One of the magazines I supervised was installed in one of those former win-
dowless closets. And so I took my expense account to the nearest Radio
Shack and bought up half a dozen sets of cordless phones and every possible
connector and adapter in the store. We attached to a wired phone outlet in
another office and extended antennae into the hall. Though the communica-
tion was sometimes sketchy, we were able to make phone calls and hook up
our slow dial-up modems to the makeshift wireless system. The range of
these phones was no more than about 50 feet, and the modems operated
somewhere between 300–1,200 bps — about 2 percent of the speed of an
802.11g WiFi network. But our makeshift network worked, in a sort of a lim-
ited way for an off-night.
I use this bit of ancient PC history just as an example of wireless communica-
tion serving as a way to get around architectural barriers. That is one of two
very good reasons to use WiFi today.
Good reason number one: Easy installation
Assume you live in a house or apartment and want to share information
between two or more computers, or share a single incoming broadband con-
nection throughout the house. You can connect machines in two ways: one is
to run wires along the floor, across the ceiling, through the walls, down to the
basement, and up to the crawlspace. Obviously, this can be done but it can
be difficult, messy work, and may not be possible to do so in rented space.
And if you hire an electrician or a computer technician to do the work, it can
be a very expensive project. The same problems apply in office settings. It
can be expensive and difficult to retrofit old offices to new communication
technologies, and you may run into additional wrinkles, such as building and
fire codes, that make the job practically impossible to accomplish.
But if you think of WiFi communication instead of cables and wires, many
problems are quickly solved. Modern wireless systems transmit across a
room and through most walls. If you need to go more than 300 feet, or if the
walls or ceilings are extremely dense or contain steel beams, metal studs,
or other signal-blocking materials, you can purchase repeatersand signal
boosters.Place them in such a way to bend signals around otherwise impen-
etrable corners or find places in the walls or ceilings where communication
links can be made.
The cost of WiFi equipment is a bit more than that of cabling (depending on
the distance to be spanned) although like everything else in computing, the
price spiral is in a downward direction. But the payback comes in avoidance
of electrician or technician hourly rates. And a wireless system is not a per-
manent thing; it can be picked up and moved to a new location quite easily. It
is also, as the techies like to say, easily scalable.You can add more machines
and access points(hotspots) with ease without the need to string more wire.
Chapter 14: Feeling Up In the Air 207