Wireless Home

When I was building my first home in the 1990's, I wanted it to be fully wired. Music and telephones in every room, centralized control center and media distribution. I used several miles of various cables, shielded for analog signals, thick, copper, unshielded for loudspeakers, and (luckily) Cat5 UTP (unshielded twisted pair with RJ-45 jacks) for control equipment. And today most of the cables in the walls are not in use anymore. Cat5 and power is what I plug into and it looks like every month I use less and less RJ-45 sockets to connect. Electricity becomes the only wired thing. Almost everything else runs WiFi. Here on the left is a sketch of the devices currently in use.

The flow starts from the telco line ADSL modem, currently running at 4Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream. It used to be 1Mbps service, but after bringing home the Internet Radio, I found out it has to be upgraded. Fortunately, due to the falling prices, the upgrade took the monthly bill down and the speed up (isn't it the way we want all this to be?). The modem is then connected to a Linksys WRT-54GC wireless router. Over several years I have gone through several wireless routers, and Cisco was right, the Linksys seems to be the best in terms of reliability, price and performance. I still have not decided to go for pre-802.11n MIMO hardware, as it requires the other end to support it as well, and I do not have any client 802.11n device.

A Devolo ethernet-over-powerline plug and a Dreambox satellite TV tuner remain the only two wired devices. Both are connected to the Linksys router. The Devolo is a very clever piece of hardware. Based on the HomePlug standard, it injects ethernet signals via the power socket to the power network and delivers networking anywhere within quite a large area. I use a pair of Devolo plugs (the other one with a WiFi card in it) to extend my Internet connection to the garden patio (of course when building the garden patio nobody thought about bringing the Internet there, so now the signals have to travel over the power line).

Dreambox is a Linux-based satellite tuner. Something similar to TiVo, probably more open architecture (thousands of programs for dreamboxes can be found on the Net, even things like an Exchange client, that displays new mail notifications on your TV). In my case it is used as a standalone TV programming "injector” that feeds whatever comes from a satellite dish over to the home ethernet network. The Dreambox has its own hard drive, so is being used as a media storage and a local backup device. Any PC can connect do the Dreambox over WiFi and act as a TV.

Following the media path we may find the SlimDevices music streamer. Mostly being used for playing Pandora radio stations, but this can play music stored on one of the PCs as well (over WiFi of course). On the PC side of the wireless home network there is a wonderful Canon IP5200R printer. Not only it prints gorgeous photos, but does that over WiFi, so any computer in the house can access it. WiFi printer is really something clever. You rarely need more than one printer at home, but if you have a wired one, you have to reconnect it frequently between computers (assuming you have more than one computer, which is very common these days...).

And the story ends with traditional PCs, laptops and tablets. WiFi has taken digital homes by storm and the number of non-PC WiFi-enabled devices is growing - I have yet to buy a WiFi digital camera :)