Ubiquitous Wi-Fi, at last

OK, ubiquitous on a small scale - my house. I'm really loving wi-fi now that I can get a strong signal anywhere in the house. This is what I call *trouble-free* wi-fi.

Before my recent upgrades, I mostly got bad reception which meant having to move, hold my Titanium Powerbook at various angles or connect to an ethernet cable to get a good connection, unless I was sitting in the livingroom near the airport base station (my favorite place for surfing). No more!

I work at home, so I'm at home a lot to enjoy the luxury of ubiquitous wi-fi with fast DSL. Here's what I did:

1. I removed my airport card and slid in a $79 MacWireless 802.11g PC card. Configured the card fine with just my airport software. This card alone could possibly have given me ubiquity.


2. But, no, I bought an Airport Extreme base station for $249 with the antenna port in case I needed to boost the signal and tried to get it to bridge to my existing Snow base station that I moved upstairs to my bedroom. No luck. Even though two Apple store staff said it would work... I should have known, they weren't "geniuses" just floor personnel.


3. It was starting to get expensive, but I went back and bought another Airport Extreme without the antenna port ($199). The two extreme base stations mated immediately - no problem.


4. I put the old snow in my home office. I'm getting a stronger signal from the snow b than the extreme g's. In fact, I can surf nicely on my snow in the home office downstairs from my upstairs bedroom and don't need the extra extreme g. Might sell it if I get a chance, but am enjoying the abundance of wi-fi for the moment.

I'm a big advocate of community wi-fi because it could be so cheap and fast. Ever since I talked with a guy at MacWorld last year who told me he *lit up* his whole town in Southern Cal with a $3000 antenna on his roof, I've been fantasizing.

After about a month of less than ideal surfing pleasure from my Sony Ericsson P800 cell phone, I just decided to start carrying my Titanium Powerbook whereever I go. Even on my 1-2 mile walks (2-4 roundtrip), I now take my Powerbook so, if I get inspired, I'll have my whole computer's worth of information plus my writing and drawing tools with me. And if I go to a Starbucks, Borders or other hotspot, I have wireless broadband Net access. All it took was spending $75 on a good computer backpack, Jansport Optimizer, at REI.