This is post number two in the PC Purchase and Customization series. For the rest of the posts, check the original announcement.
Wireless cards are the natural progression from wired NICs. People got tired of being stuck in a single place with telephones and now the same applies to computers. People are tired of being limited in mobility. Even desktop computers, that can’t easily be moved, have jumped onto the wireless bandwagon for the added convenience.
In the first post of this series, I wrote about what a wired network card is used for. A wireless card does the same thing but without a network cable. The consequence of deciding to go wireless is that it requires a bit of additional hardware to make it work. Like a cordless phone, a PC with a wireless card needs a base station to connect to. This is called a WiFi hotspot, an access point, or a wireless router. Wireless routers use a network cable to plug into the broadband modem simply because the modems don’t have wireless functionality on their own. There is a difference behind the scenes as well: speed.
Different standards
When wireless was first developed, it was designed with flexibility and expansion in mind. There are a few wireless standards that you may see denoted as 802.11a/b/g. Each is very different from one another. Most devices are now made to be interoperable with all of the standards, but some are not. The G standard is most common today because it is completely compatible with the B standard. G was made after B as a speed improvement. A is not seen very much anymore. Most wireless cards sold are based on the G standard. A point to note if you decide to go wireless is that it’s slower than a wired network. The maximum throughput of an 802.11g card is 54Mbps, which is half of the most common wired NICs and much slower than the 1000Mbps cards. Granted this, wireless is plenty fast for internet use, including gaming.
Going Wireless
The reasoning to go wireless has 2 main points. The first is that laptops can easy be transported anywhere in the home and a wireless network allows the laptop to maintain its internet connection. The second is that desktop computers can be setup in the home without the limitation of being no farther than a cable length away from the broadband modem. For example, my modem comes into my apartment and terminates in bedroom 1, but my computer is in bedroom 2. Normally I’d have to come up with some crazy solution to get a cable stretched between the two. The wireless card eliminates that.
Do you need it?
If you suffer from lack of mobility and craze the freedom, then the answer is yes. Be warned though. Such a decision carries with it another $50-80 burden of buying a wireless router if you don’t have one already. We cover them in the next post. If cables are OK for you to deal with, stick with them.
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