The impetus for the shift toward the wonderful world of wireless was provided by my wife. She was putting together her own office some distance from where all the computers in the house had been residing more or less comfortably. Thus, I was suddenly faced with a choice: (1) string cabling through the walls, under the house, etc., or (2) go wireless. Now, I'm a pretty technical boy, so given what I knew about the status quo of wireless technology I chose the latter as much out of convenience as curiosity. Besides, I keep hoping to go wireless with my laptop someday, and this would be a good first step.
Before the great wireless fiasco of 2001 began there were four computers sitting in my office: (1) my desktop machine, (2) a dedicated server, (3) my wife's desktop machine and (4) my laptop. All of these were networked through a simple 10 Mbps 3Com hub. All of them could share each other's resources and so forth, and each had appropriate firewall software in place to fend off the veritable horde of attackers that come sniffing about our ports each day. I figured that all I really needed was a single wireless network interface card (NIC) and a wireless access point (WAP), which could be plugged into my existing hub.
Unfortunately, it worked about as well as anything works these days, which is to say it didn't. When I got on the phone with a 3Com sales creature, he managed to cast a rather powerful Confusion spell upon me and convince me that what I really needed was the 3Com Home Wireless Gateway with a wireless NIC. "I neither need nor want DHCP services, network address translation (NAT) or a hardware firewall," I said several times. He carefully and politely assured me again and again that the product did none of these things. Instead, it would do exactly what I wanted, and while it was somewhat expensive (roughly $525 US), it really was the only way to go for my situation.
<Dr. Evil>Right.</Dr. Evil>
Upon receiving the unit, I couldn't help but notice—roughly on the first page of the manual, I think—that the sales creature was either ignorant or lying. As is so often the case with sales creatures, I can't really tell the difference, and thus I've decided out of charity to assume simply that he was ignorant. That seems the kindest thing to do. Naturally, the device does all of the things he said it wouldn't, and the corollary to this, of course, is that it isn't designed at all to be used in the way I desired, though it supposedly can work as a "dumb" WAP with some fussing about.
A "dumb" WAP is not at all what the 3Com Home Wireless Gateway (HWG) is intended to be. Rather, it is intended as a one-stop solution for small home networks. One's broadband (cable or DSL) modem is plugged into the WAN port, up to three wired machines may be plugged into its three LAN ports, and some ridiculous number (35, I think) of wireless computers can then link up sans cabling. When operating as intended, the unit will snag a single IP address from one's ISP, then provide faux IP addresses to all the computers it services. The end result is pretty neat: every computer connected can share a single broadband connection and IP address behind a somewhat functional hardware firewall while sharing files locally with aplomb. The device is even configured from a very nicely done web page provided by the unit—how handy is that?! In short, the 3Com HWG sure seems like a real gem for people who need it.
When I discovered that it did so much more than I needed, I called 3Com technical support to talk to them about how I might be able to integrate it in the desired fashion with my existing network. The bulk of what I got from that phone call was that I'd been had by the 3Com sales creature, but that I could use the device as a "dumb" WAP if I disabled its DHCP, NAT and firewall logging, then plugged one of its LAN ports into my existing hub with a crossover cable. It seems I was entirely correct in the first place: all I really needed was a WAP and a wireless NIC. So, I figured I'd just send back the 3Com HWG within the 30-day no-questions-asked grace period one gets when buying directly from 3Com.
Having made that decision, and since us folks in California have it pretty good when it comes to this kind of stuff, I went to my local Fry's Electronics on Saturday and bought a Linksys WAP for about $179, roughly one-third of what the 3Com HWG cost me. Upon bringing it home, I unpacked it and read the directions. Yes, some of us geeks actually do read the manuals. According to the documentation, I could configure it using either an included SNMP management utility or by plugging it into a USB port. I figured it was kind of important that I get it plugged in and configured before I went to install the wireless NIC because it said in the wireless NIC instructions—yes, I really did read those too—that it would need to know the "name" or SSID of the station to which it was to connect in order to work.
So, I plugged the Linksys WAP into my 3Com hub, installed the SNMP management utility, and tried to configure my new WAP. In keeping with the general tone for the whole wireless thing thus far, the utility failed to connect to the device. Interestingly enough, the utility provides a function to find WAPs on the network, and it easily found mine every time I tried. Unfortunately, it couldn't connect to it immediately after finding it. Nice. I wish I could say this was the last time "look but don't touch" pops up in this little saga, but I cannot. More on that later.
After trying a half-dozen times with no success, I decided to call the Linksys technical support line. Yes, I realize that I could have simply plugged it into a USB port, but I've had so many problems with USB that even the entire wireless snafu looks like a walk in the park by comparison. I wasn't going to use the USB port unless I absolutely had to do so. Foreshadowing: sign of quality films and literature everywhere. When I called Linksys, I was connected to some fellow with an Indian (dot, not feather) or perhaps Pakistani accent and a completely unpronounceable name who, I'm sad to say, knew roughly nothing about the products he was allegedly supporting.
I tried to explain to this fellow for nearly twenty minutes what my problem was. His suggestions ranged from the merely asinine ("Sir, you must install the SNMP management utility!") to the utterly moronic ("Try moving the access point around the room to get a better signal."). No matter what I said, this clown just didn't seem to understand that I had yet to install any wireless NIC; rather, I was simply trying to configure the WAP using its Ethernet connection. And he didn't seem to understand that I needed the proper SSID to have any hope of my wireless card connecting before I installed the card.
After almost twenty minutes I think the proverbial light bulb finally went on above his head. Unfortunately, I think it may have wilted whatever functional brain cells he may have possessed. Or at least that's all I can conclude given his next line of response: what I was trying to do simply could not be done. I was using the product incorrectly. Ah yes, now that seems reasonable, doesn't it? Despite what the hard-copy manual, the electronic documentation, the readme files, the software and even the blasted packaging clearly indicate, I was trying to do what couldn't be done! After trying to explain to him for another four or five minutes precisely how and why he was incorrect, he gave up and suggested I call back. This chap was not only useless as a support technician, he could not even put my call back into the queue because he didn't know how to work his own telephone!
At this point, things weren't looking good for Linksys, no sir. When I called back, however, I spoke with an obviously older black woman whose intelligence was not only luminous by comparison, her attitude was far more useful as well. I wish I had a clue how to spell her name properly so that I could give her credit, but all I can say is that it sounded phonetically like "sha tah lah nee kwa" for what it's worth. She understood within the first few moments precisely what I was after. Unfortunately, she too took the low road and told me that it just couldn't be done. When I insisted that every possible indication shows her to be wrong, she helpfully transferred me to her supervisor. How about that! She could work her own phone!
I knew that I was finally headed in the right direction. And sure enough, her supervisor was similarly quick on the uptake, and to his credit he was also familiar with the documentation for the product he is supposed to support. Imagine that. Further, he agreed that what I was doing was not only possible, it was indeed supported by the device, and I was doing everything correctly. After some time on the telephone, however, he couldn't explain why it wasn't working and suggested that my only option, for whatever reason, was to use the USB port.
By now I was tired of wasting time on it, so I gave up and plugged the WAP into the USB port as he suggested. With my luck thus far, I kind of expected my machine to go nuclear and explode. Nevertheless, it actually worked. Obviously, I could have saved myself a lot of effort, but I wouldn't have learned such interesting things about Linksys' support, would I? With the unit finally responding, I was able to configure it easily and install the 3Com wireless NIC without incident. My wife's computer came up with the new NIC in place and located the WAP on the first attempt. Unfortunately, while her machine could access the Internet, none of her local network connections were restored. When I attempted to browse Network Neighborhood, I discovered why: not one other machine was on the network. Neat.
Fortunately, I remembered rather quickly that Microsoft Windows 98, in yet another example of purely mindless design, never bothers to install the protocol it needs quite desperately to make its own Network Neighborhood function, namely, NetBEUI. Once I corrected this stupid oversight, all of the other machines appeared in the network and my wife's computer restored its connections the very next time I restarted it. Success! I finally had a wireless client on my network!
Too bad that all my tests indicated I was getting less than a paltry 2 Mbps of the 11 Mbps maximum throughput of this fine equipment. Oops. In my book, 18% is a failing grade no matter the subject. And for the record, the computer with the wireless NIC was sitting less than four feet with a clear (i.e., completely unblocked) line of sight to the WAP. Nice. If I was getting less than 2 Mbps of throughput at this range, what could I likely expect when I moved the machine across the house? This wasn't promising. Surprisingly, however, and without any rational explanation, moving the computer across the house actually improved the performance to roughly 3 Mbps, which is the best I saw with it all weekend. Go figure.
At this point, I figured that maybe I was experiencing some kind of interoptability problem between the 3Com AirConnect wireless NIC and the Linksys WAP. To test this hypothesis, I figured I would put the 3Com HWG in place in their suggested configuration just to see what kind of throughput I could achieve. If it turned out much better numbers, then I could assume an interoptability problem and try to buy a complete solution from a single vendor.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make the 3Com unit work at all. I installed it exactly as described in the manual. The lights on its front panel indicated that it had a WAN connection and three LAN connections, and I suspected it might also have a wireless connection as well, though I could not yet prove this. The problems were threefold: (1) I could not access the unit's configuration settings at all (deja vu!), (2) none of my computers could "see" each other on the network, and (3) none of the machines had Internet access.
Rather than spend hours fussing with it myself, I decided to call 3Com and make use of their wonderful technical support. When I called, I was routed quickly to a different 3Com support representative, Sharon, who had a delightful English accent, and with her help I was finally able to get my web browser connected to the thing and configured it for use. Interestingly enough, she was as baffled as I was that nothing seemed to work. Even the hardware reset switch did absolutely nothing. At one point, we swapped out the 3Com unit for the Linksys unit to make sure my computers hadn't gone completely haywire (they hadn't), and when we swapped things back, the 3Com unit was talking to us. Go figure. A pity it took us roughly three hours to get to that point (sigh).
Anyway, with a connection to the unit established, we could easily enable all of the unit's features. For some unexplained reason DHCP, NAT, and the firewall were all disabled instead of being enabled as they should be by default. Once these features were all enabled, however, all of the machines on the network were able to hook up and access the Internet. What a joyous occasion! I thanked the representative and hung up, figuring I could finally do some throughput testing.
Oh how soon they forget! My first test showed that all three of the machines connected to the HWG by physical cables could see each other, copy files, etc. And stepping up from my old 10 Mbps hub was a joy. I could now copy a 135 MB file in mere seconds! That's some serious network speed. When I tried to access my wife's machine, which was now across the house and connected via the wireless NIC, all three of the hard-wired machines could "see" it (i.e., it showed up in Network Neighborhood), but not one of them could access any of its shares. Trying to open or explore her machine resulted in an error message stating that the device was not on the network despite its being listed as part of the network. Again we're back to "look but don't touch". Asymmetrically enough, and stranger still, things were even worse on my wife's end: her machine refused even to "see" any of the hardwired machines, let alone talk to them. Not one of the machines could be found at all from her end, even when searching for them explicitly by name, IP address, etc.
I called the same 3Com support representative again, and this time she was utterly baffled, particularly because my wife's machine could successfully ping every other computer on the network despite its inability to "see" or access them. We tried everything she and I could think of, from just twiddling a few parameters here and there to completely reconfiguring the network properties for all of the various machines. Nothing worked. After a few more hours, she escalated the incident by bringing a co-worker in on the case, but nothing he said helped either. In short, the very most basic features of the HWG unit ranged from difficult to impossible to use.
Since I had been completely unable to get the 3Com unit to work, and the Linksys unit was providing less than stellar throughput, I decided to head to my local Fry's Electronics yet again in order to acquire some further components for testing. Unfortunately, Fry's didn't carry a Linksys NIC. They had dozens of the PC Card version, but none of the PCI card version. So, after speaking with a member of Fry's technical staff, who actually seemed to know what he was talking about, I settled on purchasing an entirely new access point and wireless NIC from a third company, SMC.
When I got home, I first removed the 3Com NIC from my wife's computer and replaced it with the new card from SMC. To SMC's credit, it just worked. I would probably have been in trouble if I hadn't read the manual, as I wouldn't have had a clue how to configure some of the settings, but as we've established previously I actually read the bloody things. My wife's computer had to reboot once after installing the hardware and once more after I tweaked the network settings. After the second reboot, however, all of her local network connections were re-established, and everything seemed to be just fine. Sadly, my benchmark tests revealed that I had achieved no speedup whatsoever; the machine was still getting between 2 - 3 Mbps of overall throughput.
After recording the benchmark data, I went back into the other office and disabled the Linksys WAP, replacing it with the SMC WAP. This is where the trouble begins with SMC. To be more specific, the device was just about impossible to configure. SMC takes an approach quite similar to 3Com's insofar as their WAP may be configured with a web browser. The connection must be made, however, via a little WLAN AP Utility that they provide with the WAP. When I launched the utility, it found the WAP without a hitch. When I double-clicked on the WAP it found, the WAP successfully snagged itself a temporary IP address from my ISP so that my browser could connect to it. When I next double-clicked on the WAP in the WLAN AP Utility, my default web browser (Internet Explorer I'm sad to say) launched and tried to connect to the device. No joy.
After several attempts to connect to the device, I turned to the manual and read the troubleshooting section. In it, SMC provides a list of things to try before contacting support. The first relevant item was to perform a hard reset on the unit, which I performed. Given my success rate thus far, I was honestly quite skeptical that anything would change. But I was wrong. The next time I tried to connect to the unit with my web browser it worked. I was greeted with a logon screen.
Unfortunately my troubles weren't yet over. After entering the manual-supplied default name and password, the next page of the configuration utility timed out. Clicking the browser's refresh button did nothing. And trying to connect to the unit again failed, despite the fact that the WLAN AP Utility could find the unit and reported its status as "OK". Several times I performed a hard reset on the device and got to various points in the configuration process before experiencing such a timeout. Lovely.
Hey, it was about time to evaluate SMC's technical support anyway, right? I called and after a few minutes on hold was connected to a woman named Erin, who seemed both relatively competent and helpful. After listening to my configuration problem, Erin had me update the unit's firmware, which I was about ready to do myself anyway. I had simply held off until speaking with the support department in light of other experiences in which support representatives immediately disavow any responsibility for a product once the user has had the gall to update it's BIOS/firmware/etc.
Updating both the firmware and the web image seemed to make at least some difference. I was able to get much further into the configuration process. After getting the WAP configured, it was time to do some benchmarking. Given the general reliability of wireless components experienced thus far, I figured I would keep Erin on the line for a moment or two—just in case. My serendipitous paranoia was rewarded a moment later when my wife's machine couldn't connect at all to the WAP. No matter what we tried, it just wouldn't connect. Eventually we discovered that the SMC WAP had pretty much stopped responding to the outside world at all. It wasn't even detected by their WLAN AP Utility.
After yet another hard reset I was back in my wife's office. After a successful attempt to renew the NIC's IP address, I was able to browse Network Neighborhood. All of the computers in the house appeared. Upon attempting to browse an individual machine, however, I was told that the device did not exist on the network. Yes, I did want to scream at this point. Over the course of the next hour and a half Erin and I observed all kinds of bizarre behavior. Once I was even able to access my server's shared folders long enough to copy a file. Of course, the copied file was bogus—without any error messages, I might add from Windows or anything else—and the connection was dropped an instant later, after which another hard reset of the WAP was required even to connect again.
As Erin had to let me go, she brought the support session to a close by suggesting that I was probably just unlucky enough to have received a bad unit. She suggested that I exchange it for a different one at Fry's Electronics and try again, asking if I would be sure to let her know how it all works out. Note well, however, that she could not explain why I would be getting such poor performance with their card and a Linksys access point in the first place. And further, though she kept insisting that a functional SMC WAP would give much better performance than I'd seen to date, I wasn't finding this suggestion particularly credible for obvious reasons.
Despite my skepticism, I figured I would give Erin the benefit of the doubt. Thus, I went back to Fry's Electronics the next day and exchanged the allegedly defective SMC WAP for another unit. Upon arriving home, I put the new SMC WAP in place and tried to configure it. Frighteningly enough, I could actually configure the unit. I thought this was a rather good sign. It gave me hope that maybe, just maybe I'd just gotten one bad component and had finally found a vendor whose products would just work.
Have no fear, dear reader, that hope was crushed just as quickly as it had appeared. When I fired up my wife's machine, the wireless card could not connect to the new SMC WAP at all. I tried several things before discovering that the SMC WAP had stopped responding to the outside world. After a hard reset of the unit, it was now being found by the WLAN AP Utility, but it was completely rejecting any communication with any web browser. In other words, the WAP could no longer be configured at all.
Still, my wife's computer could now connect to it, and I figured it would at least be worth running some benchmarking tests. I still think I was right; i.e., it sure would have been worthwhile. Too bad I couldn't copy so much as a single file larger than roughly 2 MB. Bizarre as it sounds, I could successfully copy files of roughly 2 MB or less in size. But each time I tried to copy a larger file from other computers to the hard drive of the wireless PC, the file copy would get to something like 99% complete and then never finish. All the while, Windows Explorer would show more and more ridiculous times left to completion. There's nothing quite like being told that copying will take a mere 7,512,223,116 minutes to complete. That seems like a long time to me, but maybe I'm just not patient enough.
At this point, I called SMC technical support and spoke to another quite helpful fellow. After listening to my tales of woe and trying a couple of things, he suggested quite candidly that if the Linksys WAP works, then I should stick with that. It's really quite refreshing to hear a vendor's own technical support staff putting the needs of the customer above the needs of the company. It's a pity that I couldn't ever get the SMC products to work together properly. It would have been interesting to see what kind of throughput a single-vendor solution could achieve.
After having written the final line in that previous paragraph, I decided I wasn't done yet. As fate would have it, the local Fry's Electronics was having a pretty big sale on all their networking components. And it occurred to me that I could test a single-vendor solution despite the lack of an available PCI version of a Linksys wireless NIC. Thus, I went back to Fry's and bought one of the PC Card wireless NICs for my laptop very cheaply (roughly $80) as such things go.
Sadly, testing indicates that a single-vendor solution is not the desired "silver bullet", though it does have some benefits. The main strength of Linksys equipment, and the reason I shall surely be buying much more from that vendor, is that it just works. Save for the configuration problem with the Linksys WAP, I have had no problems with their gear. With the PC Card, for example, I brought it home, removed the existing 3Com network/modem combo card from my laptop and substituted the Linksys device in its place. The PC Card was detected and installed without a hitch. After two reboots and some re-configuration, my laptop computer was wireless. Note well: Microsoft's claims to the contrary, things are not normally so easy with a machine running Windows 95 OEMSR2.
What's more, I haven't had a single problem finding machines on the network, finding files, copying files, etc. The network just works as it should without any fussing around. Buying from a single vendor, or more specifically buying from Linksys, seems to eliminate any problems in making use of the most basic functions. That's more than either the 3Com HWG or the SMC WAP seem capable of doing.
The reason a complete Linksys solution is not a "silver bullet" is simple: it is impossible to get anything remotely approaching the performance specified by the manufacturer. If I place the laptop computer such that its antenna is literally less than a single inch from the antenna of the Linksys WAP, the best throughput I get is around 6 Mbps on an 11 Mbps link. For what it's worth, I see slightly less than this throughput (around 5 Mbps) within a five foot radius of the WAP, within which the laptop generally sits anyway. When I take the laptop to my wife's office, however, I see the same connection problems and poor throughput as I do with the 3Com NIC in her machine.
This wouldn't trouble me so much if the various vendors involved didn't all trumpet their systems' abilities to provide 11 Mbps of throughput at distances as absurd as ninety feet! Again, <Dr. Evil>right.</Dr. Evil> My own testing indicates that no matter what channel is in use, even the slowest connection is basically impossible at distances of roughly thirty feet or more. And for sake of reference, I do not have a 2.4 GHz. cordless phone, the walls of my house are not laced with lead to prevent Superman from peeking in on us, etc. In short, only one of three products seems to work at all, and it performs (at best) at roughly one-half to one-fourth the promised bandwidth at roughly one-third the promised range. Talk about false advertising!
As matters stand at present, 3Com is busily escalating this incident up the technical support food chain. The next representative along the death march to wireless oblivion, Gavin, called me on 4/24/01 and took yet more information about each machine on my network. He didn't even try to offer an explanation or solution aside from pointing out that he had seen some evidence of these kinds of problems in the past. But my situation, he seemed perversely proud to observe, was the first firmly confirmed case of such an array of problems. Oh goody. I do so love being the pioneer. Is that curious sensation between my shoulder blades merely an itch, or have I perchance received yet another arrow in the back?
I've told 3Com that I have no intention of keeping their unit at this point, but that I will do whatever I can to help them debug the problem. At least, I will until I'm running up against the edges of my 30-day money-back window. They have been nothing but cordial about it, and they have pledged to take the case all the way up their staff of engineers to God himself, I suppose, if I am willing to help them. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: 3Com has just about the best technical support in the industry. Their products sure do cost more, but they never leave me hanging on hold, they usually know what they're talking about and, perhaps most importantly they want to do The Right Thing™. Of course, I haven't heard a single thing since Gavin called me, so maybe they're just going to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. I'll have to send the unit back in about another day, so I doubt whether anything will be resolved.
I'm still not particularly satisfied with the Linksys WAP for obvious reasons. For better or worse, however, they are the only vendor whose products seem to work. Because of this, I've pulled even the 3Com wireless NIC from my wife's machine and replaced it with a Linksys wireless NIC. The signal quality and throughput seem roughly the same, although the monitoring and configuration utility shows more detailed statistics. Despite my disappointment over the available bandwidth, my choice seems to be either to use Linksys equipment or fiddle about trying to run cabling through the house. Given that my favorite handyman tells me that doing this would be a real pain in the rear due to certain features of our house, I guess I'm going to stick with a Linksys-powered wireless solution. The lessons I take away from this whole story, then, are as follows:
What I wonder most of all, as is so often the case when I run into such problems, is this: how does the average user cope? I built my first computer when I was twelve years old, and I mean built; i.e., it was assembled from resistors, capacitors, IC chips, etc. Since then I've built more computers than I care to count (though always at the component-assembly level today, thank you very much), and I've written all kinds of software from miniature operating systems to productivity applications, engineering tools and even video games. If I'm having this much trouble getting products from three different vendors to perform even the most basic of functions, then what hope remains for the technologically challenged?
05/02/2001