Wireless networking, especially when it’s done right, can be a beautiful thing. For the average home wireless network user things have improved over the last few years with regard to ease of setup, security, and quality, but there still remains the cold hard truth that unless you do your research, you’re likely going to end up with less than optimal conditions, and in some cases experience times where it appears your wireless network doesn’t work at all.

THIS IS NOT AN ARS TECHNICA ARTICLE

No, but it’s long though! Without going into explicit, verbose waxing on the origins of wireless networks and computing, and sparing you the nerdy details about ‘how all this stuff works’ I thought I’d throw a couple of handy bits of knowledge I’ve gained over the years of working with wireless networks, and hopefully it helps you juice up your own configuration.

APPLE DOES IT RIGHT

First of all, recognition need to go to Apple, whose Airport & Airport Extreme home networking products have pushed wireless networking as a standard in the consumer realm since day one. Apple was first to the market with the original grey 802.11b UFO-shaped Airport Base Station, and they’ve led the way ever since, including today, where their 802.11n products (Airport Extreme Base Station, Airport Express) were among the first to work on the newly ratified protocol, and they smartly sold Macs to the public whose internal wireless capabilities would work with n before it was finished, allowing for a software upgrade to enable the capability.

Apple’s implementation of the n spec is at current one of (if not the) best implementations, and users configured properly to take advantage of n‘s benefits achieve close to the theoretical maximum in data transmissions.

But n only really shows its stripes when it’s running in 5GHz-only mode with wide channels enabled. For those of foreign this jargon, basically there’s one way to get n working smoothly, with high performance (5x faster than g): have the network as n-only.

But it doesn’t have to. That’s what we’re here to learn today kids.

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

The types of questions that people pose with regard to learning about n often revolve around what they can expect in terms of performance, and what they will have to do to get existing wireless hardware to play nice with n. Seems that despite the push by manufacturers of 802.11n products for early adoption, most potential buyers have figured out that upgrading a wireless network costs a good chunk of money, and they want to know they’ll get bandwidth-for-the-buck if so.

And wouldn’t you know it, the damn bastards at the IEEE (who ratify these wireless standards) had to go and make the usage of n something that would conform to backwards-compatibility standards, something previously done when 802.11g hit the market. What this means is that you have the option to run n devices alongside 802.11b/g device on a network.

“That’s good, isn’t it” Well, in terms of feats of marginalization- yes… but in terms of performance No, totally not good.

Of course when you setup things the everyone-get-along way, you don’t really see the benefits of n at all. In my testing, you actually make performance on a b and g-compatible network worse when the n-guy joins the picture.

The IEEE as a standards group is totally necessary, and we all should be thankful for the fact that there is a Wi-Fi standard at all, and not some wishy-washy sea of proprietary devices and networks. But when it comes to the differences between 802.11n and the older b-and-g networks, there was no need to have backwards-compatibility at all. In fact, there was more of an opportunity in my opinion for establish it as significantly better and worthy of existing on the 5GHz band alone, which would have created a market for a new breed of wireless devices: dual-band routers. More on this later.

CAN I SUPPORT THEM ALL, WITHOUT SACRIFICING NETWORK SPEED

Yes you can, totally. In my home network setup, I need support for all four network types: a,b,g and n. Between our Wii, iPhone, Core Duo MacBook, MacBook Air, Core 2 Duo iMac, and Apple TV, there’s a lot of wireless traffic coming and going. We don’t require the oldest 802.11b network support, but when you factor in guests and their devices, it’s just easier to have it so that anyone can get online easily.

For the purpose of my example I’ll be using Apple’s devices, but any routers with the capabilities they have and more will do this fine.

What we want to do to get all four networks supported in an efficient, speedy way is to setup what’s called a dual-band network. Basically, it’s two routers working together to create one network that supports all four 802.11 protocols.

The first router should be the n-router, or the one which has the most features (likely this will be the n- router in most cases). This way your second router will serve the network in terms of connecting b/g wireless clients only, and the main n-router will configure both wired and wireless clients, including those that are connecting through the second router.

This is also what’s called a bridged network, where the clients from the second router are ‘bridged’ to the network created by the n-router. This ensures only one DHCP server, which in turn helps with the ease of sharing network resources like printers and drives, seeing devices on the network, and file sharing between them.

In my case I’ve got an Apple Airport Extreme & Airport Express (the older b/g model). I have the Extreme configured in 5GHz 802.11n/a-compatible mode, with wide-channels enabled and 24mbps multicasting enabled. This ensures that my MacBook Air, iMac, AppleTV and even Sara’s MacBook (with 802.11a) can work on one fast, high video/audio throughput network.

Next, I have the Airport Express configured in the 2.4GHz 802.11b/g mode, setup as a bridge for the Extreme connected by ethernet to it. This means that the wireless clients (iPhone, Wii) will connect to the express and then be bridged over ethernet to the Extreme.

And that’s it, two networks which don’t interfere with each other and serve connections and transmissions fast.

I mentioned the possibility of a market for dual-band routers, and I think it’s something worth mentioning again. If Apple were to release such a router, I would surely snap it up. To have our router capable of broadcasting two or more networks would be really handy. I think it’s a worthwhile concept to explore for wireless manufacturers, and a worthy endeavor to inform the public with regards to the significant performance gain for all devices when a proper dual-band bridged network is setup.

SOLVING INTERFERENCE

In terms of external considerations, remember that microwave ovens and 2.4/5Ghz cordless phones cause interference with wireless networks. We use a 900Mhz phone and it works great with our dual-band WiFi setup, but they’re harder and harder to find. If you can pick one up second hand at a garage sale it’ll be worth it.

When it comes to b/g networks, have a look at the channels of competing networks around you. In my condominium there are over 100 units, and my laptop reports over 20 networks nearby. Using wifi-scanner tools, have a look at the most popular channels (usually 6 and 11), and choose a channel for your network as far away from them, hopefully on it’s own channel. This will help decrease the noise levels in your network connections, and increase your range.

It goes without saying (or should, anyways) that you should always secure your network with at least WPA security, and for added measure you can employ MAC address filtering. Happy networking.