Is There A Simple Solution To Networking Your Home?

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Umm, no I have a squeezbox, three laptops, wireless printing and a central PC for control. I run streaming music through two laptops at once with no issue, run Citrix sessions whilst streaming music - as well as have a consistent VPN session etc.

You're actually not doing all that much with your wireless network.
* Streaming music, while performance sensitive, is only going to be using about 256kbps. Even with two of them running, and factoring in collision, you're going to be well under the 1Mbps mark. (Assuming you're streaming compressed stereo signals, not raw wave data or surround sound). Streaming music is nothing compared to video.
* Print jobs are not performance critical. They'll happily retransmit the packets until all the data arrives. Most printers have crap processors in them anyway, so you'll always spend longer rendering the job than transmitting it. (Assuming you don't have a high-end multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars printer)
* RDP-style apps and VPN are made to run over unreliable links. Try using VNC (with all the options enabled) over your wireless network, and you'll see what good protocol design is doing for you. Citrix and MSRDP are extremely low bandwidth applications: they work by bundling and transmitting the raw gui requests, not the screen data. All the rendering is done on the client side.

Don't forget that 802.11g is able to go at 54Mbps - that's nothing to be sneezed at. It depends heavily on your environment though. Most people should only expect 20Mbps though, and if you've got brick, concrete or non-wooden-frame construction, you better be happy with about 10-15Mbps even between adjacent rooms.

Maybe I'm lazy, however the school of though in my brain exists to say 'once the application requires it, the technology enablement will deliver'. That pretty much means that there are a huge number of houses that exist already that will require solutions to allow them to take advantage of the next wave of media streaming and availability. Therefore, next generation wireless will HAVE to deliver - and I have no doubt it will.

No - believe me: There's no magical technology coming (I really do know what I'm talking about here). Everyone's sights are set on getting 802.11n finished at the moment. They can approximately double the speed of current (11g) wireless technology just by reversing a bunch of brain-dead decisions they made back in the early days. They can get a bit more out by upping the power a little (but not too much). To get higher bandwidth beyond that, they need to increase the frequency of the signal (see "Shannon's Law" link in my previous post for details - the problem is that it's impossible to reduce the "N" part of the equation unless you put your house in a magnetic cage). They're doubling the frequency for 11n.

As the frequency of microwaves increases, their permeability in air is reduced (it improves again up around the visible spectrum, but then you can't get through walls, and it would be a bit annoying having the room light up everytime someone transmits data :)). Wireless may get up to Gbps rates eventually, but it's going to take a long time, and I doubt most users will ever see past a couple of hundred Mbps, because they don't want wireless technology to dictate the materials from which their houses are built.
 
And not forgetting the difference between Baud rate and Bit rate

Baud rate is the amount of signaling bits per second/time period

Bit rate is how many bits are passed per second ( or time period )

In modems the speed is given as Baud rate ie 9600 signaling bits per second.

The Bit rate will be higher due to the fact that you can send several data bits over a single signaling bit

Rather simple... B)
 
But they're more related than you'd think, according to Shannon's Law. The maximum data rate (bps) that can be transmitted in a noise-free environment is equal to to the frequency of the analogue signal on which it is encoded (Hz). Cool, huh?

True, but I was referring to the concept that multiple bits are encoded (modulated) onto a signal change, something that many many people don't grasp. The number of bits encoded per change multiplied by the baud rate = the bit rate. This can be roughly illustrated using IEEE 802.11b which used different encoding techniques to achieve different bit rates : At the basic-rate of 1 Mbit/s, it uses DBPSK; 2 Mbit/s, DQPSK is used; for 5.5 Mbit/s and 11 Mbit/s, QPSK is employed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitrate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud

Can someone bring this thread back on track? B)
 
Yes... all of this doesn't sound like a simple solution to me :)
 
I thought the whole point of the "Offtopic" forum was to see how far we can move from the original question :D
 
You can also buy Lan adapters that plug into a power point.

Motels use them instead of wireless or re-cabling the Motel

While this has been proven to work well and there is a choice of 85mbit or 200mbit.
They do have a flaw.
Think of your power box, if you have every GPO on one circut breaker then a link will be possible in every room. But most houses have at least two seperate GPO Circuts and this is where it fails. It only works accross a Single circut, It is possible to bridge circuts with a pair one connected to Circut one and one to circut two but if these GPO's are in seperate rooms it kinda defeats the purpose. I looked into this at my previous house and went wireless. But upon building my new house new i wanted RJ45 in all rooms. RJ45 Sockets + CAT5 can transfer audio and video aswell very well upto 200m.

Wireless is the most simple but anything above surfing the net, VPN, RDP (works on 56k!!) listerning to even 512k MP3's you are going to have troubles especially if you get into SD and even worse HDTV streaming.
 
While this has been proven to work well and there is a choice of 85mbit or 200mbit.
They do have a flaw.

Yeah - I've always found the networking over power-lines intriguing, but don't know much about it myself. I've always wondered how they'd handle surges. I assume they transmit with a high-frequency, low voltage signal superimposed on the 50Hz signal, and I can't for the life of me work out how they'd get them to isolate the low-voltage circuitry when things went awry. Then again, my knowledge of AC is pretty weak.

I seem to remember hearing that some company in Germany was installing WAN links across the power grid. That was ages ago, too. That's also a pretty cool idea.
 
TransGrid, Country Energy and all other electricity supliers have been running Data,Voice and telemetry over power High Voltage (11 & 33Kv )lines for decades. The older systems where basically good old fashioned FDM ( Freq Division Multiplexing ) carrier systems. All they did was to filter the Cct and have 50Hz one side and the carrier the other. Surges dont have any effect because you are dealing with frequency.

Newer systems use more complex high freq modulation techniques...And it is very dirty with regard to the RF Spectrum

Linky --> http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310024
 
TransGrid, Country Energy and all other electricity supliers have been running Data,Voice and telemetry over power High Voltage (11 & 33Kv )lines for decades. The older systems where basically good old fashioned FDM ( Freq Division Multiplexing ) carrier systems. All they did was to filter the Cct and have 50Hz one side and the carrier the other. Surges dont have any effect because you are dealing with frequency.

Newer systems use more complex high freq modulation techniques...And it is very dirty with regard to the RF Spectrum

Linky --> http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310024


I think Queanbeyan had a trial of internet over power lines and sending between friends were ment to be pretty fast!!
 

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