving your signal strength that go beyond simply adding additional access points. Consider the following ...
Calculating Signal Loss As a wireless signal propagates through the air, its strength is diminished as a function of distance. To calculate the free space loss for...
Adding More Access Points Once you’ve assessed your need for additional access points, the next question is where they should be placed. The two considerations are i...
How Many Access Points? The short answer to this question is that you need enough access points to handle both the number of clients that will wirelessly connect t...