Gadget Showdown: My wireless LAN of constant sorrow

The growing popularity of Wi-Fi - or IEEE 802.11b - networks has been one of the stories of the year so far. But how easy is it to install one yourself? Ben King rolled up his sleeves. This is his story.

It has never really been my personal ambition to sleep curled up in the middle of a wireless network. Broadband is nice but it's all the networking the modern home needs.

Or so I thought. The folks at Cisco, Intel and other places see it differently. If you have two or more computers at home, why not link them together? And now cheap wireless technology allows it without stapling ugly cables to the skirting board.

My home boasts two desktop computers (mine and a housemate's) and an old Windows 95 laptop that I mainly use as a CD player because the batteries are dead and the screen is poor. I wanted to connect these to the internet and a printer, not to mention each other.

The first way to do this was to connect my DSL modem from Alcatel to a wireless gateway from Intel, a grey box about the size and shape of a large crab, for all the computers to access the internet.

This is how it would be done in an airport or a branch of Starbucks but a strangely old fashioned hitch meant that it wasn't like that back at chez King. The modem has a USB plug and the gateway has the same hole as the network card, called something like a B-52 port or a P-45. They just wouldn't fit together and there was no way round it.

The next plan was to use USB wireless adapters to build a network in what the manufacturers call 'ad hoc' mode.

Installing the adapters was relatively straightforward. The computers said they were both working and they seemed to know each other were there. But they just wouldn't talk - like two Victorian explorers who meet in the jungle and acknowledge each other with a flicker of the eyebrow but who can't actually converse because they haven't been properly introduced.

It was time to call in the professionals. A couple of days later I got through to a very helpful chap called Dinesh from Intel, who initiated me in the black arts of networking.

It took about two hours of Dinesh's time to get this working - and he was a highly qualified marketing engineer, not a non-technical customer support agent.

I had to learn practices such as sharing IP addresses, sending pings, configuring subnet masks and mapping network drives. And all this let me do was share files. I began to suspect we had an ease-of-use problem, though I did make it hard for Dinesh by trying to connect a Windows 95 machine - a bit like trying to install a car stereo in a stagecoach.

The first thing I tried was a PCI card from Intel, which slots into the PC motherboard and has a slot for putting in a PCMCIA card from a laptop. It's an odd way to arrange it and the results were disastrous. The kit didn't work and the computer barely survived.

Linksys then kindly supplied another bundle of wireless LAN kit, which they co-market with BTopenworld. It included another wireless gateway, which of course my BTopenworld ADSL modem doesn't support.

More helpfully, it included another USB adapter, which I installed on the Windows 98 machine without help in about two hours, partly because I was now familiar with the delights of subnet masking but also because the instructions were slightly more user-friendly. The Intel kit looks nicer but getting networking kit from the same people who make your internet connection makes a lot of sense.

The USB adapters are basically small boxes, about the size of a tin of luncheon meat. They both come on the end of quite a long cable. There were two concrete floors between these computers, so I started by hanging the adapter boxes out the window in plastic bags.

But it turned out that they worked just as well on the window sills - I liked to think of the packets of data bouncing off the cherry tree by the window but more likely they were coming off the chain-link fence behind.

Having learned how to share drives over a network, sharing a printer was relatively straightforward. It took another customer support call, to BTopenworld this time, to get internet connection sharing to go.

This required even more dabbling in bizarre and completely unintuitive processes, like configuring gateways and DNS servers, and sending a ping to BT's own servers. The printed instructions, quite good up to this point, only took me half way.

In short, for the average user, installing a wireless network is a massive, massive hassle.

Is it worth it? It's quite cool to be able to download MP3s (only legal ones, natch) on a computer and send them to a laptop that then plays them through your hi-fi. It's also quite handy to share a printer or send files up and down stairs without having to email them from one computer to another.

The real killer app has to be sharing an internet connection. If BT DSL costs £150 to install and £29.99 a month, a £200 wireless network which is almost as good as an extra broadband line starts to look very tempting indeed. Make it a bit cheaper and easier to use and who knows - it may become rather popular.

A senior Intel boss says there are 70 or so places in the average home that might benefit from chips connected to a wireless network. At some point that makes economic sense we might see other devices with wireless LAN equipment installed - like MP3 players, televisions or waffle irons.

If the idea of living in an intelligent wireless home brings visions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, don't worry yet. I feel like the innards of speaking computer HAL would be simpler than wireless LAN kit. You'll be begging to be cast adrift in space long before you get the fridge synched up with your toaster.

Now just give me a minute before I consider wireless LAN security.