Don't rush to get the latest 'consumer based' technology.

By Bryon Beilman

My advice to you: Don't rush out to get the latest and newest technology.

My rationale is as follows: Most of the time I do wait, but in one case I did not. I was working for a technology company that was making 802.11 chips for wireless access points. The new standard for 802.11G had been recently announced and it moved the speed from 10Mbps to 54Mbps. Since I was in the market for wireless and worked for a WiFi company, I decided to pay the premium ($138) for a new Dlink accesspoint/Router, and another $75 for the client card. It worked, but not flawless, and there were always some issues with it. All I really wanted was an access point, as I already have a home router and didn't need yet another network. If you want to know the difference between access point and router, see below. I had this for 5 years and it was never reliable and packet round trip times were bad and using TKIP would cause issues. A reboot would usually solve provide temporary relief.

I decided to go to Staples, and find the cheapest 802.11G acces point I could find. I didn't want a router, just an access point, but it really is hard to find just that nowaday. (must be a demand/market issue). So for just over $30, I bought a Belkin unit. Plugged it in and found via configuration, that it had an icon for "Make me an access point". I got encryption going and my round trip packet time went from 80ms to less than 1ms. That my friends, is what I am talking about. Even though it is cheap, the market for 802.11G is now stable and commoditized and I am a happy camper.

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But why would a $30 AP outperform a $138 AP? Well, buy early and pay the premium. In reality , just like the company I worked at, you design a chip, work hard to get it and all the software working. You produce something that meets the protocol standard and then try to get it out on the market. You write software to work around the bugs and sometimes even detect chip flaws that essentially reset the chip via software so it can keep going. You may find that you don't do protocol X right, but you work around it and those flaws then go to the next chip "respin" so you can fix it in a future revision. After 3-4 chip spins, it works as designed and the software is more mature too. The company of course is not making the same margins, but they made it through the acceptance period and are now relying on volume and cost cutting efforts, like integrating as much of the outside circuitry into the chip, and using Taiwanese ODMs to produce them in mass.

Access Points vs Wireless Routers

A pure access point is what they call in networking terms a "bridge". It bridges traffic from one medium (802.11) to the other (802.3). But wait, you say, why are you making it more confusing, what is this 802.?? stuff?

IEEE defines standards for protocols and 802.11[abgn] are all for wireless networking, and 802.3 is Ethernet, what you typically use to plug into your computer , Ethernet has 10Mb/100Mb/1Gb/10Gbit versions.

So your computer surfs google, and sends it out your wireless card over the air to the AP, which bridges (or translates) the traffic to the Ethernet, so it can continue out your Cable modem, or DSL or dialup.

A router , routes traffic (and in the case of the Access point router), it takes the wireless signal, and still passes it to the Ethernet side, but differently.

For your router, your wireless network will have a specific IP addrsss range (lets say 192.168.0.X) and the wired side will have another. In the case where you use this device to connect directly to the Internet, that side will be something assigned by your provider using something called DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol). So the router, will route traffic between the two networks. Another thing it is doing is providing a firewall by design, using something called NAT and a firewall access list.

What is NAT you say? Network Address Translation. Simply, there is not enough IP addresses to go around and give every person and company a unique address. What they do instead is give people inside the company a private IP address in a very specific range (192.168.N.N being an example) and give you 1 REAL address on the outside. The NAT device keeps track of everything on the inside and translates it to that one address on the outside. (the outside servers only see that one IP address ) The private addresses, like 192.168.N.n and 10.N.N.n are called non-routable addresses, so in the Internet, you cannot get to 192.168.N, the worlds Internet routers, do not know how to get to them. So this offers you some protection.

The other thing the router does is block traffic from the outside from entering the inside (unless you tell it to let it in and where to go). This is not the purpose of a pure router, but now the standard for the consumer based home routers. This was not always the case, and it is nice to see the adoption of some companies that assume you want to firewall traffic and later open it up instead of coming insecure out of the box. I blame Linksys for this, as I believe they were one of the first to really provide this consumer based NAT firewall device.

This trend is more prevalent in the consumer market, as businesses will more often look for more stable technology because the implemenation failure will cost more than the device itself cost. Technology is interesting, but ....wait for it to mature before slapping down your $$.