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Understanding the Basics

If you're thinking about building a wireless network for your home or office, it pays to do a little planning to ensuree you implement it as securely as possible. Remember how you listened to your next-door neighbor's conversation with her mother-in-law about what happened at last year's 4th of July party on your baby monitor? Like all radio frequencies, anyone with a receiver can tune into a wireless channel, so you need to take extra precautions to prevent to your big-eared neighbor and cybercriminals from listening in.

The primary reason for building a wireless LAN (WLAN) is for increased mobility — so you can move around from room to room without being tethered to a network jack. Another reason people like wireless LANs is because they can network their computers together without having to snake wires through their walls. Since you don't have to deal with the wires, in some regards building a wireless LAN is actually easier than you might think.

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There are all different kinds of wireless protocols used for different types of wireless networks, but if you want to build a WLAN for your home or office the type of protocol you'll want to use is called 802.11b. When you build a wireless network, you are basically setting up a transmitter called an access point that has an antenna on one side and a wire on the other. The wire plugs into a typical wired connection — an Ethernet, a DSL line, cable connection, or dial-up modem. The antenna talks to the wireless network interface card on your computer, sending network traffic from your laptop to an access point. If it sounds confusing, think of your cordless phone. On one end your cordless phone plugs into a wire, while at the same time the antenna on the hand-held receiver transmits to the base station where the wire is plugged in.

Set Up Your Access Point

One of the first things you'll need to do is setup a wireless access point (AP). If you're setting up your wireless network for a business, you'll want to use a more fully featured high-end AP like a Cisco Aironet 350 Series access point. If you're setting up an access point for a home network, a low-end access point such as a Linksys WAP 11 or an Apple AirPort will suffice. Any access point worth its salt has a TCP/IP interface whether you are setting it up for your home or office, which is something to keep in mind when making your purchasing decisions.

When setting up your access point, you'll want to first connect it to the wired hub, then configure the wireless interface, then the wired interface, and last but not least, configure the security. Configuration of the various network interfaces and access point features is different for every vendor. However, if you can read and follow directions, it's possible to do the installation yourself, even if you don't have prior experience. Just open the access point installation and configuration guide and follow along. If you run into snags call the vendor support line list in your access point manual and ask for help. The types of things you'll need to setup include the radio frequency, the distance between access points, and the access point IP address.

Some of the features you can expect to find in either home or enterprise class access points are listed in this table:

Feature	Small Office/Home Office	Large Office
IEEE 802.11b compliance
DHCP Server
Network Address Translation
IPSec Pass Through
IAPP
Site Management Tools
WEP (Security)
TKIP (Security)

You can also use what is known as a wireless station instead of an access point. However, wireless stations may take a bit more work to setup, and I won't be talking about them further in this article.