Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Switches
Chapter 5: Choosing Wireless Home Networking Equipment
When your wireless network needs some order
Your home network is comprised of many parts.
If you’re smart, you’ve consolidated them as
much as possible, because having fewer devices
means easier installation and troubleshooting.
But suppose that you have a cable modem, a
router, a switch, and an access point — not an
unusual situation if you grew your network over
time. Now suppose that the power goes out.
Each of these devices resets at different rates.
The switch will probably come back fairly quickly
because it’s a simple device. The cable modem
will probably take the longest to resync with the
network, and the AP and router will come back
up probably somewhere in-between.
The problem that you, as a client of the DHCP
server (which is likely in the router in this
instance), have is that not all the elements are in
place for a clean IP assignment to flow back
to your system. For example, the router needs to
know the WAN IP address for you to have a good
connection to the Internet. If the cable modem
hasn’t renegotiated its connection, it cannot provide
that to the router. If the AP comes back
online before the router, it cannot get its DHCP
from the router to provide connectivity to the
client. Different devices react differently when
something isn’t as it should be on startup.
Our advice: If you have a problem with your connectivity
that you didn’t have before the electricity
went out and came back on, follow these
simple steps. Turn everything off, start at the farthest
point from the client (usually this is your
broadband modem), and work back toward the
client, to let each device get its full start-up
cycle complete before moving to the next device
in line — ending with rebooting your PC or other
wirelessly enabled device.
Wireless routers, available from nearly any manufacturer, include from one to
eight Ethernet ports with which you can connect computers or other devices
via Ethernet cables. These routers are not only wireless APs but are also wired
switches that efficiently enable all the computers on your network to communicate
either wirelessly or over Ethernet cables.
Make sure that the switch ports support at least 100BaseT Ethernet — this is
the 100 Mbps variant of Ethernet. You should also ensure that the switch
supports the full-duplex variant of 100BaseT — meaning that it supports 100
Mbps of data in both directions at the same time. If you’re looking for the ultimate
in performance, you should strongly consider paying a bit more for a
router that supports Gigabit Ethernet (1000BaseT).
Even though you may intend to create a wireless home network, sometimes
you may want to attach a device to the network through a more traditional
network cable. For example, we highly recommend that when you configure
a router for the first time, you attach the router to your computer by a network
cable (rather than via a wireless connection).
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