Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
All the wireless products seem to have their own
sets of fans. Some fans go a little further and set
up Web sites geared toward telling all about their
favorite products. The most popular brand of
wireless gear has long been that made by Linksys
(now a division of Cisco, the huge networking
equipment vendor). So it’s no surprise that Linksys
gear comes with its own unofficial support site,
with forums, tips and tricks, and even links to specialized
firmware that can make your access
Network World
Wikipedia
Fan sites
Network World (www.networkworld.com) is the leading publication for
networking professionals, and although this site is geared primarily to businesses,
it has lots of content about wireless because so much of the technology
first appeared in commercial venues. The site has detailed buyer’s guides
that show the features and functionality of wireless LAN products — and
almost all this information is applicable for your home. Importantly, you can
also search the site for more content on Wi-Fi and 802.11 as well as on
Bluetooth and WiMAX. The publication has a large reporting staff and stays
on top of everything networking related.
For having content maintained by the masses on the Internet, Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.org) is not all that bad. Anyone can update information on
Wikipedia, and there have been lots of publicly discussed instances where
vendors wrote bad things about other vendors on the site. But as a whole, it’s
pretty good. Its wireless coverage includes topics such as the following:
� Wi-Fi: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi
� Wireless access points: n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Point
� IEEE 802.11n: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11n
point do neat tricks, such as act as part of a mesh
network to expand the coverage of your Internet
connection across several access points. Check
out the site at www.linksysinfo.org. If you have a
different brand, don’t despair. Do a Google search
or check out some of the sites listed in this section
for forums or vendor-specific pages, or go to
www.broadbandreports.com and look in the
Hardware by Brand forums there.
It’s a great tool to get a high-level idea of any topic, with substantial avenues
offsite for more detailed information. What we like most about Wikipedia is
that we usually find neat links to other related topics in the External Links
section of each page — links we probably would not find elsewhere.