Wireless setup completed
by Volker Weber
With concrete walls and floors separating the rooms at vowe's magic flying circus I needed a more elaborate setup. Instead of fiddling with different settings, I set the Netgear access points to automatic and they spread nicely around the frequency range. The fourth access point Bridge provides Internet access to my neighbor who has been out of service ever since he attempted to switch providers.
Comments
Which Netgear routers are these? Not all of them seem to support WDS...
With WDS they would be on the same channel, wouldn't they. These are (blue box) Netgear access points and they are wired through the backend with PoE (Power over Ethernet).
So, you are being a good neighbour (mother) already :o)
Can you please laborate on the PoE stuff - this sounds interesting...
@Frank: Google is a good mother as well:
PoE [German]
Volker, what is the equipment you use to provide this PoE transmission ? I'm leaning to doing the same setup, but I would like to buy a good brand, and knowing what you are using helps me with this. Is it also netgear ?
Ehm... shouldn't it logically be Ethernet over Power instead of Power over Ethernet ?
Power is provided over Ethernet cabling. PoE. Maybe you are confusing PoE with Powerline, where power cabling is used as a network medium.
I am using an FS108P with four PoE ports. I have three different Netgear access points: WG102, WG302 and WAG102. All of them are powered from the FS108P. You would probably like the WG102.
Netgear currently does not have an affordable Gigabit switch with PoE ports. Since the access points only serve 54 Mbps, I don't need the extra speed provided by a faster switch. I also have a Netgear Gigabit switch for faster wired devices.
Netgear has two lines of devices: blue and white boxes. I generally recommend the blue ones. Some of the newer white draft-n routers are also very nice.
You were right - I was confusing the two.
Thanks for the info, though, I didn't know that PoE had become affordable to the (pro) end-user, the last time I heard anything about it was with Cisco Catalyst Gigabit Switches and it needed very pricey cards.
My problem is that I don't have ethernet cables in my walls, so I set up a WDS connection between my Linksys WRT54G and an Apple Airport Express. This works fine, but I can only use WEP encryption (for those people who need to know how to set that up, you can search on my website for 'linksys').
The WG302 seems to able to do WDS as well, but is also limited to WEP.
And since WEP is so laughably crackable these days, I'm on the lookout for a replacement. I'll look into the powerline thingy, but I'm not too sure how and if you can encrypt that (I read that the signal can travel to your neighbours house if you are on the same powerline).
Thanks for the time !
Alex, at least from the tests in my house I can assure you that the powerline signal won't reliably survive a fuse between two Powerline endpoints so the chance of transmissions "leaking" into your neighbors circuits is, well, negligible. At least in standard German electrical installations, I probably should add.
Stefan, thanks for that information. I don't know if German electrical installations are the same as Belgian ones, but it should be similar enough.
I'll give it a go sometime soonish then, since I've noticed these powerlines becoming more and more prevalent in our Belgium shops (fnac).
Alex: regarding the Powerline Ethernet stuff, I have a few old Netgear XE102G units that perform flawlessly. They're only 14Mbps, but it's truly plug-and-play (yes, the pun is intentional, but you really just plug them in the electrical plugs and that's it).
I live in a house (not an apartment or condo), so I don't worry too much about my neighbors picking up my signals, although most of the Powerline ethernet adapters I've seen also have encryption options. Unfortunately, I think that just about all of the encryptable units can only be set up for Windows machines, so if you're not on Windows you're out of luck.
Also, the newer units are MUCH faster than 14Mbps, if you need more speed.
