Selecting Wireless Routers is Not an Easy Choice

Selecting Wireless Routers is Not an Easy Choice

If you are a new router owner, even if nowadays almost everyone has one in the home, then you might have some difficulties in understanding its basic working principles. Let's take a simple situation that needs a wireless router: we need to connect three Computers (2 desktop Computers and a laptop with wireless card). The solution described below refers to a broadband Internet connection, which comes in through and UTP cable.

Because we want to have both Internet and wireless connections, we will be interested in a wireless router. You can choose the manufacturer you find best at the time, according to reviews and prices. You will also have to be careful about materials that are surrounding the wireless router, like other apparatus in the area that also use radio frequencies. It's best not to place such thing near the router.

In case you are not familiar with computer definitions, here are a few that you need to know when making your first wireless network:

- LAN means local area network, and it is referring to a wired connection
- WLAN is a wireless local area network
- WAN means wide area network, and it is used to describe the network from which the Internet comes from.

In general, a wireless router for home use has 4 LAN ports. These are the ports where the desktop computers get connected if they don't have wireless cards. The cables that are use are also important, because for pc-router connection is a specific cable that should be bought. The last cable that you connect to the router is the one from the Internet provider which goes into the WAN port.

Another important eleMent is that the router should know the way to access the Internet that your provider offers (static IP, dynamic IP, PPPoE). Most providers use PPPoE. The static IP is the one you enter once and it always remains the same, and the dynamic IP is the one that changes with every new connection.

Then, when you go to the store to buy a router you are also interested in transfer speed on LAN and WAN: LAN offers speeds of 10Mb, 100Mb or even 1 Gb. These are speeds in megabits, and not in megabytes, and the conversion is of 1 bit = 1/8 byte. So, theoretically, if we have a network card with a maximum speed of 100Mb we will be able to copy files at a maximum speed of 12.5 MB. You should know that this theoretical speed is often not reachable in real situations.

The WAN speed has pretty much the same story behind it, only that the speeds are lower. You should know though that between devices with various speeds the communication is done at the lowest speed. Once the router has been selected according to these principles, you will need to follow the specifications in the user manual in order to connect it.

---