On Jul 14, 2004, at 6:31 AM, Greg Gilmore wrote:
Since my daughter has decided to continue her college education online,
weıre finally going to make the leap from 56K to broadband, and to obviate
running cables between the 4 Macs that are regularly used for internet
access throughout the house, weıll make a simultaneous leap to wireless. I,
however, donıt know much about it and would be very grateful for your advice
about what we need to buy in order to bring the following machines up to
speed:
1) PowerBook G4/667MHz/OS 10.2. (Iım pretty sure this machine is ³Airport
ready², but the card is probably 802.11b, right? Iıd probably want the newer
802.11g technology on this one. Is it difficult and/or expensive to
upgrade?)
2) iBook G3/700 MHz/OS 10.2. (This one doesnıt appear to be ³Airport ready²,
but maybe Iım not looking in the right places. Weıd want 802.11g for this
one as well.)
3) PowerBook G3 (Lombard)/400 MHz/OS 9.2.2 (Definitely not ³Airport ready².
This machine is used primarily for email so an 802.11b card should be
sufficient, if it can be fitted with one. If so, would the 802.11b card from
the G4 PowerBook work here?)
4) iMac/350 MHz/OS 9.2.2 (Definitely not ³Airport ready², but I guess this
would be the machine which would connected to the cable modem via Ethernet
anyway.)
Sorry, two of these machines would be O.T. for this list, but theyıll all be
networked together. Comcast offers internet cable service in this area but I
need to make sure theyıre compatible with Airport.
Thanks for taking the time to consider our questions.
Greg
-- There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and
those who can't.
Greg,
Just pick up a snow Airport base station, pop in a regular Airport card in each Mac from eBay and configure the wireless network. Comcast highspeed internet service isn't worth the trouble of trying to get to 802.11g. The only real benefit of "g" is being able to transfer tiles to and from the computers within the network. 802.11g is great if your source is a dedicated or sometimes shared T1. You are most likely talking about a cable modem through Comcast. Comcast doesn't need to know how you are connecting. DON'T TELL THEM YOU HAVE YOUR OWN NETWORK. They will try to make you buy a bunch of crap you don't need. Sound like I've been there? Oh yea. They'll say stuff like "you need a special router" and fill you up with nonsense. Heck, I've been online via cable modem and aDSL via my phone line in several different places over the years. . .(move a lot), and no matter where I go, the Airport system goes with me. Everyone keeps focusing on how much faster Airport Extreme is, but they keep forgetting the speeds of consumer connections on average. Remember this: The maximum bandwidth on regular Airport (802.11b) is up to 11 mbps. So far, the fastest consumer connection available within a reasonable price is up 3 to 3.5mbps. So. . .why bother with Extreme? Extreme is more for a business with an insanely fast source connection that's planning on transferring giant files to each computer within the network. Hope this helps,
Z
THE BLUETOOTH MASTER
My system:
Apple Airport Snow, Linksys Wired Router (got at WalMart for $17.95), PowerMac G4/867, PowerBook G3/500 (Pismo), iBook G4/800, Powerbook G4 17", and last but not least. . .ol' "trusty" as we call it. . .a G4 cube. The desktops are wired to the router, and the base station plugs into the router as well. The ibook and powerbooks then get their signal from the station. My internet connection is ADSL through Earthlink. Not the greatest, but their email is FAST. My average connection with them is around 1.8mbps down, and around 356k up. I pay for up to 3 down and 384k up but what are ya' gonna do. . ..:)
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