There's More To Life

(Than a 50’ Ethernet Cable)


Ahem....I have an announcement to make...


WE HAVE WIRELESS INTERNET ON ST. SIMONS ISLAND.


Our condo was built in the dark ages of TV and telecommunications in the early 1970’s. All of the old farts and miscellaneous geezers that have lived here before us were apparently happy with two TV’s and two telephones, because that’s how many connections to the outside world were included in the building when we moved in.

Since Pat’s office was in the other end of the building from the primary CATV jack in the master bedroom, we have spent a year living with a 50’ CAT5 cable connected to our cable modem and spanning through the living room and kitchen, across the sun porch, and into the second bedroom home office. The cable also presented a tripping hazard when we used Pat’s Dell notebook on the weekends in the living room and we’ve about wore the connectors on each end out plugging and unplugging endlessly over the past 12 months. I have become an expert at jumping rope using the cable as a rope.

I’ve been relegated to dragging around a 25’ phone line from the wall phone jack in the kitchen to my old Dell laptop on weekdays when Pat was working in town and dialing up at 45 Kbaud when she was out of town because I was too cheep and lazy to do anything like install a router/wireless network. I verged on having a nervous breakdown several times each week making the transition from 100 Mbaud to 45Kbaud. We considered using two Dixie cups and a really long string as an intercom, but I just couldn’t fathom one more wire in my life to stumble over.

The real reason for the delay in installing a wireless network was my concern about standards and desire to not compromise speed in the process. Why have a cable modem if your network and router cuts the speed by half to two-thirds? Why pay $300 for a network when a $30 cable provides a fast yet unelloquent solution? OK, OK, maybe I was just cheep.

Much of my trouble has been remedied this week with the installation of a Linksys WRT54GS 802.11g wireless router. I dumped the Voice Over IP idea for the time being when I found out I could add it in the future for free (they give away the hardware when you sign up for the service.) It only took me about four hours to get the hardware installed and figure out how to clone our MAC address. $130 with rebates—such a deal.

This stuff isn’t intuitive to a non-network geek like myself since the people that write the instructions seem to think everyone already knows the meaning of all of the acronyms and the cable company just throws a cable modem in your front door and runs for the hills. It didn’t help that the cable modem had been installed 365 days and several million-brain cells ago.

The real pain in the arse was the fact that Pat’s company Dell doesn’t have a CD drive because her old boss KEPT it when they fired him before she inherited the machine. Naturally you had to connect to the Internet through the cable modem and router to do the installation and the CD drive on my old Dell was of no use whatsoever. I was ready to throw both computers and the new hardware out in the parking lot about ten minutes after I started installation. I turned my attention to cooking dinner and after dining on Blue Cheese Stuffed Hamburgers and crispy homemade potato chips, I approached the project with renewed enthusiasm. I surfed over to the Linksys website and managed to find a copy of the installation software that I could download.

The router was up and running in about fifteen minutes after pulling the software off of the web. The wireless card in my notebook was another situation entirely. I got it installed easy enough with 128 bit WEP encryption, changed the network SSID, turned off the broadcast feature, sat back and...nothing. I could find the access point and I had a good signal, but the Internet was nowhere to be found. The Adelphia web site was of no help, but I found a really good article on the Linksys site about setting up multiple computers with an Adelphia cable modem. Once I found the article, it only took about another fifteen minutes before I had an Internet connection with no wires. I walked outside the front door and froze my butt off (it’s 45 degrees tonight) and checked my E-mail just for the heck of it.

In the words of Martin Luther King…free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.