Wireless Home Networking - Index of

In This Chapter
Chapter 5
Choosing Wireless Home
Networking Equipment
� Choosing your access point
� Getting certified and sticking with standards
� Being compatible is very important!
� Finding out about bundled networking features
� Understanding the rest of the “options list”
� Locking down your network with security features
� Covering the whole house with wireless
� Keeping your network managed
� Staying within budget
� Protecting your investment
When you’re building something — in this case, a wireless home
network — the time comes when you have to decide which building
supplies to buy. To set up a wireless home network, you need, at minimum,
an access point (AP) and a wireless networking adapter for each computer
or other network-enabled device you want to have on the network. Getting
this network online means you also need a router, which is typically part of
a combined AP/router device (the wireless router). This chapter helps you
evaluate and choose from among the growing number of APs and wireless
networking adapters on the market.
The advice in this chapter applies equally to PCs and Macs. You can use any
access point for a Mac as long as it has a Web interface (that is, it doesn’t
require a Windows program to configure it). Despite that statement, if you
have a Mac, you may want to consider using the Apple AirPort Extreme with
Gigabit Ethernet system because it’s easier to set up and use. On the network
adapter/client side of the link, AirPort Extreme cards are definitely the easier
choice for a Mac owner (as we discuss in Chapter 8) — it’s somewhere
between difficult and impossible to get many third-party Wi-Fi cards to work
with a Mac.