Wireless in the Home

ecommnet's MD Robert Campbell has recently upgraded to BT's aDSL broadband at his home on the outskirts of Newcastle. This has improved the Internet experience for the whole family, with two school age children and a home office there are 3 or 4 PC's in almost constant use. The existing PCs are hard-wired back to the study using standard UTP cabling. The problem has always been trying to use the lap-top from work and having to constantly plug or unplug it from the network.

Adding a wireless access point, a Linksys WAP54G, and a WPC54G PCMCIA network card in the lap-top the need to connect physically is removed.

Within four and a half minutes of taking the equipment out of the box I was browsing the Internet while sat on the sofa downstairs..it was that easy, and my brother was staying with us at the time, he too was able to use the internet connection within a minute or two of switching on his lap-top.

Wireless In the Factory

One of our customers, Grange Interiors, has just moved to a new factory, and we have provided all the new cabling and IT infrastructure throughout the office accommodation and the factory area itself. All this has used traditional structured cabling methods, i.e. STP copper wiring; patch panels and even fibre optic cabling to cater for the long distances between one end of the factory and the other.

The company has invested a significant amount in new production equipment as well as the factory building itself. They are also faced with the introduction of more IT onto the shop floor and with a new factory production layout which needs to remain flexible and adaptive as the business beds in to this new working environment.

Flexibility is the Key

The biggest issue has to be flexibility and using wireless networking will allow us to add PCs onto the factory floor and the stores areas without the need to add further cabling runs and most importantly move them around when ever required.

At present there is one access point which is covering the stores end, the starting point of the production line. It is anticipated that further points will be added to the factory as PCs are introduced to the dispatch point at the other end of the building.

The cost benefits

The cost benefits really do stack up in favor of wireless. The cost of adding three PC to the stores area using the traditional wired approach would have been in the region of £350. The cost of the wireless equipment for the same number of very much more flexible data points will be around £350. These three points can be moved and changed with no further costs and adding additional points will just require more wireless LAN cards, each of these less than £50 more expensive than a traditional network card.

If you want to know more about wireless networking please contact us using the feedback form.
There is some more technical notes on the various wireless standards and Linksys equipment.