Remember if you can, advertisements for Wireless G when it was launched. They showed a cross-section of a house and garden, with wireless B coverage in a small red circle that covered most of the house and the Green Wireless G range stretching to the bikini laptop girl by the swimming pool.
While one doesn't expect a new wireless router to provide a swimming pool or laptop bikini girls, back in the day I saw the advantages and spent the extra on a new router, PCMCIA card and a pair of PCI wireless adapters and prepared to live the rock star dream of wireless G networking.
I was rewarded with bandwidth decimating signal strength, and very quickly took up my prize of Cat5 cables run through doorways, across the stairs and everywhere else I didn't want them.
Fastforward to the distant future of 2010 where the picture for wireless N is... You've guessed it a red circle barely escaping the confines of the house representing Wireless-G and a laptop bikini girl enjoying her 300mbps bandwidth Wireless-N on a sun lounger by the pool.
Something is wrong with this picture. Has wireless G got slowly worse over the years, have houses, people and all our worldly goods got much bigger or have we just been lied to about wireless ranges? I fear all of the answers there.
As should now be apparent, my wireless-N router has delivered no blistering bandwidth, increased range or swimming pool. We do have a pond in the garden, and it has frogs, but they don't really factor into the equation when you are trying to stream media from online or from a fileserver in the spare room.
This is the future, where is my internet?
I've got a Wireless-N router, a selection of colour coded Cat5e cables, and a couple of gigabit switches. Its cheap kit and should give excellent performance above and beyond my meagre domestic needs.
To prevent the wireless bottleneck, I'm also equipped with 100Mbit Ethernet-Over-Mains. It does work - gets me about thirty to forty megabit file transfer to the Karmic Koala next to the TV. I'm not sure that Ethernet-Over-Mains is a long term solution, but its functional, easy to install and works even connected to a 30m extension cable, allowing you to run a single line out into the garden that carries power and Ethernet so you can sit next to the pond and google frogs.
I shall revisit this topic once Wireless-N works for me, or I decide to give up on the wireless dream until the next technological breakthrough shows that actually Wireless-N only reaches to the house but Wireless-X will stretch to the laptop bikini girl by the pool.
For now, I will content myself with Ethernet-over-mains, my networking solution to a problem I've created by putting a PC in an awkward location in the house while I divert my attention to finding media to watch - A task in itself and one for another day.
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