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Mending the wireless

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:31

Paul Ockenden offers a number of suggestions to help cure a flaky Wi-Fi network, from the free to the rather expensive.

If you want to try using an external aerial you'll need to buy and install some so-called pigtail cables, one for each U.FL socket on your WLAN card. The other end of the pigtail lead is a male SMA plug, and you can use these to plug in an external antenna. One example is SparkLAN's very cheap AD-132, which if I'm honest I'd suggest you avoid because of its poor sensitivity. A better option would be Gigabyte's GN-AT2060P (which has 6dBi maximum gain), or various models from Edimax. The latter firm even sells a brilliant adapter called the EA-MARS, which allows you to plug in normal "rubber-duck" antennae. Incidentally, if you have a modem or router with detachable antennae, the EA-MARS will also allow you to re-position them to a place where the signal is better. Costing a little over a tenner, it's a no-brainer upgrade.

So there you have it Dave, a range of measures that might solve your wireless dilemma, ranging from no-cost to expensive, and from easy to rather tricky. I really can't predict which ones are going to work best for you, but for my money I'd start by checking the firmware and drivers, and if that doesn't make enough difference I'd probably either go for a range extender or abandon Wi-Fi completely and invest in HomePlug AV.

Incidentally, Dave's question was posed with regard to an ADSL broadband connection, which is why some of my suggestions have been about the position of his modem. If he'd been using a cable connection from Virgin Media (or one of the other smaller cable providers), my advice would have been exactly the same with the word "modem" changed to "router". That's a bit silly, since in reality ADSL kit also usually contains a router: it's purely a matter of semantics that marketing departments in the SME and domestic network sectors adopted the word "modem" for ADSL devices and "router" for cable kit, but I thought I'd cause less confusion by sticking to the same flawed terminology.

Going cap in hand to the EU

Just as I'm finishing off this month's column, the news has popped up on my RSS feed that the EU has finally set a cap of ?1 per megabyte for data roaming, dropping to 50 cents within a couple of years. Two things strike me about this. First, this is the wholesale fee that the networks charge each other for roaming, and there's nothing in the announcement so far as I can see that forces the networks to pass the full rate cut on to consumers. Second, I reckon ?1 is still too high. The actual cost of supporting a UK phone in, say, France is pretty much the same as someone with a French contract - the infrastructure remains the same and the cost of squirting data from France to the UK is virtually zero these days, so why should a roaming user pay any more than a local user?

I've mentioned this before, but hats off to the 3 network, where roaming between all its own national networks is free of any extra charges and comes out of your monthly bundle, which is how it should be. One thing to watch out for with the new EU regime is that the networks are obliged to cut off your data as soon as your bill hits ?50, at which point you have to ask them to switch it back on again. I wonder how many product launches will be buggered up as the data connection gets pulled halfway through a live demonstration!