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Project 20
Bridging a Gap,
Wirelessly
What You’ll Need
- A wireless bridge—aka gaming adapter
- Your computers with web browsers
Cost: $30–60 for wireless gaming adapter
For some of us, it is relatively easy to expand our network with wires. We “simply”
crawl under the house or in the attic, run some new wires, drill a few holes, install
a couple of RJ-45 jacks, plug in, and go. For many people—apartment dwellers,
house renters, locations with impenetrable ceilings and walls—expanding a network
connection that requires wires at both ends is at least a challenge, if not impossible.
While a laptop may network wirelessly over relatively short distances, walls,
pipes, electrical cabling, and distance can inhibit connectivity. Taking an example from
popular gaming consoles which have only a wired Ethernet port, some computing
devices such as network-capable printers, simply do not connect and network without
an Ethernet cable. A solution is to use Wi-Fi hardware to extend your network as far
as you can without wires, and then return to wires using the wireless bridge where
necessary.
Typically, you would specifically look for a pair of wireless bridges—devices designed
to “bridge the gap”—but these devices are usually not in stock at even the most
geeky of electronics stores. If you already have Wi-Fi capability at one end of your
network, you can bridge the gap by adding just one easy-to-find device—a wireless
gaming adapter. As much by coincidence as luck in picking a low-cost solution to try,
I discovered that the D-Link DGL-3420 Wireless 108AG Gaming Adapter, shown in
Figure 20-1, will stretch my LAN.
Figure 20-1
The D-Link Gaming
Adapter is a small but
powerful addition to
your home network.
By adding a wireless gaming adapter as a network bridge, you can extend your
network well beyond just a length of wire or the range of wireless to include other
wired PCs distant from the main connection point, similar to the network schematic
shown in Figure 20-2. This too can be expanded on with additional bridges, as described
in Project 21.Figure 20-1
Project 21
Expanding
Beyond the
Bridge
What You’ll Need
- A wireless bridge—aka gaming adapter
- Leftover nonwireless router from Project 2
- Your computers with web browsers
Cost: $0
Now that we’ve wirelessly jumped a huge span of real estate from one end of
the house to the other in Project 20, we can reintroduce wires into our extended
network configuration.
Our network continues to grow to include many computers at either end of a wirelessly
bridged network, to the new network scheme of Figure 21-1. All we need is that
old nonwireless router we removed from service in Project 2. Instead of being used as
the main expansion of our one-connection DSL or cable service, and as a firewall, we
reuse this gadget to become part of our local network at the far end of a wireless connection
configured in Project 20. All this takes is a few simple reconfiguration steps to
allow it to accept the IP address of our local network, turn off the firewall, and let it
dish out a new set of IP addresses for the extended network clients.
