WI-FI Going Wireless !

Make sure you have the latest firmware for the wireless accesspoint/router.
Make sure you have the latest drivers for the wireless card.
On the router, change the default admin password
On the router enable encryption.
On the router, disable SSID transmission or at least change the default SSID
If the router has firewall feature, disable the firwalls on the client machines in the internal network.
If using ZoneAlarm - add the internal IP range ( 192.168.*.* ) as a trusted IP range in the Firewall Zone section.

Usually the routers and wireless cards come with firmware which are months old, and will be missing all the improvements from the latest version.

The Linksys WRT54G router I have, used to drop connection every 10 minutes or so for no reason, closing my remote ssh seesions, and dropping the MP3 streaming from the desktop. And the connection used to drop completely while I use any of the cordless phones at home.

On updating to the latest router firmware and card driver, all these problems went away. Now I get constant steady connection, with continuous MP3 streaming and I can copy files between the laptop and desktop at an average 18Mbps.

802.11g has 54Mbps theoretical bandwidth, but like mentioned earlier I get only 18Mbps through my wireless connection, and only 24Mbps when copying the same large files using my 10/100 LAN which has a theoretical 100Mbps bandwidth. So I guess it could be the power saving 4200 RPM Hard Disk on the laptop that is slowing down the network transfer. So 802.11b with its 11Mbps, might only provide an actual 6Mbps.

Thats another thing to consider if you are deciding between a 802.11b or a 802.11g network. 802.11b hardware is now cheap, and b or g will not matter for websurfing, since the home broadband connections mostly max out at 1Mbps and 802.11b at 11Mbps has more than enough bandwidth. But if your are planning to move large files ( like video files ) across your home network consider getting g which will provide a bigger bandwidth.

Get a wireless g router which also supports b, since most of the existing wireless hotspots are b. So you can have a fast home network and can still use the public hotspots ( like starbucks ).

netstumbler is a great tool to browse available wi-fi networks. Netstumbler showed as much as 6 active networks visible from my home, of which 3 had default settings.

More on bandwidth

Since the wireless networks does not know about the nodes that are connected compared to a wired network, the wireless network protocol has to carry a lot more protocol data describing the data it carries and making sure the data from different nodes does not go to the wrong node.

This is the reson why eventhough the wireless network has bandwidth of say 54Mbps for 802.11.g, half of it will be used by the network for storing these extra data of the protocol and only the rest will be available for actual data.

Also when you select a wireless G router which also supports wireless B, there are some more extra data to be carried as part of the protocol data to handle both G and B devices, so the effective bandwidth for a wireless G network supporting B will be lower than a pure wireless G network.

protocol	bandwidth	actual data bandwidth
802.11.b	11 Mbps	6 Mbps
802.11.g only	54 Mbps	27 Mbps
802.11.g with b support	54 Mbps	20 Mbps