I was working in the sitting room a couple of nights ago on my laptop, and was tripped over by the ethernet cable and hurt my foot. No big damage done, but it could have been the Lady of the House who was hurt.
So I decided to go get myself some 802.11b equipment to get rid of those nasty long cables. Visited Connexions at Wanchai Computer Centre, which I highly recommend as knowledgeable no bull folks. Bought the Buffalo set (access point plus USB unit) and a PCMCIA card. On the box the Buffalo AP claimes to be able to serve as an radio ethernet bridge (which means a pair of them can be used to connect two separate wired LANs together, not that I'll have any use of this at the intended place of use, but I like the flexibility) and the price was okay. The USB unit is good for the Lady's laptop computer, and the PCMCIA card is of course for my laptop. The Buffulo card is believe to be identical to the Lucent card. It has a socket for plugging in aerials, which again, adds to the flexibility.
It all works pretty faultlessly, which I must say, is a rarity these days. It's very convenient, now that I can use my laptop computer anywhere in the flat (except in the kitchen. 802.11b signal penatration is not very good, and certainly couldn't go thru the few walls between the study and the kitchen.) It is not ideal thou, as my laptop is kinda old, and could only run on battery for about 1.5 hours.
It does get rid of the long ethernet cable that connects the Lady's computer in the sitting room to my network in the study, which is a Good Thing (TM).
At the moment I have the wireless network totally separated from my home network. This AP also acts as a broadband sharer, connecting my wireless-connected computers to the Internet via an ADSL modem, making use of my Netvigator broadband, which I use as a backup and is vastly under-utilized.
I am trying to redesign my network so that the wireless network is somehow connected to the home network. I could throw them all together into one subnet, but this is no good, as I don't feel like the data going through my network leak out out to the atmosphere. I would like the connections to be encrypted and secure, while at the same time I would also like to be able to offer Internet access to my neightbours. The built-in WEP encryption of my equipment has been proven to be no good, and there are tools around which would reveal the WEP encryption key after listening to a wireless network for a few hours. Something like IPSEC is needed.
I have seen articles that discussed this. O'Reilly Net has devoted a whole section on 802.11b technology. I'll post the links as I go through them.
11:37:09 PM 
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