Or even simply walls full of cat 5 cable :-)
Or radiators, or the fact you have metal lath render everywhere, or even as I discovered FOIL BACKED PLASTERBOARD.
I haven't tested it at gigahertz frequency, but at model plane 35Mhz frequencies, what should be 30 meters plus range, is less than 3 inside the house...
But you are obviously pretty well clued up about the risks and have the skills and knowledge required to lock, and keep locked, access to your system(s).
The vast majority of computer users out there simply do not have the skills and knowledge to secure their systems even *if* they realised they where vulnerable in the first place.
In the phone socket at the end of the drive analogy you have the one inside a locked steel cabinat with fully itemised bills that you (can) check so if some one does come along with specialist tools (croc clips) the chances are they won't more than 1/4s worth of free calls out of you.
Me too
Wireless is a timesaver in installation terms; you pay for that convenience in a few ways. Up-front cost is one; hassles to make it less rampantly insecure another; no upgradeability for performance is a third. (Put in Cat5 or similar, use 10/100 MBit right now and Gbit some time later if streaming digitised video round the house becomes your bag. Yes, you need to replace the kit at both ends of the wire - though not all of it, as you can expect auto-negotiation to allow slow and fast to coexist, as it does now if you buy a switch rather than a hub - and prices have now come down so there's just no point buying a hub rather than a simple switch.)
For those who keep moving from one house/flat to the next, wireless makes good sense. For those who are doing the medium-term owner-occupier thing, or wiring for their small business, the flexibility of wired is almost always a Win.
HTH - Stekef
You might be able to add a cheap backbox to that to flush mount it in the wall, and still be cheaper than buying all parts separately.
F./
I can comment on both fixed wiring and wavelan.
First wavelan: put it in at my new rented house for the laptop's benefit. Server and my PC are adjacent so wired at 100Mbit/s. Got the D-Link Airplus Xtreme G 802.11b/g which is good for "marketing speeds" of
54Mbit/s which is as everyone knows, are total b***ocks as a useful indicator - actual speed of moving your data around (ie without the TCP/link layer overhead is more like 10-15Mbit/s, sometimes a bit higher. Anything claiming 108 MBit/s isn't following any ratified standard - it's bonding 2 channels together in a proprietry way. So one company's 108 may not play with another comapany's 108 device.All said and done though, 54=10-15 is more than enough to play streaming video at good quality. Depends on your useage - you wouldn't want to boot your operating system over it though.
There's another standard called 802.11a - works in the 5GHz spectrum rather than 2.4 GHz - also 54 Mbit/s. Be wary - it's not the favoured standard - people are moving more towards "g" including Apple. It also has poor penetration of even drywalls (at work we tried this and 3 drywalls kill the signal totally, 2 degrades badly but just about viable).
Conversly, "g" seems to get through 3 walls and well down the garden at full stength so I'm happy with it - even with a DECT phone and dodgey old microwave on (latter since exploded, RIP :-(
Lots of folks have mentioned the security issues.
I live in a village cul-de-sac - I don't expect wardrivers regularly and I don't much mind if the neighbours or Joe Random borrow the signal occasionally.
If you live in a town, this is likely to be more troublesome. WEP security (the one any unit will do) is piss poor and hackable in fairly short times by someone with a laptop.
MAC address restriction is OK - simple to set up, nothing funky to do on the client PC. Can be got round fairly easily - but enough to put off the casual eavsdropper. Doesn't stop people looking at what you're up to though if they really want to.
And now there's WPA - which is better but support in software is fairly new (= might not work).
All in, I'm happy with Wavelan. If I were doing anything *really* sensitive, I'd a) not be using Wavelan and b) if I were, I'd be using additional encryption on the PC that GCHQ would have difficulty with - not to mention a chicken wire faraday cage roun the monitor and of course a tinfoil hat ;-o
Don't forget though, that your online banking and such like should be using HTTPS which give an encrypted connection from the web browser to the server regardless of transmission medium - so no need to worry about that.
On the wired point front, I got my CAT 5 (previous flat, was doing cabling for phones anyway) from B&Q. I used the Euromod plate range which allowed me to clip in a mixture of CAT 5 RJ45, BT phone sockets and even a coax socket for the TV. Alas B&Q seem to not do the Euromod range anymore - dare say CPC do. RS do, but RS are usually expensive.
HTH
Timbo
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.