jester121
Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL
 ·surpasshosting
 ·ViaTalk
| reply to djrobx
Re: That's fast...
I think it's your aluminum foil hat. 
Seriously, if you're having that much trouble with all these wireless devices in your house, it's your house. There's some flaky gear out there for sure, but there's also a lot that just plain works. |
djrobx
join:2000-05-31
Valencia, CA
·PHONE POWER
 ·AT&T U-Verse
·AT&T CallVantage
·Time Warner VOIP
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to SkyBlue
Me too. I have yet to find anything wireless that's truly reliable. Wireless is really convenient but even the stuff I have that works best seems to suffer from some level of intermittent brain-fartiness.
Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse? LOL. I have to have the receiver less than a foot away from the mouse. Even then I *still* get sporadic "Wireless signal quality is low" messages. The Bluetooth mouse on my mac pro seems to be a much better situation. In fact I think Bluetooth is the only wireless technology I've used that really works well in its specified signal range (although its not without its own share of issues).
Wifi networking. All the 802.11b gear I tried was a joke, always disconnecting and reconnecting. "g" gear seems to have improved the situation dramatiacally, but speeds are still about a third of what's advertised, and the connections suffer from latency spikes. When I've run into crap connections, bigger antennas rarely does any good. The only way for me to use my laptop comfortably was to move an access point into the same room.
In my theater room I had to buy a keyboard rated at 100 feet just to use it about 10 feet away. And even then the damn thing drops characters.
I tried a IOGear wireless "UWB" USB hub. The stupid thing didn't work just 6 feet away, line of sight. . I ended up returning it and purchasing a far more complex, far slower, but more functioning combination of a Belkin Network USB hub and a Buffalo router in client mode.
The thought of HDTV fed wirelessly gives me the hebejebes. With my luck, I can virtually guarantee it would intermittently stop and freeze. Not all the time, but just enough to remind me that wireless will never be as good as a hardwired connection. |
SkyBlue
join:2007-03-31
| reply to From the Pres
said by From the Pres :
It's not about connecting two PCs or forwarding data from your ISP. It's about networking the high-definition centric multimedia appliances around your home.
For example, wouldn't it be nice to eliminate the HDMI cable. Or, come out of the HDMI port on your new Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player and being able to enjoy that device from every single HDTV in your home without connecting any new wires between anything.
Today, you can network your PC's. Why not your DVD players, game consoles, High Definition TVs, and the rest? Wouldn't you like to connect those things, but get rid of the rat's nest of wires at the same time.
It takes about 20Mbps to network a High Definition 1080i stream, about 35Mbps at 1080p. If you want trick play (pause, fast forward, rewind), multiply those data rates by four. If you have several rooms and different people watching different programs in different rooms, the data rate requirement goes up from there.
It also takes guaranteed Quality of Service, otherwise our video image breaks up and the video is not synchronized with the Audio. WiFi, Ethernet, etc., do not offer guaranteed quality of service - that's the primary reason you don't use them for networking high quality video.
So, it isn't about your ISP and browsing the internet or checking emails. It's about your entertainment content service provider if you use a personal video recorder in the set top box and want to network your recorded content around the home. And, its about networking all of your DVD's, etc., so that content - protected or personal - located anywhere in your house can be accessed and enjoyed from any suitable HDTV in your house without you having to run new wires or move your appliances
Sound like you might want that?
I am old school.
I like wires. Its reliable and clumsy. |
