Monday, August 29, 2005

Network upgrade

I've just finished upgrading my home network router and wireless access point from an old Intel 802.11b unit to an 802.11g DLink DI-624 which is light years ahead in terms of speed, capacity and features but cost me about half of what the old one did three years ago.

DLink have their own proprietary extension to the 802.11g standard called Xtreme G which supposedly doubles the potential bandwidth to 108Mbps when used with other DLink components. I haven't switched this feature on and I have no plan to since as far as I'm concerned proprietary technologies are the work of the devil. At the moment I'm running a mix of Intel, Linksys, Dell and DLink network components without any problem because they're all standards compliant and I want to keep it that way.

I did have some trouble connecting my two TiVo's to the network because it's hard to tell the difference between an alphanumeric key and a hexadecimal key that is composed entirely of numerals (it would have helped if the error message was useful, like "invalid WEP key", rather than the generic "couldn't find gateway"). Once I sorted that out it has been running like a dream.

Unfortunately TiVo doesn't yet support 802.11g which is a shame since transferring recorded programs between TiVo's and to my laptop takes way too long at 11Mbps.

The next thing to look forward to is Comcast's planned upgrade from 4Mbps to 6Mbps which is scheduled for September.

Update: It seems my new wireless hub has a much stronger signal. So now I can sit by the pool while I "work" and blog. Life really is tough!

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