wireless or phoneline nic?

[cf1]

If you had to choose one, which would you choose?

[tcwg]

Phone lines, its faster.

Phone lines are 1/3 speed of ethernet while wireless is half of phone lines (1/6 the speed of ethernet if my math is right).

[This message has been edited by tcwg (edited 08-26-99).]

[jamis]

Depends on the wireless system.. Many/most wireless systems can easily do 1-10Mbps. Generally more expensive too, though if you get the right system, you aren't limited by line of sight or where your phone jacks are placed. Also, from what I've heard, phoneline networking isn't even up to 1Mbps.. though i may be mistaken.

[ktwebb]

I can't help you with the phone line LAN, but I work for a wireless Networking company. Here is the deal. Right now, unless you want to pay extremely high prices the best you can hope to do with a SOHO wireless solution is about 1 meg. Diamond and a few other vendors sell home LAN solutions. The company I work for resells an 11 meg wireless solution, but each card retails for about 450 bucks and if you want the full potential, you need and Access Point at about 1200. Not a good solution for the home I know, Aironet is the product and there are competitor like Lucent and NetLAN but they do not conform to the 801.11 standard. If you can stand 1 meg (too slow for me) then the Diamond product has gotten decent reviews in most of the mags I read. I dont know what that formula tcwg was talking about. Certainly nothing I have ever heard. Probably didnt help you much, but wireless works, it just isnt that fast for the affordable hardware for the home.

[ilkjh]

I've installed the Diamond HomeFree phoneline system with 2 pc's. They now offer a 10mbps version which is working well, and plenty speedy.
The only challenges I'm having are sharing my internet connection (sometimes, the proxy that is installed with the product just plain doesn't work- Wingate) and fetching my email from the browser on my client pc.

[wyvrn]

Aironet works great here at my workplace, we all have laptops and walk round with them while we work. Pretty cool huh? Anyway, it is REALLY expensive now, so much that the pains of running cable dont seem quite so bad.

[ktwebb]

If you are paying more than 200 bucks for the PC cards, someone is getting burned. Aironet cards have come down bigtime since I mad my post about it in August. Another question is this. What driver and firmware version are you running. Aironet comes out with new software monthly it seems. The last firmware upgrade offers SIGNIFICANT performance improvements. If you don't know, download the WinDG utility and upgrade your card. You should be impressed. Current driver is 1.04 and firmware is 3.65. Creeping ever closer to 10BaseT speeds. Still a ways to go though.