I’m seriously considering reverting to a wired network. Not intending to drop the wifi entirely, but it seems that it doesn’t present the stability and reliability that I’ve come to expect.
A large part of this is down to the adaptors and aerials used by the system. Of course, no two devices are from the same manufacturer, so I can’t really expect complete integration without problems. Come to think of it, no two devices are actually running on the same platform (Win XP, Vista, 7, Mobile 6, and whatever variant of Linux is running on the actual router). I suppose it’s a miracle that they manage to talk at all.
It’s not that connections to the router show any difficulties (apart from the USB stick wifi adaptor on the Win XP box – but that seems to fall out of the USB port if you even glance at it – this takes the concept of quick release to new heights). But I also need to copy data between devices, and this is where it falls down. Speeds are nothing short of appalling, less than the broadband link would be expected to support, and without a properly managed DHCP/DNS on a server, even finding the other boxes can be tricky.
So do I really want to return to the rat’s nest of cables stuffed behind desks and book cases? No, but I may not have the choice. Unless I can sort out a no-cost (and most especially no-extra-box) solution, it will have to be back to wires everywhere.
The real negative, though, is going to be that the router will have to move. It’s currently connected directly into the BT master socket, for best broadband performance. But the no-extra-box constraint means that I can’t use a switch in the study, so the router will have to move up there and serve, with a likely drop in WAN access speeds. And that’s not something that I really want to see happening.
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