More and more people ask me for tips and tricks to improve their WiFi setup in their homes. People that recently moved in a new flat and want good coverage all over the place, which includes the living area, sleep quarters, kitchen or even bathroom, and people that just built a new 3 story house or the likes of it.

The first mistake that everyone makes is to place the router exactly where the internet connection enters the house, and that’s usually one of the corners where flats are concerned, or the basement for multistory buildings. Almost any decent WiFi router on the market today can cover an 80 to 100 square meters flat, so I won’t go into much depth on that situation, but when large houses are concerned, you need to have in mind that the best place to position your WiFi router is at the center of the structure. So, if you have a basement, ground floor, and 1st floor, you would be better off placing the device on the ground floor instead of the basement, where the internet connection is made available by the ISP. This way, you will get good coverage on the ground floor, and the adjacent floors, without the need to scale the network up to more than one router. If you have your office in the basement and your rest room on the 1st floor, it would be probably a good idea to have two separate access points and use an Ethernet connection between them. However, placing your only router in the basement is never a good idea, and should not be tried. The easiest way to test everything is to plug in a router with no WAN connectivity and walk around the house with your laptop to see where the weak points in the WiFi network are.

Feel free to post comments about your setup, or your needs based on your new home, and remember Wireless Is Fun to play with and it’s darn useful to have all over your property! Garden included ;-)

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About a year ago I used to tinker with RF, exploring ways to make it more ubiquitous, friendly, widespread and easy to use. Great material for WiF:)
I’ve slowed down.

Either wireless tech got so much of the above or I’m just comfortable with my setup.
I still have a whole closet of c*frees Merakis, Foneras, Airports, Linksys, Asus and 3G all-in-one-office boxes and various antennas, mostly WiFi tech. But I only employ a simple Airport Express ‘n with AirTunes.

Somehow it all worked out and the iPhone with its GPRS/EDGE/3G+ took over my connectivity white space.
All this is not to say that my wireless saga is over. It’s more like a new chapter. A bump up in usability and solutions that just work got me closer to connectivity nirvana, having to seek more enjoyable experiences than raw hardware solutions.

Frankly I don’t even know or care what firmwares my routers have installed. I just plug them cables or modems in and there, we have a nice working wireless link.

But all that tech in my closet is probably waiting to be employed. I suppose I could WiFi my whole neighborhood with them.
Listen! Maybe you have an idea on how to mix such a multi-skilled equipment in an ingenuous wireless project. I’ll do it!
Sound it off in the comments.

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Don’t come here! Go to Engadget! They cover this Apple event aplenty! :P
I love you, my dear readers, but I’m there as well! Or go to Apple.com and start spending.

But do come back for sugga-lovin-thrills about what the above all means! I’ll make sure you’ll find that unique insight here!

To tip you off, focus not so much on the new hardware, but drool on the new iTunes WiFi Music Store! That’s where history is now being written! ;)

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Olga Kharif from Business Week wrote an article today about MuniWiFi operators around the U.S. promising to dismantle the WiFi networks built until now because they have no customers… The statistics show that from the expected 20% – 30% of subscribers living in a certain area, only 1% – 2% subscribed.

Of course, people will love using *free* WiFi networks across the city, and of course everyone thinks it’s a good idea to have *free* WiFi, but the costs for a free network have to be covered by the city also, not only by the ISP’s and companies willing to use the *free* WiFi as an advertisement platform. Tom Haulli from Bloggingstocks wrote about San Francisco’s WiFi ballot: “Do you want *free* WiFi” the people are asked, and who in their right mind would say no to such a question? OK, maybe my grandma who has problems with GSM phones, and why do they work with no wires attached?

Glenn Fleishman from WiFinetnews.com writes about Milwaukee’s MuniWiFi not being built at all due to “whether it will make financial sense to build the network“, and thisis based surely on the 3 years experience San Francisco had with MuniWiFi and other similar projects.

Some good news though comes from Glenn Fleishman, about *free* WiFi on trains in the UK. The new operator, National Express who will take over on the East Coast from December 2007, included it (*free* WiFi) in their offer, as until now only First Class had it, and coach passengers had to pay for access.

Wireless is fun, can be monetized, but it’s nothing like we’ve ever seen until now… Starting to get intrigued as how many people can be blinded by a single word: *free* and not take the time to ask themselves: what’s it going to cost me in the long run?!

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Cisco will kill the Linksys brand. Boo! No further comments.

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What happens if you jump from entrepreneurship to full time corporate dude? First, you cease good ol’ habits such as doing email where rubber meets the road in the wireless industry – the WiFi’ed caffe!
Luckily sometimes big guys that work in tall buildings come back to the streets to smell that roasted coffee flavor and sniff those 802.11 airwaves, hopefully one of them free. Had my chance for a couple of days to bring the love back so here I am, feeding heavily on all that online stuff that makes me smarter and more competitive, at Bourbon Cocktails&Coffee in the lovely harbor city of Constantza.
Usually people would be sunbathing and stuff here but instead I’m wirelessbathing in all free nets I can find and hop on.
During my two day stay I ran across plentiful networks to do my job on, all ranging from 1Mbits to 6Mbits, all in key locations such as rep building, hotel, cafe and… parking lot!

Of couse both my N70 and my HSDPA SmartModem from Vodafone could have taken over in case there was no WiFi to grab. But for some reason I love WiFi and simply like to enable the Airport on my Mac and enjoy it from there.

Now missing a more portable device to play with nets for when taking the Macbook out feels cumbersome. I’m considering one of those new HTC touch smartphones. Anyone tried one?

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FON.com’s new precious has landed via UPS at my office today. I paid a fair €46.95 EUR for their small Fonera router and Fontenna antenna, the latter on discount. The package took exactly two weeks to deliver.
I wrote quite a lot about the Fonera so there’s no real news there. But the Fontenna I did not yet test so keep abreast!

Till I get my own oppinion (read other good reviews at ElFonBlog’s for example) will share some unboxing pics below.

Update 2: second one just arrived.
Update 1: the thing comes with two double-adhesive 3M pads (I’d call 3M best quality) to help fasten it on windows. It doesn’t have a smart mechanism to allow aiming and pointing in various directions, but it assumes you’d have a stiff “reach neighbor across the street, period” usage. Say you’re lucky to fit in this description, don’t jump like crazy about those pads. My Fontenna falls off the window every other morning. Guaranteed alarm clock! The sun takes care those pads forget they have to be sticky. ;)
Mine now rests on the floor, pathethic and helpless, till I figgure out a way to fasten it – most likely to look for some suction cups. (yeah, I know, some already pointed out they would have loved those for their Foneras, let alone the antenna)
Read the rest of this entry »

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Following on a cool wireless story where Zapp, Romanian CDMA mobile operator, launched a new service that WiFies Bucharest cabs! That’s a really schrewd move for mobility and innovation.

But I wonder what their ROI is. The business model is based on 10 minutes of free access then pre-paid card access. Given one would spend an average of 25 minutes in a cab, why would one buy a 1h card for just 15minutes? Yeah, ok, it’s good to have later on a different location, but…

I would assume it’s just an image push. (it works!).

Nevertheless cost per cab is:
- router – ASUS WL-500G w. USB port ~$40
- Z010 EvDo modem ~$20
- unlimited in-network airtime

ROI is thereafter obtained after selling ~50 $2/1h prepaid cards of roughly 30-40h usage. A week per cab, maybe, presuming clients buy the cheapest value card – http://zapp.ro/offer/data/zoe/zoecard/

Risks: nearby accidental users that would hop on the 10 minute free airtime. Probably 60% of actual usage per mobile hotspot. Not so bad as routers are set for DoD (dial on demand).

Related: I wanted to plant a hotspot in my car (a Smart ForTwo at the time) and brand it “free hotspot in range of this car”. Never took the time to do it. Envious!

Later edit: Virgil of yottablog goes further with the analysis here. Go read with confidence!

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