[OT]802.11g signal strength; gigE

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Bob George <mailings02 at ttlexceeded.com> suggested:
> Before popping for another piece of equipment, I'd try using some of the
> higher-gain antennas that fit the Linksys.

I just had some equipment failures this past week and have some observations:

* My first-gen Linksys WRT54G unit (purchased in March 2003) abruptly died.

* I noticed it had a 3-year warranty and dialed the Linksys/Cisco call
  center (yes it's in India, the service rep let slip with "have a good night"
  at the end of my noontime call...;-).  The free replacement was sent
  FedEx 3-day immediately after my call.  I only had to pay for the $7.50
  UPS ground shipping of my return unit, *after* receiving the replacement.

* The new unit has the same model number -- WRT54G -- but is version 4.
  It has *far* superior range!  The first-gen units apparently had *very*
  weak signal power!  (I'm talking 20 feet through wood-frame construction.)

* Back when I first bought the unit (replacement for WAP11 802.11b unit),
  I tried an external higher-gain antenna (SMC HMANT-4).  It didn't do
  jack for my signal range.

* Not many days later, when I was fixing up the cable mess caused by my
  wi-fi replacement, somehow my DLINK DI-604 firewall died.  My first
  instinct was to replace it with another DLINK but then I decided to
  try using the WRT54G's built-in firewall.  Seems to work fine, I haven't
  yet tried any benchmarks.  (The DI-604 had no problem with Comcast's
  4-megabit service, it could run downloads at wirespeed.  One feature
  still missing in the new WRT54G code is port-number translation:  if
  you want sshd to listen on port 54623 instead of port 22, you can't do
  the mapping at the WRT54G firewall--you have to reconfigure your Linux
  box.)

* As part of my energy-conservation project, I noticed that my old
  Netgear 8-port 10/100 switch consumed 12 watts of electricity.  For
  not much money I ditched it for a gigE switch of the same brand.  The
  new switch consumes 4 watts and runs cooler.

* If you re-cable your LAN for gigE, note that you need all 4 pairs of
  wire in the patch cables.  You can't economize with 2-pair wiring
  which I did when I first wired the house, so it took some extra cabling.

Bottom line:  if you have an old 802.11g unit whose signal is weak, you will
probably get a meaningful benefit replacing it with any newer unit--you don't
necessarily need to shell out the extra bucks for one of those
standards-noncompliant "RangeMax" units.

-rich